Page 104 of Quinlan

“No one’s died from missing a couple of meals. I’m aware.” The words unburden me. They’re a reassurance. A reminder that I survived worse, and she’ll be fine. “There’s always tomorrow. Or she’ll raid the fridge once we’re done for the night.”

Damien’s eyes cut to my fists. I’m clutching them at my sides. The blood on my knuckles is fresh after my workout earlier this evening.

The physical pain was a lifeline. I would’ve punched through Quinlan’s door otherwise.

She has no idea what it does to you.

The punching bag suffered the consequences. It took everything I gave it—my anxiety, my desperation for her to eat. I released my aggressions, left them there in a pool of sweat. Blood stained the leather of the bag when I left the gym.

I’m not that person. I. Am. Not. Him.

I flex my fingers, smoothing over my gray sweats. There. I’m better. Back to missing her instead of freaking the fuck out.

“Who knows.” Damien waggles his eyebrows. “Maybe she’ll be in the mood for meat. She’ll eat so much protein that she’ll grow to be like you one day.”

Before I can tell him I’ll take her in any shape or size, I hear it.

A piece of furniture drags on the floor of one of the rooms upstairs. My head snaps in that direction. I’m on my feet, and so is Damien.

We don’t go to her, though, as defenseless as she is. We listen in, stalking her in our own home. We’re vipers in the grass. Wolves hiding in the shadows, anticipating the right moment to strike.

My anxiety is a distant memory. My chest stopped aching. The feral need to hunt her trumps everything else. And fuck, do I need to punish her for refusing to eat.

“Want me to call Liam?” Damien asks in a hushed voice. “Tell him to catch her?”

I shake my head once. Liam would rather stalk her too.

“Come.” Never losing sight of the stairs, I motion for Damien over to the corner of the dark living room. Where we’ll be engulfed by the shadows.

Her footsteps are soft. She basically floats along the second floor. My muscles strain as I listen to what she’s doing up there.

Doors open and close. She’s checking our bedrooms. Must be trying to log into our password-protected laptops.

She’s free to snoop around our rooms. First off, we’ll have no secrets from her soon enough. Sometime after she realizes she’s ours and stops fighting this.

Second, we have no secrets anywhere around the house. We haven’t gotten to where we are by being reckless. No paper trail. No emails. No credit card receipts linking us to the men and women we hired to do some of our dirty work.

Nothing.

The police, FBI, CIA—goddamn Interpol—are free to visit us as well. They could raid our laptops, our rooms, our closets. No one would find any evidence of what we’ve been planning.

Other than the notebook. It’s locked in a drawer in our office, papers filled with scribbling and code words. The pages are old. Some of our notes are two decades old.

A stranger wouldn’t understand a thing we have there.

Would Quinlan?

Damien grins. “Sneaky,” he mouths. “I like that.”

She is.

A hushed gasp reaches from above us. She’s found Liam.

My friend’s blue eyes meet mine. “Let’s join them.”

All the blood in my body rushes south. My cock thickens. The need to conquer crashes into me.

We’re doing this.

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