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I opt to press on, driving my point home. “I’ll have Brad on my leash, one phone call away. You slip, he makes Willow’s every nightmare come true. But there’s no guarantee with men of his sort. The temptation of sweet, pretty Willow just a few doors away might be too much. He could slip something in her drink, sneak into her bedroom and fuck her comatose body every night, without my say-so."
Morgan looks sick to her stomach, pale, tears gathering in her eyes. At first, I think she won’t manage a word, but the broken whisper finally comes. “What kind of man hurts a fourteen-year-old kid?”
"You said it yourself: monsters."
Her furious glare only serves to awaken my cock.
It's a good thing she never made a habit of looking straight at me, or I would have dragged her to a dark corner and dove into her long ago.
"You can’t do that to us. It’s vile—not to mention illegal."
I don’t particularly want to do any of this. Oh, fucking her sounds like a marvelous idea, given how hard my dick is at her every reaction, but I would have opted to pass on the whole drama if I could. She's Erica's friend, and I don't need the potential ticking bomb with Chase.
"Hacking is illegal. So is blackmail. That didn’t stop you from doing the former and attempting the latter. Or is the law only important when it’s working for you?"
"I just want to know what happened to my best friend," she grits between her teeth.
"Well, princess, you could have asked."
"Like you would have just told me!"
I shake my head and chuckle.
Her friend,Lola Jones, is being treated like the princess she soon will become, under her new name, her newly dyed dark locks, and her new accent.
The Heritage has never gone to so much effort to recruit a woman, but she caught the eye of one man we couldn't ignore, and to become his, she has to let go of her past. After all, former prostitutes don’t make for ideal future queens.
Her parents don't know the details, but they're happy cashing the check she sends them every month. She’s shared more about her new life with her siblings. I don't think she believed her friends would worry as much as Morgan obviously does, or she would have done something about it, and we might not have ended up in this room.
So many choices led us right here, all of them wrong.
"I guess we'll never know."
ChapterFive
I stare at the monster across the desk, disbelief, rage, and fear pumping in my veins.
I used to think he was perfect. Camden is ridiculously gorgeous, of course, but that wasn’t the appeal. My gaze converged toward him, rather than any of his friend, or anyone my side of the river, because he was the one who sat on the sideline at the waterfall, watching his friend goof around from a distance. A mystery wrapped in the most alluring package I’d ever seen, and I wanted to crack it, to understand what made him tick, what was happening in his beautiful golden eyes.
The man seated in front of me is a different beast.
He's calm, collected, entirely at ease with his role. He's using my kid sister's welfare to try to force me into sex—recorded sex, at that. I don't even think he wants me; he never so much as hinted at an iota of attraction on the few occasions we've met. This isn't about getting laid. It's about controlling me.
Never in a million years would I have imagined this situation, or I wouldn’t have sent that stupid email. I figured Aryan would panic and finally tell me something, anything.
I tried to speak to him, and some of his friends, for weeks, but I was turned away every time. Just a week ago, he was at the ice cream parlor on Main Street with his college crowd, and I did go right up to him to ask if he'd mind having a quick chat. He told me he didn't have any spare change on him—like he expected me to beg for money—and told me to run along. I needed his attention, so I did what I had to do.
Camden is right. If Aryan had actually killed Lola, he wouldn't have confessed to it, no matter what I had on him. I decided to push him because I didn't think that he actually was a murderer. I don't know Aryan, or anyone in that clique. I barely know Chase. But we've all lived in the same town our whole lives. We go to the same waterfall up on the hill in the summer. He didn't strike me as a psycho. I figured he and Lola got in trouble—buying drugs, or something of that sort—and she ended up worse for the wear. The video was just a tool to make him confess to it. I wouldn't have used it. Not really.
I bite my lip, trying to find a way out of this bottomless pit.
If I were dealing with flighty, happy, pothead Aryan, it would have been one thing, but this is Camden Hunt.
I loathe to admit I used to be attracted to him, when three-dimensional, real men don’t appeal to me. I got to observe the golden princes of Thorn Falls during Erica's engagement party, her rehearsal dinner, and her wedding. Where his boisterous friends laughed and played around, Camden was always the observer, and the one others turned to if there was a problem. He has the intelligent, logical plan at the ready. There's something steadying, even comforting about his protectiveness, as well as his intellect.
At least, until both of those instincts were directed against me.I’m the problem now, and I get to witness firsthand the cogency of his solutions.
“If I delete the videos…”
