Primal Bargains

by Raleigh Davis

  He’s put a hollow look in Elena’s expression that she’s never been able to shake. My sweet big sister is hollowed out because of him, and all I can do is help pay the lawyers to keep him away. It isn’t enough though, and that haunts me.

  “Okay.” I force myself to breathe. “She’s already got some legal bills. We’ll just add to those. I should make enough here to cover whatever it is.”

  “It was a lot.” Mom’s voice is so quiet. “We took a second mortgage out on the house.”

  For a moment my mind goes blank. Total white noise.

  “You did what?” My whisper is almost a scream. I shouldn’t be talking to Mom like this, but I can’t help it. Panic swamps me.

  “We had to.” Mom is defensive. “We didn’t have a choice.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “We didn’t want you to worry.” Mom sniffs like she’s holding back tears. “You already take on so much—you deserve to be free of this.”

  “Elena’s the one who deserves to be free.” I feel tears burn my eyes. “I wish we could just… make him disappear.” Which is a horrible thought, but I just want my sister to be happy. She’s tried so hard to get rid of him, and we’ve done so much to help her.

  It’s never enough. The pressure in my chest is making it hard to breathe.

  Mom doesn’t even make a joke about hiring a hit man. She might have once, but years of dealing with Nick and his bullshit has rubbed the humor right out of her. “There’s nothing else we can do. And then…”

  “What else happened?” Dread settles in my stomach. “I know there’s more. Just tell me.”

  There’s no point in trying to protect me. Of course I have to know, because of course I have to help. We’re all in this together.

  Mom sucks in a shaky breath. “We’re behind on the payments. I can stretch it out for another two months, but after that…”

  After that, they could lose the house. I want to throw up. God, it just never ends. The debt piles up and up, and it’s going to crush us. All of us. Unless I can stop the avalanche somehow.

  And then the fog clears and I see my surroundings again. My gilded cage.

  “I’ve got the solution,” I say, making my tone steely. “This new job. It pays amazing, more than enough to cover a second mortgage.” There goes any extra I wanted to save for myself though. Well, I guess having student loans for the rest of my life isn’t that bad. It’ll keep me normal.

  “Honey, no.” But her protest is weak. The relief in her voice is clear and strengthens my resolve. Mom needs me. They all need me. I can’t let them down.

  “It’s fine. And I can finish in a month.” I have to finish in a month, no matter what. I look around the house. It’s a cage, but it’s not too bad. I can do this.

  I have to.

  “I just don’t know…” Mom’s wavering. She’s this close to giving in.

  Something heavy settles on my heart. Love. Responsibility. Duty. We’re a family and we all have to pull together if we’re going to make it, but damn, I’d like to see some forward motion with all this pulling. Instead of feeling like we’re doing our damnedest in order to stay in the same place. I hear the gray in my mom’s voice, see it in Elena’s expression, and I know it’s creeping into me too. The money from this will push some of that back, bring more light into our lives. So I need to pull myself together and get through this.

  “It’s fine.” I try to sound happy. I only manage super fake. “I’m working on-site, so I’ll be in and out of touch. But I’ll call you every night. If I miss a night, get ahold of Victoria right away.”

  “Is everything all right? Why wouldn’t you be able to call?”

  “Just call Victoria, okay? And don’t worry. The money’s coming. I’ve got it all taken care of.”

  “Well, of course I’m going to worry.” Although Mom already sounds brighter. “You’re a world-champion worrier and you learned from me.”

  After telling my mom I love her, I hang up and consider what I’m going to do for dinner. There was some food in the fridge and probably in the pantry too, although I didn’t check the shelves. But I don’t really feel like cooking.

  Actually, I almost never feel like cooking. I don’t think ordering delivery is an option here though.

  There’s a knock at the door. When I open it, there’s Rustem, looking happy as ever. It’s oddly comforting. “I’m supposed to invite you up to dinner.”

  My eyes widen. “With Mr. Wolfe?”

  Rustem’s taken aback. “No. But there’s food for you.”

  It sounds better than cooking for myself, so I follow him up to the main house.

  Rustem serves me dinner in the main dining room, which is mildly uncomfortable because the expression on his face says he’s clearly not into it. But when I start to protest, he shoots me a dark look and says, “I was told to get you dinner.”

  “You can eat with me.” I gesture at all the empty spots at the massive table. “We’re both employees, so it makes no sense for you to be serving me.”

  He considers it for a moment. “Maybe.”

  “Come on.”

  He rolls his shoulders and sighs heavily. “Okay.” When he comes back from the kitchen, he’s got a plate of his own, piled high with sliced meat, some kind of salad, a white, crumbly cheese, and flatbread. It looks amazing.

  I push at my own chicken, which suddenly doesn’t seem so appealing. “Where’d you get that?”

  “My mother,” he grunts as he settles into his chair.

  “You live with your mom?”

  He gives me a look that says he thinks I’m crazy. “Of course. A man should care for his parents once he’s old enough.”

  That’s incredibly sweet, especially coming from someone who looks like he snaps tree trunks over his thighs for fun.

  “What did she make you?”

  He points to each item. “Lamb kebab, shepherd’s salad, and pita. Oh, and sheep’s-milk cheese that she makes herself.”

  “Where does she get sheep’s milk around here?” Can you even milk a sheep? I can’t remember ever seeing udders on a sheep, not that I’ve ever stuck my head underneath one.

  He’s clearly suspicious, as if I’m going to cut in on his sheep’s-milk source. “She knows a guy,” he says cagily.

  “Have you always been in security?” I ask. He’s certainly distrustful enough to be born to the job.

  He shakes his head. “I was a wrestler. A gold medalist actually. Captain of the Turkmenistan national team.”

  I recognize that this is not the time to ask him about Turkish oil wrestling, which ran like wildfire through my friends’ text messages once we discovered it. Hot, muscled guys wearing leather pants and covering themselves in oil, grappling? Yeah, we were going to share those pictures over and over.

  I don’t think Rustem is talking about that kind of wrestling. And even if he was, it would offend his national pride to know we were drooling over it.

  “That’s impressive,” I say. “Why aren’t you coaching wrestling now or still doing something with it?”

  “I insulted the leader of Turkmenistan. He brought his sons to me for training, and I told him they were spoiled, useless idiots.” He shrugs one shoulder. “I had to escape across the border, but it was worth it. They were terrible.”

  I stare at him as he eats his lamb, completely unconcerned. It sounds like it could be true, but secretly fleeing a country because you insulted a man’s kids seems like… a lot.

  “Don’t believe everything he tells you.”

  At Wolfe’s voice behind me, I go completely still. Stone still.

  The lights are on. I can turn around and finally see him. Face-to-face. The urge to do so is so strong my stomach muscles ache. They’re in knots. All of me is in knots.

  I don’t though. This feels like a test and he’s already given me the answers: I’m not supposed to look back at him. So I tamp down the urge.

  “I’ll take it from here, Rustem.”

/>   I have no idea what Wolfe is taking over. Entertaining me?

  Rustem gets up and takes his plate. As he leaves, the lights go down. I groan. Not this again.

  “Don’t worry.” The bastard is actually amused, but this is his game we’re playing, so why wouldn’t he be? “You won’t eat in the dark.”

  A light directly over my head comes on, catching me in a cone of brightness. I can see everything about two feet away from me but nothing beyond that.

  “Has anyone ever told you you’re a control freak?”

  As he takes a seat at the far end of the table—I can see that much—I get the sense that he’s smiling. “You have.”

  “Well, you keep proving it.” I gesture toward the light. “This is arranged like stage lights. No one does this in their dining room.”

  “I do.” If arrogance had mass, those two words would weigh hundreds of pounds.

  I can’t argue with that. It’s his castle, I’m his captive, and these are his rules.

  “Are you just going to watch me eat?”

  “I thought we could talk.” He says that like the thought pains him. “Rustem thinks I’m not hospitable enough. Turks are big on hospitality.”

  “Really? Because he was pretty surly when he called me up here to eat.”

  “It was his idea.”

  Interesting. Rustem seems to be hiding some softness beneath that grumpy facade. I don’t think I can say the same for Wolfe.

  “You don’t strike me as the kind of man who does things because his employees suggest them. Especially things you don’t want to do.”

  “Maybe I was bored.”

  “A bored billionaire? Those don’t exist.”

  “Really? Know many billionaires?”

  Images of him with his billionaire friends flash through my mind. “No, but you do.”

  He laughs knowingly. “Go ahead. Ask me.”

  “Ask you what?”

  “All those questions waiting on your lips.”

  I can’t help but wet my suddenly dry lips. “You haven’t exactly been forthcoming so far. Why would you answer my questions now?”

  “I probably won’t.”

  “So you’re toying with me.”

  “No, I toy with attractive women in a very different way.”

  “Oh, I get the nonattractive toying then?”

  He literally growls, like a jungle cat warning someone off. “I’m not toying with you. There is no nonattractive toying, and if you weren’t hired for a job, I’d be doing the attractive kind of toying. The scorchingly attractive kind of toying.”

  My eyes widen and my breath sucks in. He thinks I’m scorchingly attractive. I have no idea what to say to that.

  I have to admit that my dating experience is… sparse. Barren. After being harassed when I was in the Army, I was understandably wary of letting any man near me. So when I did date, I went for guys who were nice. Not intense. Which didn’t mean they didn’t have the potential to turn psycho, but it was easier to pretend they wouldn’t.

  Trouble was, they were all so nice and boring I didn’t feel a thing when we eventually broke up.

  Wolfe strikes me as the opposite of all those guys. Strangely, I’m not afraid of him. Wary, yes. Super, super aware of him? For sure. But the high alert my body goes on when I see him has nothing to do with fear.

  “No, we don’t have orgies,” he says harshly. “No, we don’t share partners. No, we don’t have threesomes or foursomes or whateversomes. Any other salacious rumors you want me to clear up?”

  “I never asked you any of that,” I say hotly. “So don’t get mad at me.”

  “But you wanted to. Don’t pretend you haven’t heard all that shit. That you weren’t curious. That you didn’t come all the way out here to see for yourself what happened to me.” He ends on a low, furious note. As if the thought of everyone staring at him makes him as crazed as a caged tiger.

  He doesn’t need my sympathy, but it surges through me all the same. I can’t imagine having the entire world gossiping about you, dying to know in painful detail the awful thing that happened to you.

  It wasn’t the entire world, not for me. No, for me it was only a select few who were spreading lies about me, wanting to know exactly what he did and when and if he’d touched me. It was horrifying.

  “I won’t try to look at you,” I say softly. I might be intensely curious and this whole constant darkness thing is strange, but I’ll respect your wishes.

  “Yes, but you won’t stop wanting to see.”

  Chapter 5

  He was right. I didn’t stop wanting to see, although he never gave me a chance at all during dinner. A few minutes after telling me that, he left and all the lights came back up. By that point I was done eating and went back to the cottage to lie in the supersoft bed and stare at the ceiling. Sleep wasn’t something I got a lot of last night.

  But here I am, hard at work on one of the busted servers, trying to reconstruct the security software he was running. Rustem brought me my first supply run bright and early this morning, so I was able to put on clean clothes and get down to business. After Wolfe’s mysterious appearance last night, I was more than ready to get into his system and see what the hell was going on.

  I also kind of hoped I might see him or even just talk to him. But it’s midafternoon already and I haven’t heard a thing here in the spare office Rustem put me in. This place is soundproofed better than a recording studio… or I’m completely alone.

  Since Rustem didn’t say he was leaving and Wolfe doesn’t leave anyway, I’m going with soundproofed. It’s less creepy.

  “Come on,” I mutter to the busted hard drive I’ve plugged into the laptop Rustem’s given me—preloaded with all the software I requested. “Give me something.”

  The hard drive continues to spin uselessly, the folder on my screen totally empty.

  I glance at the busted console on the wall. It might be nice if it was working and I could talk to Gulizar, even if she is only a computer program. Rustem told me that she only ran on the consoles, so if the wall panel was broken, she wouldn’t be in that room.

  I’m also tempted to ask her some pointed questions about what happened the night of the break-in. She might just answer me, and wouldn’t that be something?

  Too bad she’s not here. I wonder if I could find my way back to the room that Wolfe interrogated me in. The console there definitely worked. And why did that one get saved when the rest were destroyed?

  “Too many questions,” I say to the laptop screen. “And you’re still not working.”

  Time for something stronger. I call up the command window and set a different retrieval program to work on the hard drive. I suppose I could send it out to be rebuilt, but I don’t think Wolfe would go for that. Which means I might have to rebuild it here, which is going to take more time and equipment. My heart sinks at the thought.

  As I watch the program run, I go through the list of things I’ll need to do next and the equipment Victoria will have to bring, jotting them all down. I miss the Notes app on my phone right now. “Jerk,” I mutter to myself, but I mentally aim it at Wolfe.

  A message notification chimes on the laptop. For a moment I stare at it, my heart thumping. This isn’t my machine, so who could be sending me messages? Maybe Victoria? But I can’t imagine her hacking into a computer that isn’t hers. Not that she couldn’t do it, just that she’d think it was too dishonorable.

  I click on the message. Wolfe is listed as the sender. No first name, just… Wolfe. I suppose I should have guessed.

  You have knitting needles and yarn on your list.

  It’s not what I’d ever expect him to say. Looks like Rustem is giving him my supply list to approve—I wonder what Gideon thought of the order I put in for cozy knitting mysteries.

  Was that a question? Maybe I’m being too snarky, but if he’s going to lock me in here, I’m going to keep myself entertained. With knitting, mysteries, and smart remarks launched from behind the sa
fety of a computer screen.

  I don’t see what knitting has to do with security systems. He types that back so fast I can feel the growl in it.

  It doesn’t. Since I can’t leave, I need something to do in my off hours.

  The faster you work, the sooner you’ll be done.

  I can’t argue with that, but I also have to occasionally sleep. You ever hear of burnout?

  Burnout is for the weak.

  I can hear his voice, rough and cold as I read it. Burnout is for lesser humans, not a billionaire CEO machine like him. But… what he’s doing now—holing up in this house—could be a form of burnout. Or trauma. Things he would call weak.

  I don’t dare point that out to him.

  I’m not a machine, I type back. I have to have down time. And that means I knit. So if you want to think of me as a tool, think of that as maintenance.

  There’s a long pause where I only see the bubble of him typing. Whatever he wants to say, it takes him several tries to get it out.

  Are you knitting right now?

  I bite my lip as I look up at the ceiling. Looks like Mr. Beast doesn’t have any cameras in here to spy on me. If only he hadn’t destroyed all those wall panels…

  A little shimmy of relief moves through me. I didn’t think he was watching me, but it’s good to have confirmation. It makes the whole being his prisoner a touch easier to bear.

  No. I write back. I’m trying to recover the data from this drive. And I’m talking to myself.

  Thank God I can’t hear you, he types.

  My mouth falls. Well, that’s just rude. I know I’m only here for a job and he’s a jerk, but it still stings. Probably because he’s the only other person in the house. The only person I’m likely to see today—not that I’ll actually see him. My chest gets heavy, my heart sinking. It’s only been a day, but already I’m lonely and homesick.

  I usually have Victoria to talk to. I hope he senses the tartness there. So I have to talk to myself.