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Victor takes a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wipes his cock off. “I’m done with her for now.”
I know I should be pissed at being dismissed like that, but I can’t summon up the energy. It’s all I can do to wipe at my mouth while I stumble to my feet with Saint’s help. He grips my arm, guiding me, and Angelo gets on the other side of me like they’re my own personal bodyguards. I note absently that Angelo is holding the leash, but he isn’t using it as a lead the way Victor had.
My legs are unsteady, and I’m almost grateful for their presence. I don’t think I could have made it back down on my own.
We’re at the stairs when I finally realize what’s happening. “Wait. My… outside time?”
“Shh. It’s been an hour. You did really good. Victor was pleased,” Saint says.
That wasn’t how I’d wanted to spend my hour outside, and irritation gnaws at the strange distance between myself and my thoughts. I feel cheated, but it’s exhausting to even think.
I stumble, and Angelo grabs my other arm to hold me up before I do something graceful like fall down the stairs. They help me down, taking me back into that room, and they briefly confer with each other in hushed voices.
Saint’s the one who takes me to the mattress and sits down, urging me into his lap. He wraps an arm around me, and Angelo leaves the room. “You really did do good,” Saint murmurs, stroking my hair. “Such a good girl.”
I’m half-asleep when Angelo gets back with a blanket and wraps it around me.
Between the two of them, I almost feel… safe.
It’s a strange feeling, and I fall asleep knowing it’s wrong. But I can’t do anything about it, so I let their warmth swallow me whole.
14
Saint
Iglance at the live feed to Lucia’s basement room again, watching her sleep. She looks so peaceful this way, and I want to go to her and see just how much I can do to her before she wakes up. I need to be working, but fuck, she’s such a distraction that I can’t focus on processing the routes she’d given us.
I know I need to finish mapping them and work on verifying them with our people, but the task seems onerous when there are much better things I could be doing.
Victor trusts me to get it done, though, and he’ll be disappointed if I don’t manage to produce what he expects. I don’tlikedisappointing him, especially not after all he’s done for me.
But Lucia is right there.
Fuck it. I can work while I’m watching her up close and personal, where I can see her chest rise and fall with each of her breaths in a way I can’t see through the video cameras.
I stand up and close my laptop, tucking it under my arm and heading for the basement. I make sure to open the door very carefully, so as not to wake her. If I get the work done, I’ll reward myself by slowly waking her with kisses. It all depends on her still being asleep, so I have to work fast.
The floor is pretty cold when I sit down, and I’m glad Angel brought the blanket for her last night. She must have been freezing before this.
As much as I would love to keep staring, the work needs to get done. I open up my laptop and pull up the maps again. The routes make sense, right until they don’t. I’d sent a few people to set up hidden cameras at key spots, but somewhere between the starting point and the destination, the product disappears. I can’t figure out exactly where.
Had she lied about the routes? I can only trace them so far, and the cars never go the whole way. Victor’s going to be pissed if this doesn’t check out.
I don’t even want to imagine what he’ll do to Lucia in that case. If she thinks he’s bad right now… She hasn’t seen Victor at his worst. For her sake, I hope I can make sense of these routes.
I’m twenty minutes into watching and rewinding the footage, going over it in slow motion, speeding it up, and I’ve got nothing. “Fuck.”
“Huh? Saint?”
Dammit, now Lucia is awake, which means I don’t get my reward. But this might be for the best. “Come here, kitten, and help me make sense of this.”
She blinks a few more times then wipes at her face, slowly moving to the edge of the mattress and looking at my laptop screen as she wraps the blanket around her shoulders. “Sense of what?” she asks groggily.
I point to where one of the paths abruptly ends. “The routes you gave us.” I really don’t want her to have been lying. I don’t want to see her getting punished. “They don’t go all the way to the docks.”
Lucia stares at the highlighted routes on the map on my screen. “Those are the right routes,” she insists. “But there’s…” She scrunches her nose, like she’s trying to remember. “Ugh, what was it he used to always bitch about?”
“Who? Your father?” I can’t really imagine Bellini “bitching” about anything, but I guess his daughter sees him in a very different light. All of my impressions of Bellini come from Angelo and Victor cussing about him.
