Page 13 of Ravaged
Derek was off doing a job for Gerard, while the three of us were taking care of Teagen. Acquiring her, like cargo. I had to think of her like that. She wasn’t a person; she was an item to be secured. But part of me hoped that she had taken my warning seriously, that she wouldn’t come to meet us. She didn’t deserve the hell that was coming for her, but if she came running towards it, I wasn’t going to stop her.
“Don’t tell me you want to run the family business,” Wil said, smirking. “It’s stale as fuck.” He tossed his head to the side. “Work at Jimmy’s with me. You’ll never have to deal with the boring, bureaucratic shit.”
“Not technically,” Axe said. Wil and I flinched, not realizing Axe had somehow gotten behind the car without either of us noticing. The man was the epitome of stealth.
“You always do that?” I asked him. He gave a flat smile, and I took that as a yes.
I liked them both better than I liked Derek. Axe kept to himself, which I appreciated and preferred to do myself, and though Wil was aggressively conversational, he didn’t constantly try to outdo me, to assert his dominance, like Derek did. I still took Wil to be an alpha, but he had his own priorities. Leading wasn’t one of them.
Perhaps my fondness for them had to do with the fact that neither of them had threatened me.
I grabbed my phone and swiped to one of the pictures I had downloaded from the Dahlia District’s website.
“Here she is,” I said.
Teagen Knox, with her chocolate brown hair in flowing curls, her big green eyes innocent and naive, doe-like and decadent. The kind of woman that made you want to ravage her. But there had been nothing innocent about Teagen. As soon as I had pulled her into my arms the night before, she had reacted to my touch. Melted to it. With every movement, she wanted more of it. To be controlled, to be dominated, to be used.
“Ah, I remember her.” A twinge of jealousy ran through my system, but I eased it back. Wil and Teagen had been in this region for much longer than I had. There was always a chance they would already know each other. “Plays the violin, right? A real nice babe.”
Why did I have the urge to correct him? “Harp,” I said.
“You ended up having sex with her, right?”
I blinked my eyes, then grit my teeth. “Yes,” I said, coldly.
He laughed, reading my reaction. “I’m not trying to move in on your territory, big man,” Wil said. “Relax. None of us got her services at the club.” He patted my shoulder. “So what was she like, anyway?”
Nubile and lush, an alluring trap of longing and desire. I wanted to bend her over again, and again, to clutch her throat as she swallowed down a gulp of lust-filled fear, biting her neck as she licked her lips, digging my fingernails into her hips as she pushed back, eager to take all of my cock.
It had been a while since I had had sex, especially sex like that. I had lost my appetite for it a while back, before everything happened with my neighbors. Now that Ken was gone, and his wife could rest in peace, I could let it go. Indulge in those deviant desires once again.
“She’s got a damn pretty face,” Wil said, interrupting my thoughts.
It was those eyes that did me in, that made it so I couldn’t focus on anything else. But she was cargo. A payment. Not a person. I thought of Mom, her light eyes staring back at me as she warned me, time and time again.Don’t fall in love with a pretty face. It was one of those phrases she said often, reminding me of what was at stake. But the last time she said those words to me, it was right before I killed Ken. She had added on more to it that time:They’ll fool you, Ethan. Those pretty faces are full of lies. That’s what happened with Gerard, and look where it got us.
Were you the pretty face, or was he?I had asked, jokingly. She threw a napkin at me.
Ethan, she hissed,You know better. And I’m serious. Don’t fall for a pretty face.
At the time, she was talking about my neighbor, Ken’s wife, Abby.I’m not going to fuck her, Ma,I said.She’s married to that piece of shit.
And what they do is none of your business, she had warned.
Except it was my business once he laid a hand on her.
To do what I preferred—tying up women because it was our mutual fantasy—was different than what my neighbor did to his wife. Abby had cowered away from her husband, constantly filled with the fear of putting him on the edge. Any time her husband came home, she hunched her shoulders, hiding, not wanting him to see her waving at me.
But there was nothing I could do now. They were both gone.
“Where are you, brother?” Wil asked. The word ‘brother’ shocked me out of my memory. “Lost in the daydream of that sweet, sweet server?”
Server. Right. In the end, Teagen was only a server at the Dahlia District. “Brother?” I asked.
“Wearehalf-brothers.” He slapped me on the back. “I ain’t afraid of it. Hell, I’ll say it in front of Derek too.”
I smiled then, because I appreciated that. At least Wil could accept me. “Teagen was hungry,” I said. It was the only way to describe it. Greedy for my cock, the need to please coming out of every pore, even when she knew that there were protocols we should have been following, that were put in place for a reason.
“Hungry?” Wil asked, raising a brow. “Like she needs some chicken nuggets or something?”
