But she belonged to Joseph. And if she was as innocent as he claimed, she wouldn’t accept the kinds of games Joseph and I sometimes liked to play with a willing woman. Ashlyn might be our captive, but I wouldn’t violate her.
I picked up the notepad from where Joseph had left it on the bed before slipping out of the room, making as little noise as possible. Ashlyn didn’t stir, and I was happy for her to get more rest. She’d be more clearheaded once she got some natural sleep and the drugs fully left her system. I’d had to dose her twice to keep her out on the journey to my family’s estate. She was probably still feeling some of the effects.
Leaving her safely locked in my bedroom, I went down to the media room and turned on my computer. I usually used it for gaming, but it would do for this more important task.
I accessed the student portal at Harvard and entered Ashlyn’s login information to open her email. My lips twitched as I typed Number1unicorn! She really was cute. I could see why Joseph had become obsessed with her. The attraction part was easy to understand; Ashlyn was gorgeous. But Joseph had always longed for a simpler, cleaner life than the one we led. Ashlyn might not be simple, but she was certainly pure and innocent in a way no one from our world ever could be.
Yeah, I definitely understood why Joseph wanted her.
When her inbox loaded, I noted a few emails about coursework from professors and one from Jayme, Ashlyn’s roommate. She was getting worried that Ashlyn had missed her text, and Jayme couldn’t remember seeing her at their apartment last night.
That could easily be explained away, thanks to the roofie I’d slipped her. If Jayme didn’t remember much from the previous night, she’d blame it on the strong cocktails she’d downed while we flirted at the bar. She could easily convince herself that she’d seen Ashlyn and simply forgotten about it in her drunken stupor. Jayme would’ve been confused enough this morning to make that plausible.
I typed out the message Ashlyn had written for her friend, adding a line about how she had seen Jayme sleeping off her hangover on the couch and hadn’t wanted to disturb her. The lie Ashlyn had come up with was serviceable: she was on a retreat in Colorado, and she wouldn’t have great cell reception there.
That solved the problem of keeping tabs on her text messages. I could turn off her phone altogether, and no one would be suspicious. Not after I finished sending these emails.
The messages to her professors were a little more businesslike, of course. She didn’t mention that she was heartbroken, but instead said she’d suffered a personal loss and needed time to grieve. She wrote that she would do her best to keep up with her coursework while she was absent.
That would do.
When I turned the page to find her message to her father, a weight pressed on my chest. The note was tearstained, the ink smudged. I could read her grief as easily as the words on the page.
A strange knot formed in my gut. She must be very close with her father. It probably killed her to lie to him. She’d revealed that she didn’t have to check in with her parents every day, but it was obvious that she loved him very much.
Yet another aspect of her life that was as pretty and perfect as she was. Ashlyn had a loving family, a doting father who wouldn’t bat an eye at her running off from college and spending money on a fancy retreat.
I’d never wanted for money, but that didn’t mean my life remotely resembled hers. My father had given me everything I’d ever demanded from him, mostly to keep me quiet and out of his way. I’d destroyed it all in a childish cry for his attention. That shit had stopped when I wrapped my new Ferrari around a tree at the age of seventeen. He didn’t even visit me in the hospital.
At that point, I’d grown up and stopped being an attention-seeking little pussy.
When I looked down at the tears on Ashlyn’s message to her father, something like envy soured my blood, pulsing through my veins before I could fully suppress it.
I shouldn’t resent Ashlyn. She hadn’t asked to be pulled into our world. She couldn’t help that she’d led a charmed life. And why shouldn’t she have everything she could possibly want? She’d done nothing to deserve what I’d done to her, stealing her away from her safe, easy life.
I shrugged off my budding sense of guilt.
I wasn’t sorry for taking her. Joseph needed her, and I needed Joseph. He was the only family I had in the world. My father might still be alive, but that didn’t make him family, not in the ways that counted. Even once I’d dragged Joseph back to New York, he was like a ghost without Ashlyn. He’d never really been happy in his life, but this was on a whole other level. He’d been miserable without her.