Page 19 of Ambition

All in the name of keepingKariacomfortable.

Well fuck this. This is my house.

I pad over in bare feet, the marble cold on my soles, and I intend to sit beside Cosmo but before I can get there, Von’s arms come around my waist and he yanks me back down into the small space between the arm of the sectional and himself.

I snap my head over to glare at him and see Cosmo smiling down at his phone, shaking his head slightly. It’s only then I realize Karia’s head is in his lap and his free hand is on her hair, his long fingers grazing her blonde strands.

I’ve seen Cosmo flirt with her over the years, but he flirts with anything that has a pulse, and Von’s hand was on her thigh earlier but maybe that was all for show.

I frown, turning to look at Von.

He raises his brows, daring me to ask what the fuck is up.

But I don’t give in. Instead, I reach over and grab another fuzzy blanket from the little black basket I keep of them beside the couch. I unfurl it over my legs and bring my knees to my chest, hiding my hands in the blanket, too.

I can feel Von’s eyes on me, but I don’t turn to him. I only stare ahead as the nun from earlier paces in some small corridor presumably of a church, on the TV. “I called Mads,” I tell Von truthfully. After I toweled off in my room. I know Cosmo is listening, but he won’t know precisely what I’m discussing. And if he does, fuck Von for bringing others here.

There’s a heartbeat of silence but Von shifts slightly in his seat, his thigh brushing my ankle from where my feet are on the couch, then he asks, “And?”

I glance over to Karia, the outline of her body curled into a tight ball under my comfortable ass blanket.

Once more, I look to Cosmo.

His chin is tilted down, eyes latched onto mine. “If this is some kind of cult shit, I can pretend I don’t hear anything or sign an NDA in blood or something.” He grins then, like he’d love to do just that, and I think of those tattoos on his back.

Von says, “Or I can just shoot you in the head if Isa gives you too much.”

When I look at him, my pulse flutters, and he’s staring back at me, eerily calm despite his threat that I’m not so sure is hollow.

His opposite arm is thrown over the back of the couch, like he was reaching toward Karia but her feet are still a ways from his hips and I hate the fact it makes me feel better.

He’s looking down at me with a blank expression, his gray eyes focused, lips lightly pressed together. He has these pouty, pink-red lips that are beautiful and full and make his face look so handsome and…

“He didn’t answer.” I lie, because for some reason, the way Von is looking at me right now, intent and devouring, I feel like if I tell him the truth—that I’m driving over to Mads’s house before Solemn begins just prior to sunset—he’ll try to sabotage it. And I want to know what he talked to Von about, since this ismywork, and he won’t give me anything over a phone line.

“I told you what he said,” Von says calmly, still staring at me in the dimness of our house.

I drop my gaze to his collarbone, the freckles along his pale skin. The hard muscle of his chest, his triceps. The tightness of his abs.

I suck the inside of my cheek and I don’t think about the fact that last night when Theo Sancte asked if he could grab my hair and I let him and he jerked my head back and pulled my throat taut, I only thought of Von behind my closed eyes while Theo fucked me against the wall.

“Why did you really invite them over?” I ask under my breath, so quietly Cosmo won’t hear, to deflect from all those wicked thoughts of my best friend. The boy I watched wipe out on his bike when we were kids, then stand to his feet with two thumbs up and a stupid grin, blood leaking down his knees.

The boy who would always pop by my house unannounced when I had a boyfriend over and he would barge into my room without knocking and cut his eyes to the boy of the month and order him to leave and no one argued with Von.

No one but me.

“Don’t be rude, Isa,” Von chides softly. “Besides, I can’t kick her out after we wore her down.”

I cut my eyes to Von’s with his words, thinking of his and Cosmo’s hands all over her while I was in the shower.

But a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth and he says, “I’m joking. We didn’t…” His expression shifts to something serious, and he sighs, turning to watch the movie and his side profile is so gorgeous with light stubble and a strong jawline and those damn lips that I feel a surge of happiness with his stupid words. “We didn’t do anything,” he continues quietly.

“Why not?” I ask him.

His throat rolls and his jaw jumps and he still doesn’t look at me. “Last night…you drove me crazy.” He says it on a whisper.

But in my peripheral, I see Cosmo is glancing at us from under his long, dark lashes.

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