CAPTOR (The Alpha Brotherhood) (Standalone Dark Billionaire New Adult Romance) (24 page)

Zoey

Shane sits upright, his eyes growing larger with every detail his brother gives him. I can’t hear a thing and it’s driving me nuts. He gets out of bed, pulling on a pair of trousers as he holds the phone to his ear with his shoulder. I guess he’s going out.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

I don’t get a chance to ask any questions because he immediately calls down to one of his assistants to send a driver. He finishes getting dressed quickly, but he chooses one of his best suits and takes the time to comb his hair and meticulously straighten his tie.

“What happened?” I ask.

“My idiot brother got hauled into a police station. On live TV.”

“Which one?” I immediately start scanning through the local channels, then check the 24 hour news networks. Oh shit. “Trent?”

“There he is.” Shane’s eyes flutter closed as he pinches the bridge of his nose. “Goddammit.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing. Everything. I don’t have time to explain.” He briskly presses his lips to mine. “If we ever have children, we are having one.” He holds up a single finger firmly as he grabs his coat.

“Why?” I ask, following him down the stairs.

“Because siblings are assholes.”

“But…” I want to have at least two, maybe even three, so they won’t grow up alone like I did. Weirdest circumstances ever to have the ‘are we having kids talk’ though, so I don’t bring it up. “Be careful,” I tell him, stopping right before my bare toes touch the metal threshold into the elevator.

Shane leans out and kisses the tip of my nose. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

It’s always so strange when I’m here by myself now. I think back about how I used to creep around this place looking for a way to escape, how I used to be so terrified of him. So much has changed since then. I have all the key codes now, even for the elevator down. And all I want to do tonight is curl up on the couch with a book and wait for him to get home.

I doze off again while reading, shaken awake by the bell that announces the rising elevator. Glancing at the clock, I realize it’s only been 45 minutes. That was quick. But Shane isn’t the one staring back at me when the doors slide open. Holy shit.

“Hello, Zoey.” A stunning woman dressed all in black leans against the rear wall of the elevator, her arms crossed behind her back. It’s the date Trent brought to Shane’s dinner party. I think her name was Kat.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Setting you free.” Her piercing green eyes drop to my casted wrist. “Did Shane do that to you?”

“No. Well, yes. It was already broken. A surgeon reset it.”

“What a complicated cover story,” Kat replies, crossing the line into our home.

I swallow a knot in my throat and take a few steps backwards. “How did you get in here?”

“I have resources that others do not.”

What the hell does that mean? And if she could pull her hands out from behind her, that’d be great. “Well, Shane’s not here. And Trent’s been—”

“I know exactly where they are, Zoey. I put them there.”

“You what?”

“We don’t have a lot of time. The man holding you captive won’t be behind bars tonight.”

“Good.” I exhale a breath of relief, both because Shane’s not getting arrested and that she finally shows me her hands. The only thing she’s holding is a manila file folder, not a gun. “And I’m not a captive anymore.”

“Has he convinced you that you’re here of your own accord?”

“He didn’t need to convince me of anything. I’m here because I want to be.”

“I’ve experienced something similar to what you’re going through. You spend so much time with the man keeping you locked up, fucking you whenever and however he wants.” That’s not something a lot of people have in common. “Eventually it all starts to seem normal. You feel for him. You delude yourself that he feels something for you.”

“That’s not what’s going on.” Is it?

“And where would you be right now if you hadn’t submitted to his whims?” she asks with a knowing glance. “Starving and locked up in a studio in Michigan, waiting for his return?”

“I…” How the hell does she know that? “What’s it to you?”

“I, too, have been at the mercy of one of these ‘brothers’ as they call themselves. Only when it suits them, of course.”

“It’s complicated,” I reply defensively. “And difficult to understand unless you’re a—”

“Pathetic, abused little foster kid? You have your set of adversities, I have mine.” Her eyes narrow into a glare as her voice lowers. “When was the last time you used them as an excuse to manipulate and brutalize someone?”

The hair raises on the back of my neck as a chill creeps across my skin. “Never.”

“Precisely.”

“Shane hasn’t…” Well, technically he has. “He’s not a…” Shit. He kind of is. “People change.”

“Or,” she says, gracefully striding over to an arm chair and taking a seat. “They stay stuck in the same place. Which is the case here.” Kat tosses the file onto the coffee table and gestures for me to sit down in the chair beside her. “Did you ever wonder where you came from, Zoey? I’d imagine most orphans do.”

“Actually, I don’t,” I lie. “There’s no point speculating about the past.”

“That’s a shame. It took some trouble discovering yours and it’s all in that folder.”

“Why would I believe you?”

“Why would I come here and lie?”

“I don’t know. You clearly like fucking with people.”

Her laughter echoes off the walls. There’s something viciously elegant about everything she does. “When did you first meet Shane?”

“A few months ago,” I reply.

“Guess again.” She taps her fingernails on the folder one a time, over and over, creating a rhythm of a ticking clock. “You seem like a bright girl.”

“Just average, actually. If you know so much about me, you probably realize that.”

“There are different types of intelligence,” she says. “Don’t you think it’s a strange coincidence that you’re both from the same area with the same sad story? That he came to your rescue right in the nick of time?”

“What’s that saying? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” I shoot back. “I think it’s time for you to leave. And take those answers with you, I don’t need them.”

“No, you don’t want them,” she corrects me, rising to her feet. “Do you really think you’ll be able to go through your whole life with him, staying in the dark?”

Fuck. “Wait,” I blurt out. Kat sits back down as my shaking hands reach for the folder.

The first thing I see is a picture of a group of kids. I zero in on Shane’s face immediately. Adam is right next to him, with his arm around his younger brother’s shoulders. There’s a teen girl standing behind them with a toddler in her arms. Her smile seems forced. And she looks a lot like me, especially in the eyes. My heart stops when I take a closer look. The child’s shirt is pulled up a little bit, revealing her round little belly. And the scars carved into it.

“Your mother was rather young when she had you,” Kat’s voice cuts through the ringing in my ears.

“I knew that. A lot of kids get put up for adoption by teen moms.”

“She didn’t give you up straight away. I’d imagine she felt guilty after what happened to you. Chloe probably wanted to take care of you, but they found her unfit a few months after the two of you went into that home.”

“Chloe?”

“Rhymes with Zoey, doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s why Shane finds it so difficult to say. It’s not the name he knew you by.”

My pounding heart drops into my stomach and stops beating. “What was it?” I turn the page to my adoption records and find my question unanswered. The space for my name is blank.

“You didn’t have a legal name. You didn’t have a birth date. Because you weren’t born in a hospital and no one knew you existed until your underage distraught mother brought you bleeding and screaming into the emergency room. So whatever she called you wasn’t on any official document. But I did find these.”

She flips past a few pages to a photocopy of a child’s crayon drawing of two little kids, a boy holding hands with a tiny little girl. Shane is written over his head. Lizzie is scribbled over hers. The most disturbing part is the marks all over her body. It looks like they were added later with a ball point pen, scraped angrily until it tore through the paper.

“I don’t know if the people who adopted and later abandoned you named you to honor your mother or if that truly was just a coincidence. It happened before she died.”

“My real mom is dead?”

“She is. Condolences,” Kat replies coldly.

This is not the story I had in my head about my real mom. She was supposed to be an overwhelmed kid that gave me up and went on to live a normal life. A part of me always wondered if she’d try to find me down the road. Or maybe my father would. One of them could even be an artist. They might have families now, little brothers and sisters half my age. Maybe one day I’d have a real Thanksgiving to go to, someone to shop for around Christmas. It’s a common fantasy for kids like me.

My real parents would have no idea that it didn’t work out with my adoptive ones, that I ended up bouncing in and out of child psychiatric hospitals until they just couldn’t handle it anymore, got divorced, and tossed me back the system. We’d meet up for lunch, maybe after one of them tracked me down on Facebook or using a private investigator. I’d tell them a sugar coated version of my shitty childhood, explain that it wasn’t their fault, that I’d done well enough for myself on my own and didn’t hold it against them.

There are a few more child’s drawings behind the first one, presumably Shane’s. Two more photocopies and one original. I gently run my fingers across the yellowed paper, focusing on the texture of the raised red crayon as my head spins. It’s the pattern that somebody sliced into my flesh. This must be what it looked like originally before time and growth distorted it. A mutilated spiral in the center flanked by haphazard stacks of chevrons. Something that sort of looks like a distorted flower. And jagged lines like lightning strikes in between all of it. It’s almost identical to my branded skin, like he memorized it.

“There’s a police report in there, but your mother wouldn’t say anything about your… injuries.”

The shock wears off as heat rises into my face. “Fuck you,” I breathe, slapping the folder shut. “I didn’t ask to know any of this. And I definitely don’t want to know where those came from.”

“Shane might know. He might know who your father is too. If you’re half Mexican, Puerto Rican, or—”

“Shut up and get out,” I hiss.

“Typical. Always blaming another woman instead of the liar they’re in bed with. You honestly didn’t want to know why he was so obsessed from the moment he laid eyes on you? He had a thousand opportunities to tell you, didn’t he?”

She’s right. If this had all come from his mouth, I’d be so grateful to have the questions from my past answered. But I can see why he didn’t. This story does taint everything that’s happened between us. It’s all based on a tragedy. Or a lie. My entire body tingles in anxiety, I can’t even feel my hands. The only sensation that stands out is the nauseated churning in my gut.

“I can take you somewhere he can’t find you,” Kat says. “For a while. Then you’re on your own.”

I guess I should get used to that empty feeling again. “Where?”

“Cassie. The stripper. I had a friend delete the records of you staying in that home with her, but I’m sure Shane will eventually track down the paper copies. However, you were in a lot of places with a lot of kids. It will take him some time to sift through it all and narrow it down, assuming he keeps looking.”

“I barely know Cassie. We were just kids.”

“She was more than happy to help Daniela. And she’s housesitting for a client through the winter, that will make her difficult to track.”

“Daniela’s there?”

“Yes. You don’t have a lot of people to run to, Zoey, and you don’t have a lot of time. Shane and Adam are pulling strings to get their brother out at this very moment. Then you’ll have to look into his lying face and wait for him to come clean. Or deal with the consequences of asking questions he doesn’t want to answer.”

Shit. My pulse races as my brain and body come back online. I need a little while to process all this. I want to talk to him when he doesn’t have the opportunity to lock me in a room somewhere. “Yeah,” I whisper. “Cassie’s place will be safe for a while.” And it will give me a chance to see Daniela. She’s the real reason all this happened.

“Pack quickly.”

I do, filling a bag with a bunch of clothes that Shane bought me and wearing a similarly acquired coat and boots. Because I don’t own a single thing that I used to have. I haven’t owned any part of myself since he got a hold of me.

“Don’t you want the folder?” Kat asks as we get in the elevator.

“I want him to know what I know,” I explain. She nods and the doors close. “Why are you doing this?”

Her face goes blank, her eyes staring straight forward like she’s looking at something a thousand feet away instead of at her own reflection. “Because one way or another, righting rich men’s wrongs is what I have always done and it’s what I will always do.”