In the Beginning

by Marks, Teir

  Her words were cut off with a squeak of surprise as Grae grabbed her by the hair and yanked her out of the chair. He leaned down and got in her face. She was only mildly aware of the sound of the plate hitting the floor and breaking.

  “I told you to come in here and check the catheter. Not feed him or turn off the fucking player!”

  “It…it was so loud. I couldn’t focus with it on.” Maleiha stated as her hands came up to his wrist. Trying to loosen the grip he had in her hair.

  He simply gripped it tighter before flinging her, none too gently, towards the table. His hand gripped her neck, and he pushed her back, forcing her to bend backward over the table. His grip was tight, and Maleiha could actually feel her air being cut off.

  “Grae, pl-please. You’re hurting me.”

  “If I catch you in here again, doing anything other than what I asked, I will do much worse.” He told her through gritted teeth. He then threw her to the floor on her knees. “Clean that shit up and get the fuck out.”

  Maleiha’s hands were shaking as she quickly picked up the broken pieces of glass. She nicked her finger on the edge of one but didn’t give it much thought before scrambling up the stairs and out of the basement.

  Closing the door, she leaned with her back against it. Chest rising and falling. What the hell was that? Why had he flipped out on her like that? She was positive that he had told her she could feed him that day if she wanted or had time. Maybe she had misunderstood what he’d said, and she was supposed to feed him tomorrow. She had probably just messed up what he was trying to do.

  That, however, was in no way an excuse for him to put his hands on her the way that he had. If she had made some sort of mistake, then fine. He should have simply talked to her about it.

  Letting out a deep breath, Maleiha pushed off the door and headed down the hall. She rounded the corner into the kitchen. She dropped the glass shards in the trashcan before making her way to the sink to clean the blood from her finger.

  As she did so, she studied the cut. It wasn’t too deep, and the bleeding had already begun to stem a bit.

  After cleaning the cut, she grabbed a paper towel and applied pressure to her finger. Knowing that it would only take a moment for it to stop completely. She was headed out of the kitchen when she bumped into Kylen.

  “Watch where you’re going, Midget,” Kylen stated.

  Maleiha glared up at him. “Shut up, Bastard.”

  She watched as his eyes traveled down to her finger. “What happened? Your attempts to cook backfire?” He questioned with a smirk.

  She rolled her eyes. “I cut it on some broken glass.”

  “Of course, you did. Tell Grae. He’ll kiss it better for you.”

  Maleiha’s eyes flickered down to her finger as she swallowed slightly. “I’ll be sure to do that.” She responded, looking back up at Kylen.

  He looked at her for a minute before nodding and reaching up to pull on her earlobe.

  Maleiha walked around him and headed up the stairs. It was a little after nine, and she just wanted to take a nice hot bath, lay down, and watch some television.

  Grae made his way up the stairs. The high pitch sound was permeating the room behind him. He closed the basement door. As he turned to make his way into his office, a fist collided with his face. Kylen. He knew it was his baby brother because the rest of his siblings weren’t stupid enough to pull some shit like that.

  Instinctively, Grae swung back, connecting with a left. Kylen swung again, but Grae caught his fist. It still hurt like hell. He was surprised that nothing had broken. Spinning his baby brother around, he locked one of his arms around his neck.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Grae questioned.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” His brother retorted.

  Grae furrowed his eyebrows, releasing Kylen and pushing him away. “What are you talking about?”

  “Leiha is terrified of you. What did you do?”

  Fuck. Grae thought as he walked around Kylen. He made his way to the elevator and got on. He was hoping that she would be upstairs in their bedroom and hadn’t left.

  When he walked into the bedroom, she wasn’t there, but he heard movement in the bathroom. Entering the bathroom, he found her standing at the sink with a towel wrapped around herself. She was putting lotion on her arms.

  “Beauty.”

  She jumped at the sound of his voice, and her eyes came up to look at him in the mirror. He made his way to her. Grae wrapped his arms around her, and she tensed slightly before relaxing.

  “I’m sorry, baby. I was…just playing a part.”

  “You should have told me, Grae.”

  “It wouldn’t have had the desired effect.”

  Maleiha turned in his arms. “I was…I was scared of you, Grae.”

  Grae leaned down and kissed her softly on the lips. “You never have to be afraid of me, Beauty. I would never hurt you.” He paused. “Seriously.” He added on because he had indeed hurt her earlier.

  “You will never put your hands on me again.” She told him.

  “Never.” He responded without hesitation because he had no intention of doing it again.

  He leaned down to try to kiss her again, and she stepped out of his embrace, avoiding his kiss. She turned her back to him, and Grae remained quiet, watching her through the mirror. He figured that regardless of the reason he had put his hands on her, it had been wrong. He shouldn’t have done it.

  Hell, he had known that when he did it, when he had decided it would be the push needed to make Henry talk earlier that morning.

  Turning, he headed out of the bathroom, closing the door behind him. He felt like an absolute asshole. So, he decided to give her actions, not words.

  He went around the room, lighting all the candles. Grae turned the overhead light off and dimmed the bedside lamps. He turned on the soundbar and took out his phone to play soft music.

  A few minutes later, Maleiha stepped out of the bathroom. She stopped, taking a look around the room before her eyes came to settle on him.

  “Come here.” He requested.

  She made her way towards him. “We’re not having sex.”

  Grae placed his hands on her waist, steering her towards the bed. “That wasn’t what I was planning.”

  He removed the towel from her body before laying her on the bed. He moved her to the middle of the bed, before reaching into one of the bedside drawers and grabbing Shea Butter she liked to keep there.

  Grae had fucked up that night, and he knew. So, he had every intention of making it up to her, being intimate with her without them having sex. He was going to worship at her altar. Do whatever it took to mend whatever tear he had caused that night.

  11

  “You can’t honestly think that it’s him?” Emery questioned as she propped her feet up on the conference room table.

  “Think about it. It’s too much of a coincidence that this shit started, and Gavin just so happens to be back in town.” Ashton responded. “On top of that, it just makes sense. He’s had an unhealthy obsession with our family the entire time that he’s known us. It isn’t so much of a stretch to think that he could have orchestrated all of this.”

  “Except for the fact that pussies don’t turn into lions.” Kylen threw out with a scoff.

  Emery chuckled. Her little brother had a point there. Though time could change any person. For all they knew, Gavin could have gone through something that caused a significant shift in him. She honestly wanted to agree with Kylen but knew they shouldn’t rule out what Ashton was saying as a possibility.

  Shifting her attention to Grae, who was leaning with his back against the wall, Emery wondered how pissed off he was at that moment. She knew that of all of them, Grae would never in his lifetime, not harbor a want to hurt Gavin. Hell, even kill him, and she was the one he had tried attacking.

  “I’ll get with Miles and track his movements since he’s come back to town,” Ashton stated, pulling Emery’s
attention back to him.

  “That shouldn’t be too hard since he hasn’t been back in town long.” She pointed out.

  “If that’s true,” Synn stated.

  They had been in their sibling meeting for half an hour, and it was the first time her eldest brother had spoken. If it weren’t for the fact that you could always feel his dominating presence in a room, she would have forgotten that he was even in there.

  “Don’t you think we would have found out sooner if he had been?” She questioned.

  “Not if he didn’t want us too,” Ashton responded with a shrug.

  Kylen scoffed again, and Emery looked over to find him shaking his head. “You’re all giving this prick too much credit. A criminal mastermind he is not.”

  “Maybe you’re giving him too little credit.” Grae countered. “Either way, who gives a fuck? He’s either behind this attack on us and we kill him, or he isn’t…and we kill him. Both options work for me.”

  With that, Emery watched as Grae pushed off the wall and walked out of the conference room. She didn’t have a problem with either one of those options either. She was almost foolish enough to hope that they would give her that honor, but she knew it would fall to Grae.

  She glanced over at Synn to see if that was all they were supposed to be discussing. Just because Grae had walked out, it didn’t mean that the meeting was over. However, when she saw her oldest brother incline his head, Emery stood from the seat she occupied and headed out of the room as well.

  It was still early in the day, and she knew that Larkin was off…somewhere in the house. So, she decided that she would go and visit their new friend Brian. He had been tied up in the closet for the last three days. Emery hoped that he had been sweating it out, trying to imagine all the things that they had planned for him, though she knew that he would never be able too.

  Though they technically didn’t have another torture room, she wasn’t worried about it. Anywhere she could take her kit would be transformed to her liking. So, she planned to turn the target range into a makeshift paradise of a blissful torture area.

  Making her way into the basement that housed Henry, she grabbed some plastic to put down on the floor. She didn’t want Brian’s body parts, blood, or other bodily secretions to stain the floor.

  As Emery grabbed a couple of rolls of thick plastic, she took Henry in. She had to admit the man was holding up a lot better than she thought he would have. If only barely. From what she could tell, Grae was nearing his endgame as far as the psychological torture went. Even if Henry had held out for this long, he would break by the end of it.

  She made her way back up the stairs, being sure to close the door tightly behind her to block out the high pitch squealing that was going on. The shit was extremely annoying, and she knew few people who could deal with it. Luckily for her, she happened to be one of those people.

  Her siblings and herself had all gone through several forms of psychological torture at the hands of Marco when he was still with them. It was so they would be able to withstand it from someone else who may have tried to get information out of them if they were ever to be careless enough to get caught slipping.

  Emery made her way into the elevator, taking it down to the training areas. Making her way into the target room, she began to lay the plastic down, taking great care to cover as much of the floor as possible. As well as too overlay the plastic in the middle to make it thicker, more durable since that would be were she positioned Brian.

  When she was done with that, she made her way over to where the knives were kept. It was also where she had started keeping her kit. Before, it had been in her room, where she could go through it and admire her instruments as often as she wanted too. However, now that Larkin shared a room with her, she didn’t want her stumbling upon it.

  Her girlfriend may have been entirely aware of the fact that most of the time, Emery was batshit crazy. She didn’t, however, need to scar her for life with all the different instruments of torture that she owned and prided herself on.

  Placing her kit where she wanted it, Emery then made her way to the closet they’d locked Brian in. It was home sweet home to the man — the final one he would undoubtedly ever have.

  When she opened the door, she found him glaring at her, and she lifted an eyebrow at him. She wondered if he thought it made him look more menacing. Even though he was far from it at that moment, and nothing he did could help that.

  He was tied to a chair with a hot pink ball gag in his mouth. Courtesy of Kylen because he thought it would be funnier. He also had a catheter, which was hanging off of a hanger Maleiha had fashioned to the back of the chair he was bound too.

  Rolling her eyes at him, Emery reached behind him and grabbed the hanger supporting the catheter. She put it in his lap before grabbing the back of his chair and pulling him around. It was a little tricky because there were no wheels on the chair, and Brian wasn’t a small man. Though she knew she could have gotten one of her brothers to help her, it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle, and she wanted to work alone in peace for a little while.

  Tipping the chair onto its back two legs, she decided to pull him that way until she had him positioned where she wanted him on the plastic. After sitting him back upright, she went over to her kit, placing gloves on her hands before pulling out a blow torch. She turned to Brian with a smile. Deciding that first, she would burn his fingertips beyond print possible.

  Korrae groaned, wondering if Brandon was ever going to shut up. He had been talking nonstop about Erik, one of the men that Ashton had sent to keep an eye out on her. At first, she had thought that they would just sit out in the car and watch the building. That had not been the case. They had both come into the store her first day back to work, and she had simply wanted them both to leave. Suspecting that some of her customers may get a bit uncomfortable.

  They were not small men, and she didn’t want any of the women that came in to shop to feel intimidated. Any of the men either. It would serve to lose her money if the two out of place men caused patrons to cut their visit to the store short and did not make a purchase or purchase as much as they would have.

  Korrae brought this up to the two men, and Donnie, who she soon found out that she was not fond of, told her they didn’t take orders from her and to deal with it. She had wanted to slap spit from his mouth and teeth down his throat.

  However, Erik had stepped in and stated that they would be in far deeper water with Ashton if they were outside, and something went down in the store. So, he had come up with the comprise of him being in the store, under the guise of security, while Donnie waited outside. She knew it was probably going the be the best compromise that she got.

  The day before she had gone back to work, Ashton had Miles tap into her security cameras. Whose, in Miles’ words, system was weak. So, he fortified her system for her. Which the next day, Sutton had infiltrated and started playing the oddest music.

  Korrae had found out that it had been at the request of Ashton to see just how strong Miles had made the system. Apparently, however, the younger woman had no trouble bypassing his security measure and, as a result, put her own in place for Korrae. Though she did have to wonder if it were fair of them to assume Miles’ upgrade had been weak when the person they had attempting to break it was Sutton.

  From what she’d gathered in a couple of weeks that they had shared the same roof, she was by all standards a genius when it came to things like that. She didn’t question it, though. She simply thanked them and left it at that.

  “Brandon!” Korrae snapped after several more minutes. “Would you be quiet, please?”

  Brandon gave her a stink face before smacking his lips and rolling his eyes at her. “Bitch, you don’t have to yell. I’m trying to allow you to be a part of the greatest love story that could possibly be told in the future.”

  Korrae cut her eyes at him. “It’s nice to have big dreams when they’re realistic.” She told him before looking over at Erik.
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  She wasn’t sure of the man’s sexual preference or orientation, but she did know her best friend's track record and the fact that he seemed only to become attracted to and lust after straight men.

  “You’re such a hater. Besides, if you didn’t want him to be my future husband inevitably, why did you hire him?”

  “First of all, I’m far from hating. Second, shut up.”

  She wasn’t about to tell Brandon that she hadn’t technically hired him, because it meant that she would have to tell him about other things going on, and she had no intention of doing that. It was well known to her from the beginning of their friendship, that he could not hold air. Therefore, anything she told him would find its way to everyone. So, she left it at that.

  Picking up her phone from the counter, Korrae checked it. It had vibrated during Brandon’s delusional rant, but she had not looked at it. Seeing that it was a text message from her mother, she almost groaned out loud. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to speak to or hear from her mother. It was the simple fact of what her mother wanted.

  For the past several days, she had been on Korrae nonstop to set up a dinner for her and her father to meet Ashton. It was not something she wanted to do.

  It wasn’t that she feared her parents meeting her boyfriend. It was that she was absolutely terrified by the prospect of it happening. Korrae didn’t doubt that her parents would like Ashton, that they would get along. She was sure that they would, and it was what frightened her.

  She had never been one to introduce her parents to someone she was dating because, honestly, she had never actually dated anyone. Not seriously. The possibility of her parents getting attached to him or seeing a future between her and Ashton and then it not working out was something she didn’t want to have to go through.

  Korrae let out a sigh. Knowing that there was no way she could keep putting her mother off. She knew her well enough to know that if she tried, her mother would simply pop up at the store, or her house, which her parents didn’t know she wasn’t currently staying in, with food and demand that she call Ashton so her mother could extend the invitation herself.