Chapter two

Peter

“We should take this somewhere more…private.” The blonde trailed her fingers down my arm, her grey eyes bright with invitation as she swiped her tongue over her bottom lip. “Or not. Whatever you’re into.”

My lips curved—not enough to classify as a smile, but enough to broadcast my thoughts. You can’t handle what I’m into.

Despite her short, tight dress and suggestive words, she looked like the type who expected sweet nothings and lovemaking in bed.

I didn’t do sweet nothings or lovemaking.

I fucked a certain way, and only a specific type of woman was into that shit. Not hardcore BDSM, but not soft. Somewhere close to hardcore though. No kissing, no face-to-face contact, women being tied up while I fucked them. I don’t do love making, I don’t do sex. I fucked. Women don’t touch me during the process. Women agreed, then tried to change it up halfway and that’s why I drafted a contract which any submissive I was in the relationship with at the moment signed to. As a businessman I prided in ensuring my dealings anywhere was contracted to prevent all the clinginess and the rest women were attuned to. So once they tried to change the flow of things I opened the door and kicked them out. Nothing pisses me off more than breach of contract, they’re just lucky I don’t sue them.

That was why I stuck to a roster of familiar rotating names when I needed a release; both sides knew what to expect.

The blonde was not making it onto that roster.

“Not tonight.” I swirled the ice in my glass. “It’s my friend’s farewell party.” I told her with my gaze on Jeremy

She followed my gaze toward Jeremy, who was basking in female attention of his own.

When his sister had surprised him, he wasn’t surprised as much as he pretended to be not to hurt her feelings. Phoebe is a lot of thing but naïve tops the chart. I mean who lives a door away from the person they want to surprise and still plans it in that house.

He sprawled on the couch, one of the few remaining pieces of furniture after he’d packed the house up in anticipation of his year abroad, and grinned while three women fawned over him, the party was hosted in his apartment. And she really believed he wouldn’t find out. Jeremy had always been the charming one. While I put people on edge, he put them at ease, and his approach toward the fairer sex was the opposite of mine. The more, the merrier, according to him. He’d probably fucked half the Seattle area’s female population by now.

“He can join too.” The blonde edged closer until her tits grazed my arm. “I don’t mind.”

“Same.” Her friend, a petite brunette who had been quiet up till now but who’d eyed me like I was a juicy steak since I walked through the door. Talk about annoying pair. Even if I wanted to have a threesome it definitely would not be with these two.

Most guys would’ve jumped at the opportunity, but I was already bored with the conversation. Nothing turned me off more than desperation, which reeked stronger than their perfume, Lemon which also pissed me off, I hate lemons.

I didn’t bother answering. Instead, I scanned the room for something more interesting to hold my attention. If it were a party for anyone else but Jeremy, I would’ve skipped it. Between my job as CEO of The Ambrose Group and my…uh..side project, I had enough on my plate without attending pointless social gatherings. But Jeremy was my best friend—one of the few people whose company I could stand for more than an hour at a time or probably the only one—and he was leaving Monday for his Law school at London. So here I was, pretending like I actually wanted to be here.

A silvery laugh pealed through the air, drawing my eyes toward the source.

Phoebe.

Of course.

Jeremy’s little sister was so sweet and sunshiney all the time, and it also pissed me off the time. How can someone always be cheery no matter what happens, sometimes I think she just uses that as her mask to hide her ugly parts but I doubt it she’s one of the few people who are genuinely cheery. I half-expected flowers to sprout on the ground wherever she walked and a coterie of singing wood woodland animals to trail behind her while she traipsed through meadows or whatever girls like her did.

She stood in the corner with her friends, her face bright with animation as she laughed at something one of them said. I wondered if it was a real laugh or a fake laugh. Most laughs—hell, most people—were fake. They woke up every morning and put on a mask according to what they wanted that day and who they wanted the world to see. They smiled at people they hated, laughed at jokes that weren’t funny, and kissed the asses of those they secretly hoped to dethrone.

I wasn’t judging. Like everyone else, I had my masks, and they ran layers deep. But unlike everyone else, I had as much interest in ass-kissing and small talk as I did in injecting bleach into my veins.

Knowing Phoebe, her laugh was real and that was much more annoying.

Poor girl. The world would eat her alive once she left the Larsen bubble. She probably thinks the world is made of pink and roses.

Not my problem.

“Heyyy” Jeremy appeared beside me, his hair tousled and his mouth stretched into a wide grin. His hangers-on were nowhere—wait, nope. There they were, dancing to Beyoncé like they were auditioning for a gig at The Strip Angel while a circle of guys watched them with tongues falling out. My gender is actually a very dumb gender that thinks only with their dicks. If most of them used their heads to think the world might be a better place.

“Sorry man, I can see you’re starting to get all Peter irritated but I’ve been busy”

“I saw” I deadpanned “by the way remnants are on your face”

His grin widened. “Badge of honor. Speaking of which, I’m not interrupting, am I?”

I glanced at the blonde and brunette, who’d moved on to making out with each other after failing to capture my interest.

Females, the second gender with a potato for a brain.

“No.” I shook my head. “A hundred bucks says you won’t survive the full year in London, Nowhere. No women, no parties. You’ll be back before Halloween.”

“Oh, ye of little faith. There’ll be women, and the party is wherever I am.” Jeremy swiped an unopened beer from a nearby cooler and cracked it open. “I actually wanted to talk to you about that. Me being gone,” he clarified.

“Don’t tell me you’re getting sentimental on me. If you bought us friendship bracelets, I’m out and I mean it”

“Fuck you, dude.” He laughed. “I wouldn’t buy your ass jewelry if you paid me. No, this is about Phoebe.”

My glass paused an inch from my lips before I brought it home and the sweet burn of whiskey flowed down my throat. I hate beer, it’s for dumb people, makes your brain dumb. It tastes like piss, but since it was the Main character at Jeremy’s parties, I always brought a flask of whiskey whenever I visited.

“What about her?”

Jeremy and his sister were close, even if they bickered so much I wanted to duct tape their mouths sometimes. That was the nature of siblings—something I’d never quite gotten to experience.

The whiskey turned sour in my mouth, and I set my glass down with a grimace.

“I’m worried about her.” Jeremy rubbed a hand over his jaw, his expression growing serious. A clear indication that whatever he’s talking about will very much piss me off. “I know she’s a big girl and can take care of herself—unless she’s getting stranded in the middle of fucking nowhere; thanks for picking her up, by the way—but she’s never been on her own for so long and she can be a little too…trusting.”

“Naïve. You mean she can be a little naïve” I corrected

“Yeah bro. You don’t have to use terms that sure as hell would piss her off though “ he added

I had an inkling of where Jeremy was going with this, and I didn’t like it. At all. “She won’t be alone. She has her friends.” I inclined my head toward said friends.

One of them, a curvy ginger-head in a pink tulle skirt that made her look like a 6 year old playing Pinkalicious, chose that very moment to hop onto the table and shake her ass to the rap song blasting through the speakers.

Okay maybe he has a reason to be worried. But that doesn’t mean she’s my problem.

Jeremy snorted. “You mean the friends I’m staring at? Steph? She’s always mostly a liability, not help, she gets in much trouble than her tulle skirt can accommodate. And Phoebe is always the one going to get her out of it, so I wonder who’s going to help the other when it’s a problem phoebe gets into, and Kiara…well, she has security, billionaire’s daughter and all but she’s not around as much, she’s always running to Manhattan for daddy’s business so who knows if she’ll be around when Pheebs needs her.”

“You don’t need to worry. Larsen’s safe, and the crime rate here is close to zero.”

“The chances of her getting into nerve racking situations is slim”

“Yeah, but I’d feel better if I had someone I trusted looking after her, you know?”

“I can’t just leave her here without the confidence that someone I know is here looking after her”

Fuck.

The train was heading straight off a cliff, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.

“I wouldn’t ask—I know you’ve got a lot of shit going on—but she broke up with her ex a couple of weeks ago, and he’s been harassing her. I always knew he was a little shit, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Plus she has a stalker, I don’t know how but she’s been receiving messages and shit. I told her I’m sure it’s that piece of shit she dated but you know Phoebe, she believes the best in everyone. Anyway, if you could keep an eye on her—just to make sure she doesn’t get killed or kidnapped or anything? I’d owe you big.”

“You already owe me for all those times I saved your ass,” I said wryly.

“You had fun while doing it. You’re too uptight sometimes.” Jeremy grinned. “So, is that a yes?”

“I’ll give you my very best puppy dog eyes if you say no. I know how much you hate it and I’ll try to make sure the one I give you this time around traumatizes you for life”

I glanced at Phoebe again. Took her in. She was twenty-one, three years younger than Jeremy and me, and she managed to and she managed to appear both younger and older than her years. It was the way she carried herself, she’s so full of life like she has seen all parts of it, the good, the bad and the ugly and is choosing to embrace it and love it until it all the ugly parts become beautiful. In key terms she’s a fantasy fighter, the world thrives because there are ugly parts and probably she will learn that the hard way.

She must’ve felt me staring because she paused her conversation and looked directly at me, her cheeks tinting pink at my unflinching gaze. She’d changed out of her jeans and T-shirt into a purple dress that swirled around her knees.

Too bad.

The dress was nice, but my mind flashed back to our car ride, when her damp shirt had clung to her like a second skin and her nipples had strained against the decadent red lace of her bra. I’d meant what I’d said about her not being my type, but I’d enjoyed the view, who wouldn’t? I could imagine myself lifting that shirt, tugging her bra aside with my teeth, and closing my mouth around those sweet, hardened peaks—

No, no,no,no,no, you can’t go there Pete. I yanked myself out of that startling fantasy fast. What the fuck was wrong with me? That was Jeremy’s sister for fuck’s sake. Innocent, cat-eyed, and so sweet I could throw up. The total opposite of the sophisticated, jaded women I preferred both in and out of bed. I didn’t have to worry about feelings with the latter; they knew better than to develop any around me. Phoebe was nothing but feelings, she was the definition of living, breathing feelings, with a hint of sass.

A ghost of a smile passed over my mouth when I remembered her parting shot earlier. I hope that stick in your ass punctures a vital organ.

I didn’t know she had it in her, Bright and Fair Phoebe? I was stunned. I wanted to tell her attagirl but that would be above my personality.

Not the worst thing anyone’s said to me, not by a long shot, but more aggressive than I’d expected coming from her. I’d never heard her say a bad word to or about anyone before. I took perverse pleasure in the fact that I could rile her up so much.

“Peter,” Jeremy prompted.

“I don’t know, man.” I dragged my eyes away from Phoebe and her purple dress. “I’m not much of a babysitter.”

“Good thing she’s not a baby,” he quipped. “Look, I know this is a big ask, but you’re the only person I trust not to, you know—”

“Fuck her?”

“Jesus, dude.” Jeremy looked like he’d swallowed a lemon. “Don’t use that word in relation to my sister. It’s gross. But…yeah. I mean, we both know she’s not your type, and even if she was, you’d never go there.”

A sliver of guilt flashed through me when I remembered my errant fantasy a few moments ago. It was time for me to call up someone from my roster, i obviously need to get laid bad. If I was fantasizing about Jeremy’s little sister than definitely my balls are blue.

“But it’s more than that,” Jeremy continued. “You’re the only person I trust, period, outside of my family. And you know how worried I am about Pheebs, especially considering this whole thing with her ex and the stalker” His face darkened. “I swear, if I find out who that fucker is…”

I sighed. “I’ll take care of her. Don’t worry.”

I was going to regret this. I knew it, yet here I was, signing my life away, at least for the next year. I didn’t make a lot of promises, but when I did, I kept them. Committed myself to them. Which meant if I promised Jeremy I’d look after Phoebe, I’d fucking look after her, and I’m not talking about a text check-in every two weeks.

She was under my protection now.

A familiar, creeping sense of doom slithered around my neck and squeezed, tighter and tighter, until oxygen ran scarce and tiny lights danced before my eyes.

Blood. Everywhere.

On my hands. On my clothes. Splattered over the cream rug she’d loved so much—the one she’d brought back from Europe on her last trip abroad.

An insane urge to scrub the rug and tear those bloody particles out of the soft wool fibers, one by one, gripped me, but I couldn’t move.

All I could do was stand and stare at the grotesque scene in my living room—a room which, not half an hour earlier, had burst with warmth and laughter and love. Now it was cold and lifeless, like the three bodies at my feet

I blinked, and they disappeared—the lights, the memories, the noose around my neck.

But they’d come back. They always did.

No matter how much I tried to forget them, I can’t run from them.

“…You’re the best,” Jeremy was saying, his grin back now that I’d agreed to take on a role I had no business taking. I wasn’t a protector; I was a destroyer. I broke hearts, crushed business opponents, and didn’t care about the aftermath. If someone was stupid enough to fall for me or cross me—two things I warned people never, ever to do—they had it coming. “I’ll bring you back—fuck, I don’t know. Coffee. Chocolate. Pounds of whatever is good down there. And I owe you a big, fat favor in the future.”

I forced a smile. Before I could respond, my phone rang, and I held up a finger. “Be right back. I have to take this.”

“Take your time, man.” Jeremy was already distracted by the blonde and brunette who’d been all over me earlier and who found a much more willing audience in my best friend. By the time I stepped outside the door and answered my call, they had their hands beneath his shirt.

“Uncle.,” I said, using the blamd tone i always used for uncle. He says a weak man is one who shows the world his emotions. So we’ve always talked with indifference.

“Pete.” My uncle’s voice over the line oozed the same indifference I had answer with, except his is scratchy from decades of cigarettes and the wear and tear of life. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“No.” I glanced through the sliding glass of the front door at the revelry inside. Jeremy had lived in the same rambling, two-story house off Larsen’s campus since undergrad. We’d roomed together until I graduated and moved to D.C. proper to be closer to my office—and to get away from the hordes of shrieking, drunken college students that paraded through campus and the surrounding neighborhoods every night.

Everyone had turned out for Jeremy’s farewell party, and by everyone, I mean half the population of Seattle, not just Capitol Hill, where Larsen was located. He was a town favorite, and I imagined people would miss his parties as much as they missed Jeremy himself.

For someone who always claimed to be drowning in schoolwork, he found a lot of time for drinking and sex. Not that it hurt his academic performance. The bastard had a 4.6 GPA.

“GPA.

“Did you take care of the problem?” my uncle asked.

I heard a drawer open and close, followed by the faint click of a glass being placed on the desk. I’d urged him to quit drinking countless times, but he always brushed me off. Old habits die hard; old, bad habits even more so, and Edgar Ambrose had reached the age where he couldn’t be bothered.

“Not yet.” The moon hung low in the sky, casting ribbons of light that snaked through the otherwise-inky darkness of the backyard. Light and shadow. Two halves of the same coin. “I will. We’re close.”

To justice. Vengeance. Salvation.

For sixteen years, the pursuit of those three things had consumed me. They were my every waking thought, my every dream and nightmare. My reason for living. Even in situations when I’d been distracted by something else—the chess-play of corporate politics, the fleeting pleasure of burying myself into the tight, warm heat of a willing body—they’d lurked in my consciousness, driving me to greater heights of ambition and ruthlessness.

Sixteen years might seem like a long time, but I specialize in the long game. It doesn’t matter how many years I have to wait. And the end of the man who had destroyed my family? It would be glorious.

“Good.” My uncle coughed, and my lips pinched.

One of these days, I’d convince him to quit drinking, his liver is weeping already. Life had driven any sentimentality out of me years ago, but Edgar was my only living relative. He took me in, raised me as his own, and stuck by me through every thorny twist of my path toward revenge, so I owed him that much, at least.

“Your family will be at peace soon,” he said.

Perhaps. Whether the same could be said of me…well, that was a question for another day.

“There’s a board meeting next week,” I said, switching topics. “I’ll be in town for the day.” My uncle was the official Chairman of Ambrose Group, the cybersecurity development company he’d founded a decade ago with my guidance. I’d had a knack for business even as a teenager.

Ambrose Group headquarters called Manhattan home, but it had offices across the country. Since I was based in D.C., that was the company’s real power center, though board meetings still took place at HQ.

I could’ve taken over as Chairman years ago, per my Agreement with my uncle. We started the company, but the CEO position offered me more flexibility until I finished what I had to do. Besides, everyone knew I was the power behind the throne, anyway. Edgar was a decent Chairman, but it was my strategies that had catapulted it into the Fortune 500 after a mere decade.

My uncle and I talked business for a while longer before I hung up and rejoined the party. The gears in my head cranked into motion as I took stock of the evening’s developments—my promise to Jeremy, my uncle’s nudge about the minor hiccup in my revenge plan. Somehow, I had to reconcile the two over the next year.

I mentally rearranged the pieces of my life into different patterns, playing each scenario out to the end, weighing the pros and cons, and examining them for potential cracks until I reached a decision.

“Everything good?” Jeremy called out from the couch, where the blonde kissed his neck while the brunette’s hands became intimately acquainted with the region below his belt.

“Yes.” To my irritation, my gaze strayed toward Phoebe again. She was in the kitchen, fussing over the half-eaten cake from Sweet Tooth. Her fair skin glowed with a faint sheen of sweat from dancing, and her raven hair billowed around her face in a soft cloud. “About your earlier request…I have an idea.”