by Maisey Yates
She’d discovered that what she wanted couldn’t be wrong, because there was a match to her needs.
Then she’d discovered that man was the son of her mortal enemy. And she’d lost her job. Lost her home.
She’d looked Jason Treffen dead in the eyes. The man who was responsible for her sister’s death. She’d spoken to him. Been in his office.
So many things had changed in the past few days but that was the most important.
And that was what she had to remember. That no matter how much it felt like a loss to let Austin do this to her, it was a small part of a very big picture.
She would use this, use him, use the information he was getting and his muscle, to help get to Jason.
She’d had her night off. And it had been blissful, until she’d been smacked with the reality of it all.
Now it was time to get back to work. What she wanted didn’t matter. It never had.
All that mattered was doing what was right. She wouldn’t be distracted again. She wouldn’t be giving in to her desire to let go again, either. Not until all of this was finished.
So if Austin thought she was just going to jump back into his bed again, he was going to be disappointed.
Me, too! Her body shouted at her and she ignored it.
It was one thing to sleep with a stranger. It was another to sleep with the man who had failed her sister in the way that he had done.
He might be her ally in this, but at the end of the day, he’d played a role in Sarah’s downfall. She would work with him, but they would never be friends.
She would never forgive him for what he had done. And nothing would change that.
* * *
Austin felt a vague sort of triumph as he watched the movers bring the boxes into his penthouse.
Vague because it was battling with a sense of disquiet at the thought of sharing his space with this woman for an indefinite amount of time.
But he had to protect her. He had to. It was like some raging, primitive urge. Maybe Sarah’s ghost possessing him. Or maybe it was just the guilt from the past, piling on with the regret he felt over having unleashed his darkest passions on the last woman on earth he should have ever touched.
The problem was, when he looked at her, he still wanted her. When he saw that brown hair, coiled into a bun at the base of her neck, he wanted to unravel it again. Pull it hard, until she cried out from the pleasure and pain. And that brought him back to what it was like to have her sweet red lips on his—
He cut off that line of thinking.
She was currently standing in his kitchen, in a pencil skirt and prim blouse, her arms folded beneath her breasts and her shoulders curved like she wanted to collapse in on herself.
Her expression, on the other hand, was much more confrontational than her posture.
“I imagine this is larger than your place on 79th?” he asked.
“It’s larger than any place I’ve ever lived ever, but the only reason that matters is that I’ll be less likely to run into you.”
“You don’t seem to like me very much.”
“Shall I list your offenses? I don’t see why I should need to. You’re a smart man. College-educated. A lawyer. I barely graduated high school, so it doesn’t seem like I should understand anything you don’t. All things considered, you should be able to state why I don’t like you with perfect clarity.”
“In point of fact, I know my offenses in this life,” he said, leaning back against the wall, his hands in his pockets. “I could put together a comprehensive case and see myself damned for all eternity.”
“I might find that entertaining,” she said.
“Don’t worry, the devil is saving me a seat in hell already. I don’t need to wait for my day in court.”
“Then why act surprised about me not liking you?”
“It’s just that you did like me once.”
“No. I wanted you. I didn’t know you.”
“True enough. But I want you to know that in terms of...in terms of what passed between us that night...I don’t expect anything like that to happen again. In fact, I don’t want it to. You’re staying here and you’re under my protection. And the last thing I want is for you to think that I asked you to come here so that I could seduce you, or so that I could take advantage of you. Because while I’m not a spotless lamb, I truly have no desire to be my father. I pour a lot of money into advocating for women who have been harassed. Into really helping them.”
“That’s good to know,” she said.
One of the movers walked in through the door, a small box in his hands. His foot caught the carpet and he pitched forward, dropping the box, the top bursting open and spilling the contents onto the marble. A highly polished wooden jewelry box hit the tile and went into three pieces that skidded across the floor.
“No!” The word burst out of Katy’s mouth and she dropped to her knees in front of the mess, gathering up papers, earrings and necklaces that had come out of the box. “Oh...no,” she said, as she froze and clutched a piece of the box in her hands.
“Sorry, miss,” the mover said, looking genuinely upset.
“Give us a second,” Austin said, gesturing to the door. The other man obeyed, likely just relieved Austin had decided not to tear him a new one.
If it had been valuables, who knew, he might have. But this was something more. Something deeper. And he didn’t want anyone here to witness Katy’s pain.
It was a part of protecting her. And he would protect her. In any way he could.
“What was it?” he asked, still standing across the room. She wouldn’t want him to touch her. He knew that already.
“It was Sarah’s jewelry box. It’s probably silly to be this upset about it but...” She took a sharp breath, concealing a sob. “It fell and broke into pieces. Just like she did.”
“Shit,” he breathed, and then he was on the floor next to her, holding one of the pieces. He wanted to do something more. Comfort her or something. But he didn’t know how. He didn’t know how to touch her the right way.
All he knew with her was sex and control. And that wasn’t what she needed. So he just sat with her on the floor, while she stared straight ahead. There were no tears, just a blank sadness. A sort of hollow look that echoed inside of him, in all the empty places.
And there were so many.
“We can get it fixed,” he said. “It’s the lid and body and...this looks like it was a false bottom.” He picked up the middle piece and looked at the way the bottom was dangling open.
“I didn’t know it had that,” she said, frowning.
“It has something in it, too,” he said. “A picture.”
She ran her arm over her face, over her dry eyes. “There’s one here, too.”
“You weren’t keeping pictures in it?”
She shook her head. “No. But I didn’t know about the bottom, either.”
She leaned forward and touched the picture that was facedown on the floor, then picked it up slowly. She turned it over. “Oh.” She put a hand up over her mouth.
“What?”
She just shook her head and handed him the picture. He looked at it and dropped it like he’d been burned.
He closed his eyes and tried to wash the image away. But he couldn’t.
It was a woman. Blond hair spilling over pale shoulders, her head down, a man’s hand braced on the back of her neck.
“It’s Sarah.”
“I know,” he said.
He picked it up again and studied it more closely. Then he picked up the photos that were still in the false bottom. Some were more graphic. And there was no doubt as to the activity happening in them.
But it wasn’t the blatant depiction of sex that shocked. It was the pain in Sarah’s eyes. Not physi
cal pain. This wasn’t a game with whips and chains. It was the emotional pain. He could see how dead to it all she was. Resignation tore at his heart.
It was sex. Simple, vanilla sex. Especially in comparison to his encounter with Katy. She wasn’t bound. She wasn’t being dominated in any obvious sense, and yet, she was a woman owned.
With a man who took delight in exploiting his power over her.
His stomach pitched. It was all too familiar. A hideous, twisted rendition of his encounter with Katy. His stomach turned, his throat tight, sweat breaking out over his skin.
Something compelled him to turn it over and look at the back.
Jason 9/04
Three months before Sarah’s death.
And with his father. Jason wasn’t stupid enough to be in a picture, of course. All that could be seen was a man’s hands. There was the label on the back, but that meant nothing in any real sense.
But he knew it was true.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “I didn’t even suspect.”
“I want to see,” she said.
He pulled them back. “You don’t.”
“I need to see, Austin.”
“Why, Katy?”
“Because I’m going to ruin this man. I’m going to destroy him and mount him on my wall, and I want to know exactly what manner of monster he was when I’m staring at the carcass.”
“Incentive, then.” He handed her the photos and watched her work her way through them, her complexion pale.
She curled her hands into fists, her teeth burrowed so far into her bottom lip he was afraid she would draw blood. “I hate this.”
“I know.”
“No, I hate that ten years after her death...this is the extra thing I get to find. That one last piece of her. Do you know how much you wish for one more picture? One more letter?”
His stomach churned.
One more voice mail. “No,” he said, his voice rough.
“So much, Austin. And I have these. Pictures of this...affair, whatever the hell it was. I have photographic evidence of the thing that drove her to her suicide.”
Katy swallowed back the bile that was rising in her throat and tried to stop the shaking. Dammit, she was shaking everywhere. Inside, out.
It was horrible to see just what had driven her sister over the edge. To see what she’d been subjected to. And for how long? Had she wanted some of it, only to find it went too far?
What did it say about her that she wanted that man’s son? That he was the one she’d picked out of a crowded room when she could have had any guy there? That he was the one she’d trusted to live out her most secret fantasies with?
Clearly she was sick.
She handed the pictures back to Austin and their fingers touched. The hot surge of electricity that shot through her only served to make her feel even more shame.
How could she feel something for him? Even now. During this moment. Her head was so screwed up. Something was broken inside of her and she had no idea how to fix it, or how to deal with it.
Just slap some duct tape on it and keep going. Because you have to. It’s for her. You don’t have time for you and your issues right now. Just shut it off.
She didn’t have time to break apart now. And she didn’t have time to deal with her attraction to Austin. An attraction that crossed the border into so freaking wrong territory.
“I guess I put this with the invoices,” she said.
“I guess so,” he said, standing up. She couldn’t stand yet.
“Why did she keep them, do you think? Why did he take them?”
“Do you want my guess? Because a guess is all I have. I didn’t know just how deep this went. How far things had gone. So all I’m going off of is the man I grew up with, the man I thought he was for the first twenty-three years of my life. Combined with ten years of suspecting he’d driven a friend to suicide by harassing her, mixed with what you told me today.”
“Give me your theories.”
“He gets off on power. On owning people. He likes that he can be so purely civil, I think, while hiding all of this. That he can advocate for women in the courtroom while manipulating them into sexual slavery in private. I’m sure having the pictures, and even putting them in Sarah’s possession, was him taunting her. With the fact that evidence of what they’d done existed. And with the fact that her having that evidence would never mean anything. That she wouldn’t be able to do anything with it.”
“He was making her feel powerless.”
“Yes. And I’m sure that was fuel for every disgusting fantasy he has.”
“Who does things like this? I don’t understand it. I...I grew up surrounded by addiction. By all the terrible things it can make you do, or not do. Our parents were so checked out. It was all about their next high. They used to leave us, lock us in a bedroom with food. It was their version of taking care of us. It was what they could do. What they understood. I hated it. And I’m not overly fond of them, but I get that there was an intention to care. But that the addiction was bigger than the love. This kind of stuff? This intention to hurt? I didn’t know it existed like this. He killed everything inside of her. Until all that was left was for her to go ahead and kill her body, too. He left her to bleed out emotionally then...then she finished the job.”
Austin’s expression was blank, his eyes unfocused. “Well, I think for today you should just settle into your room. Do you want me to keep these?”
She shook her head. “I think I should. I’ll put it with everything else.”
“I understand.”
She picked up the pieces of the box and held it together, the pictures on the top. “But I think I will go to the room.”
“I’ll get your things situated tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
She was too numb to be angry at him now. Not when she just felt sick and defeated. Why was everything so messed up? She couldn’t even begin to figure out how her life, how Sarah’s life, had ended up this way.
The thing was, not a lot of people would be too shocked that a woman with their background had gone to New York, gotten caught up in the excess and hadn’t been able to handle it all. Officially, that was the story.
Sarah Michaels was just a girl from nowhere who’d transcended the boundaries she was born into. She’d taken a leap, and discovered she had no wings.
Another sob story in millions of sob stories, only notable because it was Jason Treffen’s building she’d jumped off of.
It was her name that was mud. Not his.
And if she could do anything to change that, she would.
Assuming she could survive living with Austin. Not that the living situation itself was a hardship.
The penthouse really was beautiful. Open and new. And it seemed to have working amenities. Heat that didn’t sound like a dying animal when it kicked on. Totally different from what she was used to.
The wall of windows in the living room offered up choice views of the city. Only the beautiful places. So that Austin Treffen never had to look at any of life’s ugly things. Too bad there were a lot of ugly things on the inside of his world. They were just better hidden than the ugly things that were in the world she’d grown up in.
Though, that wasn’t strictly true. She’d hidden her own ugly things admirably for a long time.
She walked out of the kitchen area and up the sleek, curved staircase to the mezzanine floor. “Which bedroom is mine?” she called down to him. And she knew she sounded whiny and she didn’t care.
She was so tired she thought she was going to fall over. Every last ounce of energy drained from her like blood running from an artery.
Today was horrible. She was spent. She was done. She’d lost her job, lost her home, seen pictures that she needed to view, but hated the
existence of. And being near Austin was just a drain all on its own.
From the moment she’d first seen him, he’d captured a piece of her and he hadn’t given it back yet.
Asshole.
“End of the hall.”
She nodded and walked down that way, pushing the door open, then closing it firmly behind her. She locked it for good measure. Because she didn’t trust any of the people in this house. It was only Austin and her, but that was sort of the point.
The room was huge. Clean and spacious with cream-colored walls, a sleek, black four-poster bed and furniture in purple velvet. That part of it reminded her of the vampire brothel. The rest of it was extremely respectable. And the velvet probably wouldn’t make her think of anything untoward if she couldn’t remember, vividly, what it had been like to feel that textured wallpaper beneath her bare skin while Austin was on his knees in front of her....
She closed her eyes. No. No, no.
She walked across the room and threw the covers back, climbing beneath the sheets and pulling her knees up to her chest.
From this position, on her side, she could see out the windows and down into Central Park, to the naked trees and the blanket of snow over the green grass. The windows themselves had pristinely clean windowsills around sparkling glass. It was notable to her. And for some reason, it made her think of the view from her bed, not in her most recent apartment, but in her childhood home.
On her side, from her mattress on the floor, she’d had a view of an old carpet. Frayed in spots, the rotting wood splintered beneath it. There was dirt on it. Pieces of cat food, kid food and other crap all over. Fake wood paneling on the walls.
If she’d turned over onto her back she could see an edge of light coming through the window, where the old ratty baby blanket that was tacked over it had come loose.
There was mold where the floor met the wall. She’d made a game of keeping an eye on it. Watching it climb the wall and spread farther. Little black spores that she knew, now, she should have been kind of worried about.
