by Loki Renard
“Let’s talk about you anyway,” he said. “How have you been, Ellie?”
“My name is Elliot,” she said frostily. “And I’ve been fine.”
“Any husband?” He looked at her hands and she slid them away all too late. There had been an engagement ring on her finger up until two months ago. It wasn’t there any longer. Another sore spot that of course, he’d instantly honed in on. Six months ago, her engagement had been announced in every society circle. Everybody knew she was getting married. Except, of course, now she wasn’t.
“Any wife?” she asked the question back spitefully.
“No,” he said, his cheek dimpling with amusement.
“I suppose that makes us even.”
“It’s not a competition, Ellie.”
“Elliot,” she corrected again. “And no, you’re right, it’s not.”
“So defensive,” he said, frowning slightly. “You still don’t know how to ask for a favor, do you.”
“And you still don’t know how to… how to…” She stammered to a stop. “Can we just talk about Aiden, please?”
“Not yet,” he said, a deeper timbre in his voice. “I want to know what’s going on in your life.”
“I’m in college.”
He quirked a brow. The unspoken question, still? hung in the air between them. She should have graduated by now, but things hadn’t been straightforward for her either. She’d taken a year off after high school to travel, and one year had turned into two. She was twenty before she got to college, and twenty-one before she actually managed to attend a class. She’d been planning on dropping out and marrying the man of her dreams, before he turned out to be more a man of her nightmares. She didn’t want to discuss any of it with Mason. He’d gloat about her failures in life and love, she was sure.
“Post grad?”
“Yes,” she lied through her teeth. It didn’t matter what she told him about herself, she figured. She just had to charm him enough to help Aiden. Thus far, she hadn’t been that charming, but it was difficult. She didn’t feel like a sophisticated young heiress when she was in the room with him; she felt like an awkward teenager in trouble.
He gave her a long, searching look that made her begin to squirm where she sat.
“Look,” she said, gathering her purse into her lap. “Maybe you can’t help me. That’s okay. Aiden’s lost most of his friends already.”
“I didn’t say I couldn’t, and I didn’t say I wouldn’t,” he said. “Did you really think you could just walk in here after all these years, have a two-minute conversation, and the problem would be solved?”
“I thought I’d tell you that a friend of yours needed help and you’d help him.”
“It’s not that simple, Elliot,” he said, his expression growing cold. She almost missed him calling her Ellie. She was pissing him off, and she couldn’t afford to do that. Aiden couldn’t afford for her to do that.
“I know Aiden’s in trouble,” he continued. “I tried to help him months ago. He didn’t want my help then, and I don’t really see why he’d accept it now.”
“Because if someone doesn’t help him, he’s going to end up dead. He keeps talking about people coming for him. I don’t know who they are, but he says the police can’t help him, and my father doesn’t believe a word he says anymore. He doesn’t have anyone left to help him.”
“But you think I can?”
“You’ve always been able to do things other people can’t,” she said. “If anyone can help him, you can.”
He smirked slightly. “I think that’s the first nice thing you’ve ever said to me, Ellie.”
“I’m not saying a nice thing. I’m just telling the truth.”
“Of course not. You still haven’t forgiven me.”
She kept her mouth shut.
“You deserved every bit of it,” he said. “I can’t believe you’re still sulking after all these years.”
“I’m not sulking,” she lied. “I just don’t have time to reminisce about the past. Aiden’s in real trouble.”
“I know,” he nodded, clasping his hands in front of him. “In fact, I know more about it than you likely do. The trouble Aiden’s gotten himself into isn’t just about money. It’s more than that, and fixing it isn’t going to be easy, or without risk.”
“But you’ll do it?”
He snorted. “Still living in a world where people jump just because you tell them to, huh, Elliot? It’s going to cost me a lot to help Aiden, and frankly, he hasn’t been the best friend over the last few years. My help isn’t going to come free of charge.”
Hope sprang up in her. If all he wanted was money, maybe some arrangement could be come to. Her father still liked Mason; more important, he still trusted him. “I can talk to my father, to the trustees, see if we can release some funds…”
“I don’t want your family’s money,” he said, holding up his hand to stop her in her verbal tracks.
“What do you want then?”
He fixed his gaze on her in a way that was suddenly very intimate and very unsettling. “I want you, Elliot.”
“Me? You can’t have me. What does that even mean?”
“You want help for Aiden?”
“Yes. Please.” She said the words through gritted teeth, already hating him for how he was making her beg. She’d never been able to tolerate Mason, and now that she needed him, he was more arrogant than ever. He didn’t have to say anything, just the curl of his lip, the little sneering smirk made her want to slap his face. She couldn’t do that though, not as she had when she was sixteen and still immune from the consequences of her behavior.
“I’m a businessman, Elliot, so I’ll make you a deal. I will help Aiden. I’ll square his debt and get the people off his back, but you’ll be the one paying me back.”
“How am I supposed to pay you?” It was her turn to sneer. “You want me to sleep with you, don’t you. Ugh. Gross.”
“Sleep with me?” He chuckled softly. “That’s not the half of it. You’ll have to earn the right to sleep with me.” He leaned down, his green eyes holding her in a darkly enchanting gaze, and spoke in a low rumble that captured her attention completely. “You’ll be mine. I’ll own you. Every part of you. You’ll do what I say, when I say it. You’ll be at my beck and call, available for my use at any hour of the day or night.”
She stared at him, shocked to her very core. She understood the words, but she couldn’t believe they were coming out of Mason’s mouth, and she couldn’t believe he really wanted… that.
“Are you… serious?”
“Absolutely, Ellie. You’ve needed something like this for a long time.”
“I’ve needed to be treated like some kind of sex toy?” Her voice rose to a high pitch. “Mason, what are you talking about?”
“You’ve lived your entire life thinking you’re above everything, everyone. You don’t even know what it is to be a real person, Ellie. You walk into high rises and you make demands and you expect the world to fall at your feet. You need to spend some time on your knees.”
Her shock turned to outrage. Secretly, below her skirt, she could feel a fluttering sensation, a tightness and an excitement that didn’t make any sense to her. She crossed her arms over her chest, hiding the sudden rise of her nipples beneath her blouse. She was almost more shocked by her reaction than by what he’d said.
“That is absolutely not happening,” she said, her voice cracking.
He straightened and gave the faintest of shrugs. “Then Aiden is on his own.”
“Fuck you, Mason,” she said, filled with righteous indignation and fury. “Go to hell.”
She had to escape. She couldn’t stay in the same room as him, feeling this hot flash of desire and embarrassment rushing through her veins. Her mind was paralyzed, so she reverted to the one behavior she was most familiar with when it came to Mav: haughty derision.
She stood up, turned, and walked out of his fine office, slamming the door behind her.
What was he thinking? She came to him for help after all these years, and he tried to turn her into some kind of slave? She ignored the receptionist’s scandalized look as she swept past. A slammed door was the least he deserved. She should burn this entire gaudy uptown place to the ground for what he’d dared say to her.
Elliot was still fuming as she got into her car and navigated into heavy traffic. Her phone rang, connecting through the Bluetooth. She didn’t recognize the number, but answered it just in case it was Aiden.
“Ellie…” His voice came down the line, silky smooth and…
“You’re a pig, Mason. I should never have come to you. Don’t ever talk to me again. Ever.”
She turned her phone off and drove home, smoldering with fury, and with a treacherous wetness between her thighs. The way he’d propositioned her had been so bold, and for what? Not even just to fuck him, but to be owned by him… less than a servant, even? She didn’t know exactly what that meant, but she could sense the humiliation he had in store for her.
Payback. That’s what this was about. She’d tormented him when she was a teenager and now he was getting his revenge as an adult. What kind of an asshole did that? She’d lowered herself to come to him and he’d tried to use Aiden’s situation against her. She’d always disliked him, but now she was pretty sure she hated him.
“One of these days, you’re going to get what’s coming for you, Mason,” she promised under her breath. “And if anything happens to Aiden, I swear to god…”
Tears started to fill her eyes as she thought about Aiden. Nobody else seemed to care about him anymore. He’d been the golden boy her entire life, but now that he’d brought shame on the family name, that was it as far as everyone was concerned. They were more concerned about their reputations than they were about his well-being.
She drove home in an angry haze, pulled into her garage, and ran up the stairs to her apartment. It was twenty stories up and she usually took the elevator, but she needed to move and work out her frustration and anger. When she got to the top, she unlocked her door and walked in, lazily throwing it closed behind her. She should have been glad to be home, away from him, but somehow she still felt as though he was with her, even though she’d left him behind in a high rise across town. Stalking around the room, she tidied this and moved that, making her place look nice. Of course, it already looked nice, and technically it wasn’t really her place. Like everything else, it belonged to the family. She was a tenant in her own life, just like Aiden had been before he was evicted.
Stressed and frustrated, she turned her phone back on. Aiden would probably be in touch soon. When her phone came back online, there wasn’t any message from Aiden, but there was one from that not so unknown number: CALL ME, ELLIE. WE NEED TO TALK.
All caps. A demand from a man who now thought he could order her around just because she’d spent five minutes talking to him.
How the hell did he have her number? She didn’t remember giving it to him. She’d been too mad to wonder about that while she was driving, but now she was worried. He’d said he knew more about Aiden than she did. How much did he really know?
Before she could puzzle that out, her mother rang. Elliot answered.
“Elliot?” Her mother’s voice came strained down the line. “Have you heard from your brother?”
“No, Mom, I haven’t,” Ellie said. “Is everything okay?”
“I don’t know,” her mother sighed. “We’ve just come up to see Aiden at the…” she paused for a moment, “…farm.”
“It’s a rehab facility, Mom. You can say rehab.”
“Yes, dear, well, whatever you like to call it, he’s not here. The staff haven’t seen him since last night apparently. They’re saying he may have unofficially discharged himself.”
“You mean run away.”
“I suppose,” her mother sighed. “Really, Ellie. We can’t keep up with these antics of his. They’re so very tiresome. The Jessops were asking all sorts of questions at the polo club, and it was very embarrassing.”
“Mom, they’re not antics, he’s addicted to…”
“Yes, yes, we all have our little foibles, don’t we, dear? No need to blow them out of such proportion.”
“Mom…”
“Let us know if you hear anything, dear. We’re off on the boat for the next two months.”
“Mom, now really isn’t…”
“Kiss kiss, sweetheart. See you in December.”
With that, her mother hung up. Elliot white-knuckled the phone and restrained the impulse to throw it through the damn window. Aiden was missing now and nobody cared, not even her own parents. There was nobody to help her. Nobody to help him. All the money in the world and it didn’t matter.
She tried calling Aiden, but of course he didn’t answer. He never answered his phone anymore. He’d probably thrown it away again. He was paranoid that he was being tracked, babbling about how he couldn’t take the battery out and so ‘they’ were following him, listening in on his conversations. At first she’d thought he was just having some kind of breakdown, but then it became increasingly obvious that he was getting involved with the sort of people nobody should ever be involved with. Thoroughly frustrated, she threw her phone across the room. It landed on the couch, unharmed.
She turned around, cursing under her breath. The city was laid out at her feet, but instead of feeling on top of the world, she felt more powerless than ever before.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
A knock at the door made her start. Who was that? Was it Aiden? Had he made his way to her place? She doubted it, but she hoped so. Her heart sank when she saw the panel by the door showed three strange men standing outside the door. She didn’t recognize them, but was pretty sure they weren’t from the building. They were wearing long dark coats and had an air of menace about them that made her uncertain.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Miss Chapman! We know you’re in there!”
She put the safety chain on, just to be sure and walked away. They’d get sick of knocking, she figured. Besides, there was no way they knew she was actually home… unless they’d been watching her come home, in which case… she shook her head. She was getting to be as paranoid as Aiden. They were probably Mormons. Or Witnesses. Or maybe they were selling cookies.
The knocking grew louder, the rapping of knuckles turning to the pounding of closed fists. Her heart started to hammer in her throat as she backed away from it. The hair on the back of her neck was standing upright, her mouth dry as fear began to creep into her bones. Something didn’t feel right. She could sense aggression and danger seeping through the wood.
“Go away!”
The pounding at the door grew louder.
“What is it? What do you want?” She tried not to sound scared, but failed.
“We’re looking for Aiden.”
“He’s not here. Go away, or I’m calling the…”
Boom!
The door burst off its hinges in a shower of wood shards.
She screamed at the top of her lungs and ran for refuge as three large men burst in, two of them armed. The sight of two guns trained on her made her freeze, her eyes wide. There was a gun in a drawer next to her bed, and there was a panic button in every room, but she was too frightened to make a move toward any of them.
“Elliot Chapman?” The man in the middle didn’t bother to pull out a weapon. He wasn’t as bulky as the other two. He had round spectacles, a bald pate, and the sort of face you’d associate with an analysis of the economy. He looked harmless—except for the malevolence in his stare and the men flanking him with weapons.
“Y-yes… that’s me,” she stammered. “Wha-what do you want?”
“We’re not here for you. We just want to know where your brother is.”
“I don’t know! He was in rehab, my mom just called to say he’s run away, but we don’t know where he is.”
“We found his phone,” the man said. “There were fifteen missed calls from you
.”
“Well, that tells you, doesn’t it! I’ve been trying to find him. Just like you. I don’t know where he is!”
They all moved closer, a pack slow-stalking their prey.
Fear lurched in her stomach, her head spun. These were dangerous men, and all the protections that were supposed to keep danger from ever approaching her in the penthouse had disappeared. They’d gotten past the security without trouble, and now there was nobody to save her.
They advanced on her and she retreated until the backs of her knees hit the couch and then she collapsed in graceless fear. The men gave each other looks, dark looks that suggested they were thinking dangerous, awful things to do to her. She scrambled to push her skirt down, wishing it was longer. She’d chosen something above the knee to try to get Mav on her side, but it left her vulnerable to others, these sharks of men with their dead eyes and nasty grins.
“Start talking,” the middle man said. “Or we’re going to get nasty.”
“No, you’re not.”
Five minutes ago she would have sworn she never wanted to hear that voice again. Now it practically made her burst into tears of relief. Through a narrow gap between the men’s shoulders, she saw Mason. He was standing in the broken doorway, looking fucking furious. Elliot suddenly had an incredible sense of just how tall and broad he was. He practically filled it, the top of his hair brushing the frame. Even the big men with guns looked small compared to him. They turned toward him with violence in their eyes, but the moment they looked at him, they seemed to deflate. Surreptitious, guilty glances passed between them. In seconds, they went from the most intimidating people Elliot had ever seen, to looking like naughty schoolboys caught being bullies.
“Get out,” Mason said. “Now.”
“But…”
“Now.” He growled the word.
There was no more discussion, no attempt at argument.
They made their way toward the door, practically shrinking in order to avoid contact with him. Before they could actually leave, he held up his hand and stood blocking their way. The hand became a finger pointing at Elliot.
