Your sister.
Footsteps passed in front of the room, going down the hallway, casting shadows from the crack underneath the door. Their presence seemed larger than life.
Like a god.
“Who are they?” I whispered again.
“Think of them as a family. It’s easier that way,” she said. She forced a smile. “Close brothers. Best friends.” She pushed the bag towards me, offering the extra clothes. She nodded in the brothers’ direction. “They’ll help you, but you have to give to them too, especially Wil.”
Listen to her. Play the game, the voice said.You always knew you would be subjected to this.
I nodded. “Okay.”
CHAPTER 3
Wil
Maddie was talking to the nameless woman who could barely speak, while the three of us sat in the study. Half of me wondered if I should have felt guilty about what we were doing. The other half didn’t care. She was on our property without any rights to be; she should have been dead.
Instead, she was mine.
My brothers were talking about a business matter while I zoned out, trying to figure out how best to control the situation. Playing a woman’s god was an interesting situation; you chose the outcome, but you had to get her to bow down of her own volition. Otherwise, any completed acts weren’t truly given. True loyalty resulted from rule. And what I wanted, through every fiber of her being, was loyalty.
“Dead?” Derek asked. My world came into focus with that word.
Axe nodded slowly, then said: “Chopped to pieces.”
“Butchered?” Again, Axe nodded. Derek shook his head. “And you’re sure it was Lance?”
“I picked apart the pieces myself.”
I lifted a brow. Lance, one of the security members we had working on our father’s property for the last decade, was dead?
“The hell is happening now?” I asked.
“I found Lance butchered to death,” Axe said. “Sliced up, like someone had used a cleaver on him. Slit his throat, then chopped him up.”
“Where?”
“In the woods.”
Our parents lived in one of the oldest neighborhoods in Sage City, resting against a vast forest. The property had been in our family for generations, the eldest son always moving in, taking over the leadership role of our family business, our mafia. We owned the acres surrounding the house, including most of the woods in the back, and had many guards placed throughout to monitor the property. When he wasn’t enforcing, Axe was one of them. He had his workroom camouflaged in the woods as well.
“So you found a naked woman and one of our guards dead on the same day?” Derek asked. “Shouldn’t we put two and two together and make the assumption?”
That woman? Nope. Didn’t make any sense.
“Can that woman even talk?” I argued.
Axe shook his head. “I checked her for marks. There was nothing. No signs of distress. No signs of fighting.” I tightened my fist, thinking of Axe checking her body, but then I released it. He knew, even then, that she was mine. He hadn’t looked at her in that way. “But I take it that whoever put her there, might have had something to do with Lance.”
“Or maybe it’s bad luck,” Derek said. He shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”
“Who the hell knows,” I said. “I’ll watch her now.”
“You still got your gun?”
I nodded. I kept a pistol with me at all times and had several hidden in the penthouse. You never knew what would happen in our family, and you had to be prepared. “It’s not going to come to that.”
