Page 53 of Fearless

He holds up his hands, his jaw ticking. “Meisie—”

“Don’t fucking touch me!” I scream.

“Stop pretending that you have—”

I kick out at him again, baring my teeth like a wild animal.

He laughs.

He fuckinglaughs. And then he tilts his head and studies me like I’m the newest addition to the zoo and he doesn’t know why the hell I’m being so unruly with my pen mates.

Slowly, he sinks onto the side of the bed. When I go stiff and show him my curled up fists, he holds up his hands again.

“Just listen, would you?”

“Fuck you!”

“Just…” he looks away and mutters something I don’t catch. When he looks at me again, the mask is back. Not a shred of emotion in his eyes. “This is long overdue,” he says.

I yell when he grabs me, but it doesn’t matter how hard I fight, he lifts me off the bed and carries me to the stairs.

“Let’s take a walk, shall we?”

* * *

Our walk ends at the closed double-doors on the second floor of this mansion I’ve been trapped in. Cillian sets me down and I quickly put a foot of distance between us—

But he grabs the back of my neck and just reels me the fuck back in again.

“I won’t work as a shield,” I tell him. “They’ve still got a clean shot of your head.”

“That’s one, Meisie.” Without warning, the flat of his hand connects with my ass. A loud slap rings out, and I buck forward with a yelp. If he hadn’t been holding my neck, I might have been able to glare at him over my shoulder. Instead, I just have to trot in front of him like a good little soldier when he opens the door and walks me inside.

I’m vaguely aware of metallic blinds, a glass-and-chrome desk, and a flat-screen television blaring at full blast on the opposite wall.

“Christ,” Cillian mutters, releasing the back of my neck as he surges past me. “Turn that shit down, would you?”

He grabs a control from the edge of the chrome desk, spins, and stabs at a button.

Silence floods the study.

The guy behind the desk doesn’t seem to give a fuck. Then again, unless I’m seeing things, there’s a ghostly line of coke trails on the glass in front of him, so maybe he’s too high to even notice.

But then the man behind the desk swivels on his chair and we lock eyes across the thick gray carpet.

Which is when I realize he definitely gives a shit about a lot of things.

Trust me, you do not want to fuck with my brother.

I do a double take, frowning first at him, then at Cillian as the latter turns in my direction to put the control down on the desk.

“We were watching that,” a soft voice says. I didn’t even notice the blond-haired girl sitting in one of the armchairs closer to the television.

“The fuck is she doing here?” Cillian says, directing the question at his brother. “I thought I made very fucking clear she—”

“Well, look at you,” the man says, ignoring Cillian and staring at me. I tug self-consciously at the hem of my shirt dress. Now the girl’s looking over at me too, brown eyes going wide as if she recognizes me.

Cillian glances in my direction. He frowns, but only for a millisecond, and then stabs a thumb over his shoulder.

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