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And then she comes.
She cries out again, and the sound seems to echo both in the bathroom and in my head. She writhes under the water, her chest rising and falling as she gasps for breath.
It’s like my body is somehow synced with hers, and my cock pulses in my pants, my balls drawing up tight. I exhale harshly through my nose and grit my teeth, forcing it all back.
No.
It’s not the right day or the right time, and I can’t afford to be losing control like this.
Not over some girl that we should have killed in the first place.
In my head, I start counting the seconds as I inhale and then hold the breath in, waiting until my lungs burn to release it.
It’s something I’ve done since I was a child, a way to cope with the shit my father put me through. Settling deeper into the chair in front of my desk, I watch the water lapping at the edge of Willow’s bathtub and remember how my father used to hold my head underwater. How I’d take a huge, gasping breath beforehand, filling my lungs to the brim with as much air as I could fit in them. Then I’d count the seconds, waiting to be allowed to breathe again.
My vision goes blurry for a second, and my chest aches the way it used to back then, when I had to remind myself to breathe more often than was probably normal. But who the fuck knows what normal is anyway?
Thinking about that isn’t helping, so I shake the memories off. I don’t like to remember that shit.
My fingers feel stiff, aching with a phantom memory of my dad breaking them, one by one. I flex them and shake my hands out, trying to banish the feeling.
None of that is useful to be thinking about now.
“And neither is this,” I mutter to myself, clicking away from the video feed in Willow’s bathroom just as one of her arms moves to grab for her body wash. My fingers hesitate, and a small part of me wonders what she’d look like, wet and soapy in the bath. My cock gives an interested twitch, and I growl under my breath, furious with myself for this fucked up addiction to watching her.
It serves no purpose and does nothing to make things better for me and my brothers, so there’s no reason to do it.
By that logic, it’s a waste of time, and I hate wasting my time.
Still, I find myself checking the feeds to her apartment several times a day.
With the video of Willow minimized and out of sight, I switch over to check my inbox for messages. My eyebrows twitch upward when I realize I’ve gotten an encrypted message from X. My brain switches back into work mode immediately, and it feels comforting, like putting on a jacket that fits perfectly.
I put Willow out of my head and get to work decrypting the message, my fingers flying over the keyboard as I run the necessary programs.
Once decrypted, the message is clear to read, and I scan through it, memorizing the necessary details before pushing my chair back from my desk. I open the door and head downstairs, following the sounds of muted cursing and metal on metal that mean someone is working on something in the garage.
The cursing isn’t angry enough to be Malice, so it has to be Ransom.
I find him where I expect, working on his motorcycle. His head bobs, and I notice he has earbuds in, playing music and mouthing the lyrics to some song while he works. There are tools and pieces of car parts scattered around, piled in what Malice calls ‘organized chaos.’ They’re leftover from the last car we chopped up, but the bulk of the garage is empty, since we don’t have anything we’re currently working on.
“Ransom,” I say, trying to get his attention.
He spins a wrench in his hand and keeps bobbing his head, using the wrench like a drumstick to play imaginary drums one-handed.
I roll my eyes and step closer, snapping my fingers in his face.
That catches his attention, and he jerks a little, leaning back before pulling one earbud out.
“Shit, Vic. Give a guy a heart attack, why don’t you?”
“We have a message from X,” I tell him, getting right to the point.
He understands the importance of that, and he straightens up immediately, wiping his oily hands on an already oily rag.
“Should we wait for Mal to get back before we go over the details?” he asks. “I know how you hate to repeat yourself.”
The words are half teasing and half serious, but he’s right. Repeating myself isn’t up there with my favorite things to do.
