Page 22 of Breaking the Code

The ghost that lurked in the shadows.

As soon as Samuel dropped me off at the Order after our trip abroad, I raced to the computer, determined to find out who was watching us in the warehouse from the shadows. I scoured the internet for weeks, hacking in to video feeds, looking for some hint of him somewhere.

And then I found him. He cased that warehouse for hours. I watched him as he killed Lionel’s man outside the building. Then I watched him kill Lionel, the man Samuel met with. He seems to have a thing for necks, considering he broke one and severed the other.

Despite all that, he is perfection. At least in looks, and oh God, those looks make me breathless. I want to crawl under him and call him Daddy.

Not that I’ve ever called a man Daddy. At least not out loud. There’s been a few I’d found online that made me think it, but this man deserves to be called whatever the fuck he wants.

He’s massive—big and broad. I know because I triangulated his height after seeing his license because I didn’t believe it. No one is six-ten. That’s God’s territory. But the driver’s license hadn’t lied to me. He is six-ten and maybe even bigger.

I’m a runt. I know it. On my best day, I’m five foot seven. I’m slender and short with some muscle tone, but not much. I like yoga, not weights so I’m very lean.

My slender and short to his big and broad would be comical if we were ever in a room together—like the people at Guinness are trying to find the most opposite couples or something. We’d look crazy next to one another. I probably wouldn’t even come up to his nipples.

Curiosity gets to me, and I giggle as I pull up images of us and manipulate them, proving myself right. It is definitely a hilarious sight. Not as bad as I initially imagined, but still comical.

I don’t give a fuck.

I want him.

I want him to claim me, hurt me, abuse me, but only in the feely good ways. The ones I’ve read about and watched on porn sites. I’ve been hurt in the ‘that actually hurts motherfucker’ kinda ways before. My body carries the marks from the years I’ve spent under Samuel’s thumb.

A chill runs through me. Just his name gives me the shivers. The memories are the stuff of nightmares.

I allow it.

At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. And it’s not a lie, just not the complete truth, either. I needed some sort of protection from the Order. Samuel was the lesser of two evils. Twenty would probably be a more accurate number than two, though.

After Mum died and Owen Black forced my father and me to move to America because my dad fucked up a job he was given, and Da failed to come up with the money he owed Owen. Life changed for me. Night and day was the best comparison. Life wasn’t great before Mum died because she’d been in a coma for a few days and bedridden due to cancer for a few weeks, at least before that. But then Owen came to Scotland, and the day we buried my mother, Da and I were forced onto a plane.

When I was little, I didn’t know what it all meant. I just knew how much I missed my mum, and our home, and Mack. But as I got older, I realized who these men were that Da and I lived with. Even worse, I also came to realize I looked like the guys they paraded through the mansion. At first I believed what Da said about them. They were here as interns or for scholarship meetings. Later, I realized they were being shuffled through the house as property to be bought, borrowed, and sold.

That’s why I made the executive decision, as soon as I noticed the side eyes, to offer myself up on a silver platter. A last ditch effort to keep myself safe after Da was killed. I’d been worried even before he died that he couldn’t keep me safe. I even feared at times that he purposely wouldn’t because he was a slave to the Order.

The nightmares of him willingly handing me over to the Order to garner favor were the worst. They’d grown increasingly regular nighttime visitors over the last year of Da’s life. He’d been losing favor with Owen at every turn, and I knew he was frantic to get back into Owen’s good graces.

As one of the few children who grew up around the Order, I had been a loner because of forced circumstances. I knew the other members had children—well, some of them—but I wasn’t permitted to interact with them, really. I know Owen Black has a stepdaughter named Everly, but I’ve never met her. Owen keeps her removed from things, her and her mother. They are beautiful women who help Owen maintain an honest appearance in the outside world. At least as much as a human-trafficking, drug-dealing, arms-dealer can.

A beeping sound distracts me from my thoughts. I let my gaze race over the screens in front of me, and a name pops out—one I recognize. It’s burned in my psyche, flashing like a neon sign on a moonless night.

Helvig.

Maeve Helvig.

I read the post on the message board again. This man that I’ve found in the code, who’s beautiful beyond words and makes me actually want to experience sex with another person, is the son of the Helvig family my father killed for Owen Black. Only my father did what he did best. He fucked up.

How?

Da didn’t kill all the Helvigs as he was ordered and as he let on to the Order. He left two of them alive.

Draven Helvig is still alive.

And Maeve Helvig is his sister.

I read back through the message board yet again. Draven learned his sister didn’t die nearly twenty years ago. He’s learned that the body in his sister’s casket is of a missing child.

He may have learned a lot of stuff, but how to hide his tracks online is not one of them. He’s posting from the IP address from his own house without a firewall or any proxy servers.

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