Page 27 of The One

“I don’t want to scare you.” Well, crap. Before I can push, an alert goes off.

“That them?”

“Yeah.” Abel pulls out his phone. “I’ll send Riley up.” He presses a kiss on my mouth before he heads out the door. I stare after him, my head a mess.

I slip off the counter and hurry into the closet to change. This time when I see all the clothes, I notice the tags on them. Abel got his home ready for me. He knew he was going to bring me back here, and from the look of things, I will be staying for a while.

I run my hands along the clothes. They’re all brands that I wear, and some are actually replicas of clothes I already own that are hanging in my closet at home.

“Hey.” I turn around to see Riley standing in the doorway of the closet.

“That day at my house. When everything happened. You didn’t ask Abel to take me and make sure I was safe, did you?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “Nikolai just reassured me that you were safe.”

“Because he ordered Abel to take me?”

“I think Church had a plan already.” She motions toward the clothes.

“He was planning to take me all along.” Riley glances around, her eyes landing anywhere but mine. “Riley.”

“What?” She shrugs. “What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know.” I pull some clothes off the hanger to get dressed.

“These men are different.” She shrugs.

Her words hit the mark. She’s not wrong. Abel is a different kind of man, but isn’t it some of those differences that had me falling so hard for him?

“He tortures people,” I mutter, wiggling into a pair of joggers. I still can’t reconcile in my mind how my sweet, caring, doting Abel could be the same man these people call Church.

“Some people need torturing.” Riley shrugs again, as if this is no big deal. She goes around, opening one of the drawers with all the nail polish. “Want to do mani pedis?” Is she serious right now? She wants me to paint my toes while Abel is somewhere maybe removing someone else's? I close the drawer. She is truly part of this world. “That a no?”

“Is my father one of the men he’s tortured?”

“I don’t ask those kinds of questions.” She holds her hands up. “There are some things better left unknown.”

“If it was your father?”

“Yeah, that comparison might not work for you.” Riley actually laughs.

“What does that mean?”

“Let’s just say that Nikolai and Matteo have made it so I am the only O'Haire left, now that my sister is married. Pretty soon I won't even carry the name anymore once I get married. Then the O’Haires will all be gone.” Riley doesn’t sound beat-up about this.

“I’m over only getting details.”

“All right, you are one of us now,” she says before launching into how her sister and Matteo came to be, which also brought her and Nikolai together. When she’s done, it only makes it more clear that yes, these men are very different from others. Especially when it came to their women. But what I’m not sure of is what that means for me. “These men take what they want. They are possessive.”

“Insane?” I add.

“I think Church more than most.” I close my eyes. You would have to be on a different level of crazy to be able to torture people. “Hey.” Riley nudges me, making me open my eyes back up. “My man is a little insane himself. There is a reason he and Church are closer than some of the others.”

“Where is your man?” I ask, exiting the closet. Riley follows behind me.

"He and Church are dealing with something." I stop, spinning around to face her.

“Something? As in my father?”

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