Page 60 of Tempted to Rebel

I unsnap my helmet and hook it to my motorcycle. There’s no sense waiting around out here for the sun to rise. Rage seemed worried the minute he checked his cell phone, like he couldn’t get away fast enough. The trouble is that we were on the outskirts of the city, on the opposite end to where we are now. It takes at least an hour to drive across, and we still had a body to manage.

Another pretty daughter of a politician mutilated with Celia’s initials carved into her back.

We can’t keep the press quiet about the murders for much longer. I can feel the clock ticking in time with my heartbeat, every second becoming a moment of agony. As the clock winds down, so too does the time between this moment and the one when I see my father again for the first time in years.

Will he recognize me? Or can I kill him before he realizes that it’s his son holding a gun to his head?

I don’t know which I want more—the satisfaction of surprise in his eyes, or the knowledge that he never saw it coming.

I drag my feet up the walkway to Celia’s front porch. The door is locked, but it doesn’t take an expert to shimmy the handle until it unlatches. I lock it behind me just in case I’ve been followed and slide a dining room chair beneath the handle for good measure. “Rage?” I call out, peering around every corner of the main floor to look for my brother. He isn’t here, and neither are Rebel or Ruin.

Voices float down the stairwell, and I follow them to the second level. No one notices as I stand outside Celia’s bedroomdoor, witnessing their collision. I see everything, from the way Rage handles her grief, to how she lashes out at him in her anguish, up until the moment when every jagged emotion suddenly slots into place. The tension in the room shifts, softening with her waning cries. I watch as both Rebel and Ruin slip onto the bed with Rage, all three of my brothers taking turns stroking Celia to sleep.

Even as the seconds pass into minutes, then into an hour, I don’t think they realize I’m here.

A wave of emotion washes over me as I realize that I’m a stranger within my own family. Longing grips my heart and squeezes tight, but I’m not sure if it’s longing for the woman in their arms or for a closer connection with my brothers.

Most of my life has been spent watching over my brothers. When our father used to go on a bender and raise his fists, I’d take the hardest swing just so that they could go to school without a black eye. I’d complete my rounds on the streets, peddling drugs or muscling my way into the fighting pits to earn enough money to put food on the table. My father sure as shit wasn’t feeding the family while nursing a booze problem, and my step-mother was too busy trying to soothe his perpetual anger to find a job.

The bratva took care of us in its own way, but it was still a tough life.

I stare at the outline of Celia’s body on the bed for another moment before finally turning away. While my brothers work together to soothe her, I shift my attention to the luxury of her house. The bedroom is massive, fully furnished with two sets of dressers, a vanity, a desk that looks more decorative than functional, and hundreds of shiny trinkets and nicknacks that likely cost more than I used to make in a month. I wander down the hallway to inspect the framed photographs on the walls. Pictures of her and her brother Mikhail are the most prominent,the twins seeming inseparable while attending school.Privateschool, too, with a pleated skirt and button-down shirt as part of the girls’ uniform. I move on to the more recent pictures, finding a few of her parents, then a few more of her ex-husband Ted. A wedding photo sits on a bookshelf in the office downstairs, the glass broken and its metal frame bent. Someone had a fit of rage while staring at this picture. It could have been Celia after her husband left her, or it could have been Ted when he realized he made a mistake marrying her. Hell, it could have been Rage when he first came to her house and saw the bastard’s face grinning at him.

The office is bare save for a few things, so I move on with my tour of the house. The moonlight outside illuminates a professionally-detailed backyard, with one of the ugliest stumps of a tree that I’ve ever seen sitting dead center on the lawn. I stare at its whitewashed trunk for a long time, wondering what it means. Everything in this house is painted white or gray. Modern, chic, expensive. But with silver moonlight blanketing the room in an eerie glow, everything also looks dead.

How could Celia ever be happy in a house filled with ghosts?

I picture her radiant smile in the summer sun, the video I found of her at the beach burned into my memory. She was wearing white then, too, a bikini that showed an endless canvas of tanned skin. The wedding ring from her late marriage was missing, Celia likely having been too young to have met Ted yet.

She was happy then. What would it take to make her happy now?

Beyond that, can my brothers actually pull this whole thing off? Making a woman like Celia—who seems light years out of their league—happy enough to start a family with them?

I think about that for a long time as the night wears on. Walking the perimeter of her house becomes second nature, and I learn each dip in the yard and crack in the driveway. As thestars start to fade with the oncoming morning, I find myself standing in front of that ugly white tree in the backyard. It’s been freshly cut into ribbons, its branches spread across the ground like thick straws of hay. I’ve never seen a tree so heavily scarred, its trunk gouged with deep cuts, chunks of its bark littering the ground.

I used to think that Celia was as ugly as this tree, with a rotten core hidden beneath all the money and makeup. She abandoned the bratva that raised her, married a man without a drop of Russian blood in his veins, and couldn’t even dothatright. He left her heartbroken and alone, and I used to think that she deserved it.

But just like my brothers and I didn’t choose to have a shit father, Celia didn’t choose to have a shit ex-husband. Sometimes, things are simply out of our control. Like how attracted we are to the way someone smiles, or how shitty we feel when that smile cracks like it’s made of the thinnest pane of glass.

When I first learned that Celia was messing around with my brothers, I thought that she was a gold-digger looking for her next sugar daddy to take care of her, or that she was trying to worm her way back into the bratva’s good graces so that ourpakhanwould forgive her for her transgressions and allow her back into high society. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. She fought my brothers’ advances as well as she could. I’ve seen that footage, too, of all the mornings Rage visited her at the boutique and pushed her to love him back. She never sought my brothers out. They’re the ones that forced themselves into her life.

She never wanted to be a bratva wife, or she would have accepted the role the second she turned eighteen. All she’s ever wanted is a family to call her own, and somehow, she ended up joining mine.

The sun starts to crest over the horizon, and I rub my aching eyes. There was no activity on the property all night, but it gives me peace of mind to know that had anything gone down, I would have handled it. Still, it’s careless of my brothers to forget to watch their backs, no matter how tempting the woman is lying beneath them.

I triple-check that all the windows and doors are locked before walking back upstairs. Surely, they’re awake by now. It’s less than an hour until eight o’clock, and I’ve been conditioning Celia to be an early riser. She should be waking up any minute now?—

A heady moan fills the air, and I freeze in my tracks. My heart rate spikes, jumping to a thousand in a millisecond.That’sa sound I’ve never heard before. In all of my research into Celia’s past, I found not one illicit photograph or video of Celia Monrovia. I’ve been using my imagination for days—weeks—wondering what she sounds like when she’s on the verge of coming.

And now, after groaning into my pillow and coming into my fist more times that I’ll ever admit, I hear it.

The sound she makes when she comes.

My cock stands to attention immediately, painfully hard within seconds. Time moves in slow motion as I step into the master bedroom doorway and witness a scene I’m sure that I’m not supposed to see—but I can’t look away.

I’ve been waiting for a glimpse of what it might be like for Celia to whisper my name in the throes of passion. We get close during our training—both of us sweating and panting as we roll around on the mat, her cheeks flushed and tendrils of soft, wavy hair clinging to her skin. I’ve been rock-hard every morning this week, aching for her to submit to me.

To letmebe the one to make her forget her own name.

---