Page 32 of The Devil's Daughter

Her cheeks flush, and her lips purse contritely as if she’s about to apologize, but that’s the last thing she should do. I put a finger over her mouth and shake my head.

“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry. You were in your element. I’ve never seen you so fullyyou.It was fucking spectacular, and it made me wonder why you ever gave up dancing. I’m also going to dream about it for the rest of my life. But you were already with Ben, and I’d be a supremely inconsiderate asshole if I horned in while he’s keeping his distance.”

Her eyebrows twitch. “No one said I had to choose between you, and why would I?”

I frown at her. “Because that’s just how the world works.”

The argument is weak, and I know it, especially when I was trying to use the same one on Ben just the other night. But my point was that it could work for him and Drake. Not me. And onlyafterwe’re past whatever threat we’re hunting down.

“Is it, though? My father—Arturo, I mean—was polyamorous. Celeste is with both my brother and Leo. Maybe it runs in the family.”

“Then how do you explain Toni and Sam?”

She lifts an eyebrow. “I guarantee you her love for Manny didn’t just evaporate. Sure, he’s not around, but I have a feeling even if he were, Sam would’ve found a way to be with her. He’d have forced Manny to make room for him. He would share just to have her, if it came to that.”

She swallows and continues staring up at me, her unspoken question hanging between us. Would I share if it meant having her?

I glance toward the deck where Drake and Ben were having lunch a little while ago, but they’ve disappeared. I’m afraid to ask my next question, not sure I want to know what really happened that night while I wasn’t here, but I can’t let it go. “What about Drake? I’m not imagining that there’s something between you two, am I?”

“No, you aren’t.” She drops her gaze and rises to sit back in her chair. “You heard his story, right? About how he needs to watch.”

My eyes widen. “You let him watch you and Ben?”

“No… just me, at first. But I liked it. Enough that I’ve been video chatting with him at night, letting him watch me get ready for bed. He says it calms him, even though he knows he can’t touch me. When I was with Ben…” She looks up at the ceiling, her voice shifting to a sultry lower register. “…Drake wasn’t just watching. They…sharedme, and it felt so right. The only thing missing was you.”

She drops her gaze back to me, and it’s bright with desire and expectation, some of the weariness gone. “Let us have this, Baz. I think we all fill a need for each other. If it’s easier for you, we can let them watch the first time instead of being involved. I want you, but I don’t want to leave them out to have you.”

Her confession leaves me spinning for several seconds. This is nothing close to how I imagined I might finally be with her, if it were even possible. Now she’s offering herself to me with one huge catch. I don’t have any issue sharing with my brother, but Drake is another detail to wrap my mind around. Except I know there’s already something between Drake and Ben, so would I be compromising my brother’s sanity by makinghimchoose?

Elle’s the only one I want, but she’s right—we’re surrounded by alternative relationships. We never questioned it when Mad Dog basically moved in with Celeste and started sharing a room with her and Leo. Never flinched when we’d catch the casual affection between the two men.

The fact that Papá Flores didn’t take issue—acted like it was perfectly commonplace—gave us our cue for how to react, so Ben and I barely batted an eye. Except I’m fairly certain seeing Leo with a man gave Ben the confidence to acknowledge his own latent sexuality. I won’t take that away from him, if Drake is who he wants. If Elle isalsowho he wants. Fuck, I need to talk to him to make sure. One thing I am sure of though is that we can’t keep letting this torture go on. We’re all suffering, which is just as much a distraction as falling in love.

“Okay,” I begin, a surge of adrenaline flooding my veins as I let myself give in. “Meet me in your room in fifteen minutes. I need to talk to Ben and Drake first.”

I stand, only half-aware that my dick is as hard as steel. I only hope that getting this out of my system—and knowing it isn’t a one-time thing—will finally allow me to focus on finding the asshole blackmailing Drake.

16

Baz

When my brotherand I first met Elle, we were barely old enough to be interested in girls. She was younger than us, but in an accelerated learning program at our school that put her into some higher-grade classes, and one of her teachers recommended her for the school’s coding team. I was pissed at first, because until she came on the scene, I was the alpha dog in that group. Then she arrived and didn’t give a single fuck that she was the only girl among a bunch of STEM guys, or that we were all eventually intimidated by her skills, though if I’m being one hundred percent honest, it was her burgeoning femininity that distracted most of us.

My animosity evaporated the day I stopped by her house after school to talk about a team project and found her sitting hunched over on the front step, silently crying. The reason for her mood was immediately apparent; a man and a woman were fighting inside the house—her parents, I guessed—the vitriolic outbursts making me wince when I heard them drift through the open windows.

She had her school bag with her, so I urged her to leave. She hesitated because Sam was on his way home from whatever after-school shit he did—probably banging the hot girlfriend he had at the time—but I talked her into sending him a text and escaping. We went back to school and spent the rest of that afternoon in the computer lab, brainstorming ideas to make our team project shine at a regional competition.

Ben met her the next afternoon when he joined us after soccer practice, which I’d missed to spend time with her. They hit it off too, which was comforting to me because I’m possessive of my twin and the concept ofgirlfriendswas starting to become a reality, and I wasn’t willing to admit I hated the idea of losing him to some girl.

But Elle wasn’t justsome girlto me, and soon she wasn’t to him either.

Perhaps it was because she grew up with four older brothers, but she felt like a missing piece to our puzzle… a piece we never even knew was missing. Our dad had been dead a while by then, and Toni had been preoccupied with her career for a few years already, so at first it felt like she was filling the shoes of our absent sister. At least we both pretended that’s the role she filled for us because after a brief run-in with Sam Santos one summer afternoon when we were eighteen, we realized it might be safer if we didn’t get too close.

It was easier to maintain distance after we graduated from high school, since Papá Flores had us training and working for him full-time from that moment on so there was little time to socialize, not to mention, Elle had moved to San Diego by then and we were still in LA. We’d still text and she’d send the occasional selfie our way, but that was the extent of our interaction.

At least until the shit hit the fan when Toni got kidnapped. Neither Ben nor I could stomach being in the same room with Flores, knowing he’d fucked our mom. It didn’t matter that it’d happened decades earlier, before she’d married our dad; it still felt like a betrayal.

Now it feels like the fucking planets have aligned or something, like every moment in our lives was somehow leading up to this. Our falling out with Flores made him reassign us to Elle’s detail, a job we were too stunned to say no to when he offered it, though half of that was due to just having learned she was his daughter.

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