Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 80643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
But I keep showing up in his bed, every single night, because it turns out that nothing in my mind points in the right direction when I’m around Noah.
Or maybe everything just points toward him.
Magnet in a fucking compass, leading me in one direction.
I head downstairs. When I arrive in the reading room on the first floor, Hunter is there with his laptop in the dark, only illuminated by its glow.
“You have something against lamps?” I ask him.
Hunter looks up. “You told me this was secret.”
I reach over and turn on a small lamp on one of the side tables. “It is. But don’t you think we’d look even more suspicious sitting in a dark room hunched over your laptop?”
“Sure. Fine.”
I nod at him, pulling one of the armchairs a little closer. “Okay. What do you have?”
“Not much, unfortunately. The security camera has night vision, but it’s sort of shitty. I found the SUV you were talking about, though.”
He pulls up the video.
It’s the standard greenish-white on black of a night vision camera. It’s eerie to see the SUV pulling down the street so slowly.
It pulls up, and the back window goes down.
“You saw this from upstairs?” Hunter asks.
“Yeah. I mean, I was on the balcony, so—”
I stop short when I realize my mistake.
Fuck.
I’ve been so caught up in protecting Noah that I didn’t even stop to think of the glaringly obvious thing that Roman pointed out the other day.
My window doesn’t face toward the front at all.
Hunter seems to catch my pause.
He holds up his hands in the air. “Hey. I’m not going to ask. Your business is yours. If you’re snooping around your stepbrother’s room, I’m not getting in the middle of it.”
I frown. “I wasn’t snooping. It’s not like that between me and Noah. If I was looking through his stuff, I’d admit it to him and to you.”
“Like I said. Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
For some reason I find myself desperate to deny the accusation, and tell Hunter I was actually there because Noah needs my cock.
Almost like I wish every guy in this damn house knew that Noah was marked as mine.
“I have to protect Noah, because he’s completely unable to look out for his own safety,” I explain. “That involves being in his room, considering these fuckers have the ability to point a goddamn camera at his exact balcony.”
“He’s lucky to have you as a watchdog,” Hunter jokes.
“If something happened to him, it would ruin my life.”
I’m struck by how true the statement is.
How real it feels.
“Look at this,” Hunter says, zooming in on the back window right as it opens. The image is grainy, but it’s possible to make out the fact that the guy in the back seat is wearing a hat.
“He’s wearing a beanie in the middle of summer.”
“Is that a logo?” Hunter asks.
He zooms out just a little again, and freezes it right on a frame where more of the hat is visible.
“It’s a scorpion.”
“How the fuck can you tell?”
“I know it. Fucking hate scorpions. You can tell it has the little stinger sticking out at the top. I know this hat.”
“From…?”
Hunter sits back, blinking as he frowns at the laptop.
“I saw one of Roman’s cousins wearing it. I noticed it at the time because I thought it was weird that the guy kept the hat on for the whole party. It was sweltering at that party, like a sauna, and he kept it on the entire time.”
“Jesus.”
“It has to be him,” Hunter says.
“I’m going to kill him,” I hear myself saying. “I’m going to fucking kill him. Roman lied to me.”
“What are you talking about? I thought you said this was just a freak who wanted pictures of Noah.”
“Yeah. I lied.”
I grab the laptop and stride out of the room before Hunter can stop me.
I take it right out into the backyard where I know Roman’s sitting by the fire pit, and I shove it in front of his face the moment I’m nearby.
It’s dark outside other than the fire.
Hunter follows after me, and right now, we’re the only three people out in the yard.
“Who the fuck is this?” I demand. “You know who it is, don’t you? And were you sitting in the back of this SUV right next to him?”
Roman looks at the image on the laptop.
Calmly, like he always does.
But then his expression shifts as he leans over, studying the frame and seeing the hat.
“Roman, care to clue me into what the hell is going on?” Hunter asks. “Are we in danger again? I told you to tell me the moment anything went wrong—”
“It’s my cousin,” Roman says, and then his eyes land on mine, glaring with an intense heat.
“Maks?”
“No. I told you where I was with Maks that night, and I had no clue that Kuzma was… fuck. Fuck, they got to Kuzma. I should have known. He is working with them.”