Page 8 of Taming Seraphine

“Maybe, but it’s not that easy.” He rubs his chin. “Some of these devices are set up to release their full charge of electricity as a penalty for tampering.”

“Is it lethal?”

Miko chuckles. “An electric chair needs to discharge at least two-thousand volts to kill. The most a DC battery of that size can hold is twelve.”

“Alright then.” Leroi nods at my collar. “Remove it.”

“No,” I rasp.

Both gazes snap to my face. I push myself up, my limbs screaming in protest.

“There’s a chip.” I raise a trembling finger to a spot behind my ear. “They told me it would overload if I ever messed with the collar.”

The two men exchange glances, but it’s Leroi who speaks first. “Who are you?” he asks, his voice soft. “What’s your name?”

My eyes dart to the redhead, who backs away under the other man’s command. It’s only when he’s completely out of reach that I turn to this stranger. My savior. He’s in his early thirties, about the same age as the twins, with eyes so dark they appear black and bottomless.

They’re as expressionless as the rest of his face. It’s the first time in years someone has looked at me—really looked at me with anything other than fury or lust. My breath catches, and alarm tugs at the pit of my stomach. I shrink away, not wanting to fall into those depths.

“Maybe she’s shell shocked?” the red-haired man asks from the other side of the room.

“She isn’t,” the man says, his gaze breaking away from mine.

The pressure around my lungs loosens, and I exhale, finally able to look the man full in the face. His features are angular—sharp eyes, sharp cheekbones, straight nose, cruel mouth. It’s softened by olive skin and a dusting of stubble, but there’s still a hardness to him. He has the look of a man whose hands are soaked with blood.

Like mine.

“Seraphine,” I mumble. “Seraphine Capello.” I cringe at the sound of my full name on my lips. It’s been so long since anyone’s asked, and my head is so messed up that I forget to lie. What if he kills me next?

His gaze snaps back to meet mine. “Any relation to Frederic?”

“He’s my...” I clear my throat. It’s not like I can make up anything clever now. “He’s my dad.”

“Frederic Capello didn’t have a daughter.” He leans into me, his dark eyes boring so deeply into mine that I swear he’s trying to yank the answers out of my soul.

The fear in my gut twists into the same fury that’s kept me going for years. It’s venomous and cold, a fierce determination to prove them all wrong.

“Dad had two families,” I say from between clenched teeth. “I didn’t know that until he brought me to his second house and handed me to his sons.”

“Shit.” The man glances away.

“Leroi?” asks the younger man.

He shakes his head in a motion to shelve that line of conversation, pinches the bridge of his nose, and clenches his jaw. “Who was the person on the monitor?”

“My brother,” I say, my pulse quickening. “They’re keeping him in another building. I need to find?—”

The man raises a palm. “Another Capello son?”

“Yes,” I rasp.

Leroi exhales, his gaze dropping to my neck. “Let’s work on removing your chip and collar, then we’ll find your brother, alright?”

My ears ring with alarm. Who sent Leroi, when everyone who ever cared for us is dead? There’s the handler, but after five years, he wouldn’t help me now.Not when he was such an eager participant in my training.

Mom is dead. Dad’s guards strangled her until she stopped moving while he and the others looked on and jeered. Nanna died months later in captivity. Gabriel is still a hostage, and he’s too emaciated and weak to arrange a mass murder. This man killed Dad and the twins. No one else with any power knows I was kept in that basement.

Asking questions might lead to him discovering why I’d been held captive, then he’ll find a way to hack into my collar and bring me under his control. I need to play along, treat this interaction like any other job, and act like an innocent, harmless victim.

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