Page 19 of Knot Your Damsel

When I open some drawers, I find dress shirts in various fabrics, and most of them are either white or a charcoal that’s almost black. They’re stunning and I carefully pick one up, letting the soft and supple fabric slide over my hands. They look tailored, not store-bought.

Damn, this guy is living large. I have no idea how much these clothes cost, but I’m sure that I wouldn’t even be able to afford a fraction of them.

In some of the other drawers I find even more cufflinks, though these are neatly stored in boxes and seem to be paired with watches and other designer details.

If these are stores here, what are the cufflinks in the other drawer for?

I close the drawers. Enough of that. I’m sure I’ll be able to explore in here more later. Maybe Mr Page can even explain the whole cufflinks situation then.

Finally, I get to the things I’ve been wanting to explore the most. His bedside tables. I haven’t found anything too exciting yet, mostly just things I expected to find. But bedside tables tend to be way more interesting.

The reason I nearly cut off all of the ‘downstairs’ of one of Mr Page’s men was because I kept my favourite knife in the bedside table drawer on my side of the bed.

Bedside tables can reveal a lot about a person, so I’m curious what Mr Page is hiding in his…

8

Mathew

Apparently,the asshat who hired me yesterday decided that he didn’t want to wait for me to find out if his —just as much of an asshat— cousin was still alive and got himself killed. This was after I’d explicitly told him not to go to the location the kidnappers gave him and that I’d have some of my people take a look at it today.

He was too impatient to wait and stormed in, on his own, getting himself killed.

On the bright side, his cousin was still alive and the people who held him were so surprised by some guy storming into their ‘lair’ that they simply fled, leaving everything behind. Which will make tracking them down so much easier in the future.

I sigh.

Usually, I’m not hired by these types of people. They tend to end up hiring those whose starting rate isn’t in the six figures, but more in the four or five figures.

That’s what I get for doing one of my long-standing clients a favour, I get dragged into this kind of shit.

The long-standing client apologised profusely and promised me that he had no clue that the asshat would do this. That it was as much a surprise to him as it was to me.

I guess we all make mistakes. At least none of my team got hurt or even had to do much this time. Apart from checking out the ‘lair’ for any evidence that had been left behind that could be of use to us, before pointing law enforcement in the direction of the shipping container.

Yes, they called a fucking shipping container their ‘lair’, according to the texts we were able to retrieve. They were a bunch of amateurs. Anyone could have figured this shit out, we really weren’t needed.

I told the team to come home as soon as everything there was taken care of and then stared at the pool of dried blood on the carpet for a while.

Hubert Russell might be dead, but he was the leader of a sizable pack, he wasn’t just a one-man operation. Things aren’t going to be over just because he’s no longer here. His pack are going to want answers and now probably want Caleb and Vera dead instead of just captured.

They’ll probably want me dead too, but that’s less of a worry than Caleb and Vera’s safety. People much better connected than them have been trying to take me out and they’ve clearly not succeeded yet, and won’t succeed any time soon.

I pull a notepad towards me, smiling as I look at what I wrote on it while waiting for Caleb to take the bait.

He’s mine.

He’ll be mine soon.

And so will she.

My handwriting’s little more than excited scribbles, as my head had been swimming from their pheromones, making it very hard to concentrate and keep up my act of indifference.

I rip the page off, crumple it into a ball and throw it into the trash. Let’s not leave that out in the open. Nobody else needs to see the that.

Knocking on the door pulls me from my daze and I growl, really not wanting to have to deal with any more problems today.

My mates are in my bedroom, they’re basically naked and smell way too good. I want to be with them and not deal with work.

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