ZANDER
Necessary supervision and adjustments to supervision will be a constant endeavor of The Firm. The client’s safety and well-being will always be our top priority.
The autumn night has fallen over the motel, leaving a trail of burgundy and pinks on the horizon. That’s my cue to go back to Ella. I had to force myself to sleep during the day. My overactive mind resisted the pull of the pills. It only wanted her. Planning every detail, reviewing potential lines for the next scene. With my muscles coiled, and my imagination going over every possibility, I hardly slept at all.
My body fought again sleep as much as my mind did. My cock wanted Ella, yes, but so did every inch of me. Every last one. Thinking of her sweet lips and her dark eyes lends itself to a strain I’m eager to explore. It pulls everything into a neat, pulsing tension.
Punishing her will have to be enough. Giving her this release will have to be enough, no matter how badly I want to fuck her. No matter how badly I want her to be mine in every way. It’ll have to be enough because these are the boundaries we’ve drawn. Her life. My job. Those are the circumstances, and part of the challenge is finding a way for it to work so that—
My head spins with the recurring memories.
Fuck.I don’t want this challenge. I want to have her under my hands and in my bed, and I can’t.
Tugging my polo shirt over my head, I grab the file Silas sent over, tucked into a plain manila folder. It’s about Kamden, and it’s slim. Too slim. I take it with me on the way out to the car and page through it. Kamden has a squeaky-clean reputation. Absolutely nothing has ever been flagged about him in any database anywhere. Silas told me I’d be disappointed if I was looking for something, because there was nothing.
Something’s not right with her conservator. It’s obvious in the way he guards himself with her, in his language and tone. He’s hiding something and I don’t like it. I take another set of four measured breaths and put aside my own misgivings about Kam. Even if I liked him, a completely empty file would be suspicious. Ella’s got enough of a past to warrant things appearing on a background check. Kam is with her all the time. One of them has a record, and one of them doesn’t?
I pull open the driver side door and toss the file onto the passenger side seat, then climb in. The outskirts of town give way to tree-lined streets. Leaves come down and flutter against the windshield like the feathers of little birds.
My little bird is waiting for me in her elegant, modern cage.
If I’m honest with myself, that’s what it is—a spacious, comfortable cage. I’ve never thought about it in quite those terms before, but now I do. I follow the winding road toward the wealthy part of the suburbs where Ella lives tucked away in the mountains, and let myself consider her dilemma. She needs a cage. That much is clear. Only the house is too sprawling. Not intimate enough. The cage she needs is me. The bounds of our agreement.
The irony doesn’t escape me. A cage can set a little bird free.
In that space, with her, the rest of The Firm doesn’t exist. Nothing exists except the two of us. She can pick up the pieces of her past and study them from a safe distance.
Maybe that’s what I’m doing too. Or what I should be doing.
I pull in at Ella’s driveway and steer the car around to the parking in the back. Nobody’s in the kitchen. One light is on in the sitting room, but she’s not there. Not in the rec room, the formal dining room, anywhere.
There’s an anxiousness I shouldn’t feel. One I aim to remedy when I find her. She’s to wait for me in our blue room when she knows I’m arriving. This tense unease that she’s not here, not where I left her, not … okay—that something is wrong—I don’t care for it and it’s so easily rectified.
“Ella,” I call, keeping my voice calm as it travels up the staircase, but is met with silence. Where the hell is Damon? Distress spurs my steps to pick up.
I climb the stairs. The door to her bedroom is open, but it’s empty.
Where are they?
Did she tell them? Was it too much and she’s backing away from me? It’s a bitter reality to imagine. Of all the things that kept me up, this wasn’t one of them.
Checking my phone, there are no messages from Damon and I’m nearly five minutes early. Still, where the hell are they?
There’s only one place I haven’t been in this massive house. One place that Kam fiercely guarded when we were doing the modifications. Swore up and down that he’d keep it under control, but we weren’t allowed to move anything, to replace anything. So we didn’t. Instead there’s a rope that’s anchored in the doorway of the west hall.
It could’ve been a mistake, listening to him. That empty file makes me uneasy all over again. I move through the halls to the west wing, ducking under the thin rope and ignoring it altogether.
It’s an eerie feeling that surrounds me when I flick on the light. I don’t get more than a few steps in before it dawns on me that if Ella were here, she would not be okay.
The clearest demarcation is the art on the walls.
Every piece is wrapped in paper and a thin layer of packing foam as if it’s been protected in order to move it, but nothing has been moved. It’s all still hanging in place with a thin layer of dust coating it. Like an abandoned house, still filled with its memories and bundled up safely but kept hidden.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I must have seen this before. I must have. I remember the conversation with Kam, his body blocking the entrance to this hall. I must have looked past him and noted the artwork, but I don’t remember it. That was the day of the court hearing, shortly after and before the informal introduction to her downstairs.
I had still been rattled from seeing her.