“Good. You’re as useless with sycophants as I am.”
“Being in love isn’t sycophantic, Malachi. It’s the opposite, actually.” He chuckles lightly and looks back at me, slipping one hand into his pocket. “It’s hearing a world of things you don’t want to hear and respecting the mouth that offers it.” Hannah’s chain gets pulled out, twined around his fingers, and he smiles for the first time since I got here. “Do you actually want to talk, or are you just musing your own thoughts with someone else around?”
“The latter.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“You don’t usually need anyone else, Malachi. Certainly not me, so why the need for company?”
“I don’t know.” I do in reality. I need his silence, his quiet sense of murky and distant so I can think, search, understand my own thoughts. Especially here in Manhattan. “I don’t understand my own sense of ease with her, nor do I like the fact that it might change both me and what I have to do.”
He laughs and then goes quiet again, contemplating his own mood, his own thoughts. “You’ll change each other, Malachi. For the better, on your part. She’ll keep giving you a reason to live, and you’ll keep giving her everything to ensure she stays. As long as you can answer the question honestly, anyway.”
“What question?”
“Whether you’ve fallen in love or not?” I keep looking out of the window, part refusing to acknowledge the absolute notion that I have. It amuses me, brings a smile to my face. It’s not entertaining. It’s quietly debilitating, and causes a surge of that yearning to consume me.
I get up and go over to the window to stand across from him, staring at my own townhouse in the distance. “I think I might have done.”
“Nauseating, isn’t it?”
We both drink in silence. Both ponder the merits of that abnormal, freaky ass, as she would say, feeling. It’s relatively nice for a while, which draws me back to thoughts of going back there so I can sleep with her, or fuck her again. Or perhaps push some more pressure points so I can remind her who hurts her rather than have her remember who else did.
“Our world will turn differently if I’m with her. You should know that. She makes me think like my Grandfather did.”
“I doubt it. There’s still seven of us. You can’t force decency on us, Malachi.”
I down the rest of my brandy and turn away from him, ready to acknowledge my own thoughts and do something about them because I can. Or I can at least shake the table.
The glass gets put down, and I walk to leave.
Conversation is over.
Chapter 14
Ally
Acommotion wakes me. Shouting and fighting.
I bolt upright in the bed and search for the sound, trying to hear Brett or Brandon. It’s not them. It's Malachi’s voice. Crashing echoes around the place, something shattering on hard floors. I get out of bed and grab a robe, wrapping it around me as I bound out of the door and rush across the landing area. The sight of a man I don’t know sprawled out on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, his face bloodied and battered, does not fill me with happiness.
“Go!” Malachi’s voice shouts. “Die somewhere else.” The man crawls past some of the security team, pulls himself upright on a table. “I doubt I have to insist this stays quiet, but just in case, don’t be fucking stupid, Damien. For now, this is over. Don’t ever take anything that belongs to me again.”
I pad softly, trying to look over the bannister. Malachi’s off to the side of the stairs, wearing the same pair of jeans and t-shirt as he wore last night. A maid walks past him to the main entrance and opens it for whoever Damien is. It's then that I see both Brett and Brandon follow him from the other side of the room, Brandon looking about ready to kill.
One glance at their knuckles and I know exactly what’s been going on.
This is the man Malachi told me about last night.
Mothering takes over, regardless of whatever this man did to me.
I move until I’m in the middle of the staircase, calling both their names. They look up. I shake my head. “No more.” Brandon snarls, but at least Brett stays focused on me. “But don’t let him leave.”
My fingers run through my hair, as I make my way down to them and tighten my robe. I don’t know what I want to do, or say, but I can’t, or won’t, just let him walk away without looking him in the eye. I get closer, watch as he tries not to look at me. He should. If Malachi’s right, and this is the man that caused me to be taken, he should, at the very least, have the fucking mettle to look me in the face.
Brandon blocks the doorway, and Malachi comes out of the wings behind me. I look at him over my shoulder, knowing, without a shadow of a doubt, that not one thing will happen to me while I’m under his watch unless it comes from him. The idea of that stretches my lips into a smile. A near sadistic one maybe, but it’s built from pain and anger and years of looking after myself.
