Page 23 of Cruel Dominion

The man smirked and pulled out the chair opposite me. Over the years, Paulson had become a favorite of my private investigators. He scored low on professionalism, but high on results. His willingness to go the extra mile always earned him my continued patronage as well as a few thousand extra to pad his bank account. It almost made me forgive his catastrophic failure to alert me that Anna was back.

Almost.

I had competitors. I needed to stay one step ahead of them. But this time, Paulson wasn’t looking into Hudson Vaughn or anyone else in this damned city worth mentioning on the six o’clock news.

“I’ve got a few answers about where she’s been the past few years,” Paulson said eagerly. “And of course, surveillance of her since she returned.”

“Let me see the report,” I said. He opened the bag he carried and took out the file. The printed pictures of her on the sidewalk, coming in and out of a car, and having lunch with another woman felt so intimate. A primal sense of satisfaction filled me. She was mine, and now, I could watch her all I liked. I could consume her every move. Her every word. Until I knew her inside out. Until I knew her better than my own reflection.

“Well, right now everything seems fine. She’s out and about, usually alone. She has a driver and nothing seems out of the ordinary.”

“And the injuries?”

I hated revealing Anna’s bruises to Paulson. It seemed too private, too intimate to share. But I had to know whether her father had caused them. If Vaughn was hurting Anna in that house, I was ready to drop a bomb on it. I only had to get her out first. Fuck the collateral damage.

“No luck infiltrating Vaughn’s security system yet, so it’s hard to know for sure. I didn’t see her anywhere near a hospital either,” he said.

I chewed on my bottom lip. That meant Anna’s injuries hadn’t been severe—or, at least, that a visit from a home doctor was enough to treat them. Paulson pointed at the report impatiently.

“I found out a little something about her past. Keep looking.”

I leafed through the file, past the recent pictures of Anna, to a group photo of a bunch of strangers. I squinted at the image. Two women and three men at what looked like an upscale bar or something, huddled together for the group shot, smiling at the camera. What the fuck was this? My lip curled in agitation, then I saw it.

“Where was this?”

“The picture is a year old. The one holding the pool cue? His name is Josh.”

“Tell me something useful, Paulson,” I spat.

“He’s been to jail for resisting arrest and booked in for domestic abuse,” Paulson said. I stared at him. “I found a couple more pictures of them like that. Close. Lovey-dovey even.”

“She dated this man?”

My upper lip curled into a snarl, analyzing this Josh in a new light. No. He didn’t look her type at all.

“No solid intel yet, but you wanted to know who might have hit her. This could be the guy. After I found these photos, I followed the trail and managed to dig up a few more. Looks like she worked at this place. It’s an upper class bar for wealthy clientele in St. Louis. Flip to the next ones. See. The other men look to be…close to her…but Josh appears to be the most recent.”

Heat raced across my back and I looked up at the image of the moon over the water, going back there, to that calm place to get the thought of her with numerous different men that weren’t me out of my fucking head.

I wanted to castrate each and every one of them.

So much for building sustainable housing in Africa.

It wasn’t as if I could judge her. Not with the way I went through women faster than you could fucking blink. But I still loathed that anyone else managed to get close to her.

She promised me.

She fucking promised me.

Anna Vaughn was mine.

…until the day you shattered her.

I threw off the thought. That didn’t matter. I didn’t mean it and if I thought for one fucking second that she would disappear before I had the chance to make it right I never would’ve…

It didn’t matter now.

“I can’t speak to Mr. Vaughn,” Paulson continued. “It’s still possible he could have hurt her, I just haven’t found any evidence of that yet. But if this was her man.” He tapped the image lying on the table. “He was knocking his exes around long before Anna. He probably wouldn’t have spared her.”

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