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I’ve only interacted with him and the other two for a little bit, but in that small amount of time, Ransom has always seemed like the nicest one. If any of them could be called nice after what I saw them do, I guess. At least he’s more charming and seems more…humanthan the others.
But in this moment, I know I was right to begin with, that first night I bumped into him.
He’s dangerous and deadly, and the hard look on his face proves that. He can be just as terrifying as the other two when he wants to be.
His voice drops down a little when he speaks, and a shiver runs through me as his words hit my ear.
“It wasn’t a request,” he says simply. “This is your last day working here.”
I blink, my heart sinking. Tears well in my eyes, and I want to look away from him, but he’s just so close. There’s nowhere else to look, nothing else to focus on with his muscled body crowding mine like this.
A tear slips down my cheek, and when I sniffle a little, trying to stop it from becoming a torrent, the hard look on his face softens. He sighs, reaching over to run a knuckle down my cheek.
“I’m sorry you got mixed up in all this shit, angel,” he murmurs. “It’s not fucking fair, but that’s the way life is sometimes. I have to look out for my brothers, you know? We’re all we’ve got.”
Brothers.
Right. The three of them are brothers.
I remember Ransom mentioning something about how the Russian guy killed their mother, Diana Voronin. And even if I hadn’t heard him say that, I could probably have guessed that the three of them are related. There’s definitely some resemblance between him and the two men with dark hair, and the similarities between the dark-haired men were obvious—even if their demeanors seemed to be almost polar opposites.
Three brothers.
Three monsters.
Three men who wouldn’t hesitate to kill me if they had to, to protect each other.
A wave of fear rushes through me at the thought, and my throat tightens as something almost like envy follows on its heels. They have each other, and I don’t have anyone. No one to watch out for me. No one to have my back. No one to help me as my life spins out of control.
“Okay,” I whisper, another tear slipping through my eyelashes and trailing down until it reaches Ransom’s hand. “I’ll tell Carl I quit.”
Ransom nods gravely, brushing the teardrop away from my cheek. “Good girl.”
He lingers for a moment longer, gazing down at me with his knuckles still lightly touching my face. The point of contact between us tingles, making goosebumps rise up on my skin, and I hold my breath, staying absolutely still.
When he opens his mouth, I think he’s about to say something else, but then he just shakes his head and closes it again. He tugs me away from the door and slips out of the closet, disappearing into the crowd.
8
WILLOW
As the doorto the closet shuts behind Ransom with a soft click, I wrap my arms around myself, taking a few deep breaths and trying to get a handle on my emotions.
My heart is still racing way too fast, and my skin feels cold and hot at the same time. I can still feel the brush of Ransom’s fingers and the way he boxed me in against the door, and it reminds me way too much of the dream I had last night.
I don’t like the way my body responded to him.
I don’t like the way my heart beat harder and faster, or the way my skin prickled like I was touching a low volt battery. It makes me feel unbalanced and out of control. I haven’t felt like myself since last night, and I was hoping that just doing my job and getting back to some semblance of my normal life would help, but now that’s being taken away from me too.
I scrub a hand over my face and then draw myself up, finally leaving the closet to go knock on the door to Carl’s office.
“What?” he barks, sounding as irritated as usual.
I edge the door open and stick my head in. “Do you have a minute?”
He looks up from his computer screen and glares at me, shaking his head. “Jesus, Willow, if I wanted to see you this much, I’d put you on the fucking stage like you asked me to. What the hell do you want now?”
For a second, I think about reminding him that he’s the one who dragged me into his office earlier, but I hold that in, deciding to get to the point instead.
