CAPTOR (The Alpha Brotherhood) (Standalone Dark Billionaire New Adult Romance) (20 page)

Glaring at him, my hands reach to remove them, but he grabs my wrists and pins them to my sides. “You are really pushing it,” he snaps.

“Seriously? I’m pushing it?”

“Yes.” He guides my hands between my legs. “You know you want to.” Holy shit, I really do. Shane’s fingers cover mine, slipping into my folds. I groan when he applies pressure to that perfect spot, blushing as I try to hide my face. He crawls on top of me, lowering his weight onto my belly, keeping my hands where he wants them. “Do this for me,” he whispers into my ear, his erection sliding across the back of my palm.

There’s something so unexpectedly vulnerable in his voice that I’m caught off guard. I turn my face to his and I’m rewarded with a kiss filled with desperation. I can’t resist either side of him, the arrogant prick or the secretly broken hearted, lonely man behind the stone cold façade. Shane pushes off me and goes back to watching from the edge of the bed.

“I’ve never done this before,” I confess.

“I know.”

My nipples harden in the clamps as I slide my fingers back and forth across my clit the way he does. There’s nothing sinister about the smile on his face now. I push away the embarrassment, focusing on his satisfied expression, watching his eyes darting back and forth between my face, my heaving breasts, and the scene between my legs.

I feel it approaching, the muscles deep in my stomach trembling. My legs want to close but they can’t. The first shudder rolls through me, my skin prickling. Shane drags my body down with a firm grip on my hips, pushing inside me as I thrash and groan.

My eyes widen at the incursion, each thrust so surprisingly harsh, yet it coaxes another round of spasms out of me as soon as the first one is over. Shane comes with me this time, dropping down on top of me and pushing his tongue into my mouth as he fondles one of my breasts.

My head is spinning when it’s over, but my arms wrap around his neck and squeeze. I always get so clingy after I come, I can’t help it. His hands slide across the tingling skin of my back as he lingers inside me, his face buried in my shoulder, breathing heavily.

Did he get whatever he needed out of his system? Can we go back to normal now, or whatever passes as normal for us?

Zoey

I’m too afraid to ask him, skimming my fingers through the hair on the nape of his neck instead. He lets out such a pitiful groan, squeezing me tighter as I turn my face to kiss his temple. We stay locked in this embrace for such a long time, the full weight of him resting on me. I’m accustomed to the crushing sensation now, it doesn’t really bother me. If anything, I’m starting to enjoy it.

But my body has been through hell and once the emotional high wears off, I really start to feel it. “Shane?”

“Don’t,” he replies.

Don’t what? He is so confusing. “I can’t help it. I’m so thirsty. And my shoulders really hurt.”

His body tenses and he lifts up on his elbows. There’s the concern on his face I was hoping for. “Zoey, I…”

“It’s okay,” I whisper. His face contorts in disgust and perhaps a touch of remorse. “Really.” Talk about abandonment issues though, seriously.

Shane drags himself off me to the end of the bed and unties my feet. He won’t make eye contact, but he picks me up and carries me through another door. If the dungeon’s theme was hell, this room’s theme is closer to heaven. Everything is white and silver, with soft inviting furniture and cool toned lighting.

The first thing he gives me is water and I guzzle it down. Shane pinches the bridge of his nose as he watches me reach for another bottle and the ibuprofen beside it. He motions for me to sit on the bed and my heart sputters. I don’t want to fuck him again and the idea that I don’t really have a choice is sickening. But I’m too afraid that he’ll throw me back in there, I’d rather delude myself that I actually want it.

I sit down, my chin dropped. My captor doesn’t maul me, climbing behind me instead and resting his hands on my shoulders. He kisses the base of my neck as he starts to massage them and my body finally relaxes, leaning back into his touch.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask timidly.

“No.”

My better judgment insists that I don’t push him and enjoy the comfort of his touch instead. When he’s done rubbing my back, he guides me to lay down. I brace for him to spread my legs apart, but he dips his face down to my stomach instead and plants gentle kisses all over the scarred skin.

I almost insist that he stops this strange veneration of the most revolting part of my body. Somehow I’ve managed to block it out when we have sex, I try not to look at it or the insecurity and disgust is overwhelming. Shane’s been good about ignoring it too. Now my eyes are watering and I choke out a breath that’s almost a sob. This feels like pity. I don’t do pity.

I’m so relieved when he rolls me onto my belly and turns his attention to my stinging butt and thighs. Each kiss and caress aggravates the pain, but I can’t help but enjoy the wordless apology, if that’s what it is. He rubs some kind of cooling lotion on my skin after he’s done.

Shane tells the control system to cut off the lights. That weirds me out every time, I don’t like the idea of talking to a house. He pulls back the soft down comforter and wraps his body around mine. I’m snuggled up to his chest, resisting the urge to request an actual conversation about how beyond fucked up that was, when I hear a click and feel something lock around my good wrist.

Is he fucking serious? I lift my face, my smart mouth about to release a torrent of protests and obscenities. But the other end off the cuff is around his own wrist and he holds on to me tighter than he ever has, his eyes so panicked and desperate that I’m left speechless with a fluttering stomach.

I’m definitely not a piece of meat right now. Shane doesn’t like pity either, but I can’t help it. What the hell happened to him? I thought I was screwed up. He’s breathing heavily when I press my lips to his over and over, his body shuddering as I drag my fingers down his arm and wind my hand into his.

I want to tell him that I never should have left, that I didn’t even want to in the first place. I want to tell him that I’m not angry that he dragged me back into his twisted life. That I’ll never leave again. That I love him. Which is obviously, undeniably true even though I never understood the word. But if I’m not angry at him after that, if my stomach keeps flipping and flopping like this all the time, if I worry about him so much, that has to be it. I love the crazy jackass, I just do.

But he won’t believe a word that comes out of my mouth, not when he’s like this. All I can do is show him with every kiss and caress until he drifts off to sleep long before I do. I wonder which Shane I’ll have to deal with when he wakes up.

It turns out, neither of them. I wake up alone in bed with my hands free. Every muscle of my body aches and my ass is so sore that I almost cry out when I sit up. The lovey dovey afterglow has worn off. He seriously didn’t need to rough me up like that.

“Shane?”

If this is some kind of ‘stay in bed until I summon you’ test, I’m going to fail. I yelp when I get up and fall back on the bed. My feet are all torn up from trying to run away barefoot last night. I hope Shane’s jaw is sore.

There’s a door on every wall in this room and none of them seem to be locked. I remember which side leads to the creepy sex dungeon and open that one first. It’s dark and I eventually end up telling the stupid house to turn the lights on. He’s not there and I turn them off just as quickly.

Thankfully, I don’t have to go through there to get to the living room. But in a way it’s just as disturbing there with the steel plates over the windows. I doubt there’s a glimmer of natural light in the whole house. The living room and the bedroom have a door leading to a modest kitchen. It’s stocked with food and everything looks pretty fresh, like he bought it just for me.

“Shane?” I call out again. Where the hell is he?

There’s only one door left to check. I push through it apprehensively because I’m assuming he’s in there. My eyes are blinded by sunlight. At first I wonder if it’s the best artificial lighting I’ve ever seen, but then I see that the windows are covered by iron bars, even the skylights.

It makes sense. This is obviously the workshop. It’s bigger than the other rooms combined, taking up more than half the house. There aren’t any more rooms to explore. Shane isn’t here. And he’s obviously not here very much, there’s hardly any projects out like there are at his other house.

Now who’s leaving who?

Something yellow in the corner of my eye draws my attention. It’s a small bouquet of sunflowers resting on the top of a stack of boxes. I walk over and pick them up, inhaling even though sunflowers don’t have much of a scent. Such a beautiful, natural thing seems so out of place in this industrial environment.

The boxes are all full of ceramics supplies. To my left is a large table with the prototype tablet sitting on top of it, along with the two vases I made when I was at his house. They haven’t been fired. Shane said he sent them out. I turn around and spot a pottery wheel, and beyond that several small kilns and a large one. He didn’t.

The sting of his abandonment is eased by my excitement. I haven’t really had regular access to a kiln since high school, and that one wasn’t nearly as state of the art as these. I’ll be able to do multiple firings to layer glazes now and control my own temperatures. They really should be outside though, this place is going to get crazy hot even with the epic ventilation system.

There are enough materials here for every experiment I’ve ever wanted to try. I spoke to him in detail one night about my dream workshop, and it looks like he created it for me. I left out one detail though. His workshop would be across from mine. He was supposed to be here.

He could have at least left a note. The windows are all frosted and I can’t even look outside, not that I actually have any desire to see the wilderness I’m likely surrounded by. But maybe this place has a yard and Shane’s digging in a new garden for next spring.

That fantasy lasts for a few hours, until the sun goes down. At that point I start talking to the house again, telling it to open the doors. It actually answers with, “I’m not allowed to do that for you, Zoey.”

How creepy is that? I bark at it to raise the light levels in the workshop. I can’t believe he left me alone like this. Internet access is restricted to my favorite ceramics websites and there isn’t a phone to call for help. For a moment, I contemplate starting a fire. Knowing Shane, that would trigger the doors and windows to open. I doubt he’d leave me in here to burn alive.

But the most peculiar sense of peace washes over me and I fire up a kiln instead, just for a test run. Shane’s a total head case, but he’s my head case. I might have gotten bent over last night, but I’m also under his skin.

********

With a deep breath, I open the kiln door and my heart sinks. Another failure. I knew there would be a learning curve, but this is just so demoralizing. I was starting to get excited about my career as a ceramics artist, but instead I want to throw all these pieces against the wall. I can’t believe I’ve ever sold anything. I suck. And the worst part is that you have to wait all day for the kiln to cool down to find out that you’re a talentless hack destined to work in fast food for the rest of your miserable days.

I only bisque fired the pieces I made at Shane’s. Clearly I have no idea what I’m doing and won’t risk glazing them because they’ll get destroyed. Considering that Shane has abandoned me here to starve to death, those two vases shouldn’t matter as much to me at this point, but they do.

“The bowl turned out nice.” A voice from behind startles me and I stumble backwards, almost knocking over a shelf full of drying pieces. I didn’t even hear him come in and my temper immediately heats up as hot as the kiln beside me firing up my next failure. “The colors on some of these tiles are beautiful, Z. I assume you’re taking notes?”

“Eight days,” I hiss.

“Zoey, I—”

“Eight fucking days.”

“I know,” Shane replies, rubbing his chin. “It couldn’t be helped.”

“You deliberately don’t say ‘I’m sorry,’ do you? Just carefully phrase every sentence to avoid those two little words.”

“I’ve directly apologized to you before.”

“How could you just leave me here?”

“I said it couldn’t be helped.” Shane eyes me up and down as he approaches me. “I missed you.”

“You missed your sex on tap,” I retort. “Don’t you dare fucking touch me.”

But he doesn’t listen, softly grazing his fingers across my forehead instead. “I love how messy you get when you work. Like a miniature volcano spewing dust into my atmosphere. I’m glad I put everything away, your residue would have surely damaged the more delicate electronics.”

“Fuck you and your circuit boards, Shane.”

His eyes narrow. “Watch it.”

“What are you going to do? Hit me again? Gag me while you fuck me whether I want it or not?”

“You wanted it.”

“Not all of it,” I clarify. “You know how many times I’ve gotten smacked around in foster care? Too fucking many.”

The harshness of his features softens and his lips roll together. “That won’t happen again, unless you… It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“Really? Then why do you have a room in both your houses devoted to it?”

“It’s funny you should mention that,” he says, striding over to the couch across the room and taking a seat. “It used to be a requirement, before I was let off the leash. But I kept them of my own accord. I like the message it sends.”

I’m about to call him out for being such a power tripping asshole, but something else catches my attention as his words replay in my head. “What do you mean a requirement? What leash?”

He doesn’t answer for a while, staring off into the distance. “I’ve been with Adam for the last week. He went off the rails when Marlowe was taken into custody.”

“Well, maybe you two shouldn’t have systematically destroyed his empire if you didn’t want that to happen. I fail to see how this is my problem.”

“I had too much on my plate, Zoey.”

“Nice to know where I fit on the totem pole.”

“It was an issue of timing. I needed to check on those boys, Z. I didn’t trust my brother to take care of it properly.”

“So you did?”

“Not exactly. I suppose I was just gathering information. I don’t know what to do,” he says, his insecurity showing on his face.

“To do about what, Shane? How does it even work?”

He hesitates, getting up to pick up one of my tiles that actually turned out close to the right color. “I don’t really want to talk about this.”

“If that was true, you wouldn’t have brought it up.” I take the piece of clay from his hand and put it back on the table. “Talk to me. You know you want to,” I say.

Shane laughs, bringing both of my hands up to his mouth and kissing my knuckles. “Ever read Lord of the Flies?”

“No, but I’ve seen the movie.”

“He recruited me when I was 9. Adam was 10, we were living in the same foster home. It wasn’t a bad place. I should have just stayed.”

“But you didn’t. Why?”

“Curiosity maybe. A man in a fine suit walked into our school to offer us an amazing opportunity to become rich and powerful. If we could prove we had what it takes. Adam jumped at it, even though it meant leaving his older sister.” He draws in a hitched breath. “Molly.”