But I would wait.
This game would have to be a long one. There was hell to pay, and a quick death for Guido Romano would be far too good.
“Is she still reading?”
I turn my head at the sound of Phoenix’s voice. He’s hovering in the doorway, his face tipped down. He’s got a tank top on and sweatpants, and the stains on the front tell me he’s been working out. He doesn’t keep to a schedule the way I do—the way any of us do—because he no longer leaves this place.
He hasn’t left in twenty years.
He hasn’t set foot beyond the gardens since the bullet tore through his temple, ruined his eyes, and took away everything he’d worked for. Not since he attempted to take his life—to take himself from me. And I snapped.
Twenty years hasn’t softened his resentment toward me at his imprisonment, and I know it’s mostly fear now that’s staying my hand and refusing to hand over the key to his gilded cage, but he has stopped hating me for it.
“She’s touching the rose,” I tell him as he crosses the room. His hands find me, and I look up into his face. Still the beautiful, dangerous man I think I’ve always been in love with. He digs his fingers into my waist and leans in, running his nose along my jaw.
He’s the only one who ever takes these kinds of liberties with me. I love my boys, but Phoenix knows the shape of my soul in ways no one else ever has. He cups my face and tips my jaw up with his thumbs, then kisses me.
“James watched her last night,” he murmurs against my lips. “Late—after all of us were asleep. She touched herself.”
My body and brain refuse to commit to any kind of reaction. I don’t know how to feel. I know in the short weeks we’ve had her under constant surveillance, he’s become increasingly obsessed, but that doesn’t surprise me. James is the sweetest among us. He’s the only one with a heart left.
He was a broken, shattered man when I dragged him from the floor of the drug house and let my doctor stitch him up. He looked at me with pain in his eyes that stretched down to the very core of his being when he realized he was worth nothing more than a sacrifice to Guido Romano.
He’d been told that far too often growing up, and I promised him in that moment if he stuck with me, he would understand what it truly meant to be worshipped. And none of us have truly let him down.
But I worry now. Alice is exactly the sort of creature who could take him down at the knee, and I don’t know what’ll happen to my sweet little murderer when he faces the reality that she might breathe her last in Ari’s chair.
“He’s falling for her,” Phoenix murmurs.
“It sounds like you watched too.”
“Both of them,” Phoenix says. For a blind man, he has an intense voyeurism kink. He’s constructed an AI tethered to our home and to every one of our surveillance lines that reads to him exactly what’s going on in any room.
No matter where I’m fucking or where we are, Phoenix is always there with us.
“Did you enjoy him getting off to her?”
He just laughs and dips his hand into the front of my pants, curling his fingers around me. “Her pussy sounds sweet. I isolated it once she got her little toy inside her, and I fed it right into James’ speaker.”
I shudder. I shouldn’t indulge this. I should demand that they stop immediately. It’s not safe—not for us, not for our dynamic. But something stays my tongue as I buck up against Phoenix’s grip.
“They’re waiting for you,” he eventually says. He thumbs at the head of my cock, and I’m pretty sure I can’t get harder than I am right now.
“Do you want to join us?”
“I’ve had my taste of Ari for the night,” Phoenix says. He kisses me again, dipping his tongue into my mouth like he’s sharing it with me, and I imagine I can get a small hint of his musk. “Make him cry.”
I grin and nip at his lips. “Don’t worry, I will.”
Phoenix leaves me, and I take a few moments before I make my way downstairs, then out of the main house and toward the building we constructed for the resident psychopath to do his work. I imagine I can hear noise, though it’s entirely soundproof, and there’s only silence as I open the door.
James is there when I walk into the room, and he’s got Ari lying on his back, entirely naked, covered in red marks. He looks up at me and grins, and I realize he’s wearing his hook prosthetic—something he only does here.
He’s never felt the need for it out in the world. I once asked why, and he told me he wanted to make sure every Romano knew what happened to him and why they would all pay with blood.
But here, he uses the hook to take Ari’s nipple in a vicious pinch, and my cock twitches when Ari’s mouth falls open wide in a silent scream.
“Looks like he’s perfectly warmed up,” I say.