Page 8 of The Captive
"Yes, Thomas. Lock up on your way out."
I waited until his footsteps faded before moving to the desk. The bottom drawer unlocked with a key I kept on my person at all times. Inside was a steel lockbox containing items too sensitive for digital storage.
Amongst them, an elaborate mask—the one I'd worn during the hunt.
Creamy flesh broken by several lashes of my whip.
The glint of a blade.
Blood trickling down shapely thighs.
Moans and screams stretching well into the night.
Pain and pleasure…
I lifted the mask, turning it over in my hands. A raven. Ronan had chosen it for fun, but Beatrice had seen it as something mythic and intriguing. The mask of her captor, her tormentor, the man who'd drawn out her darkest desires.
I hadn't meant to get so deeply into the role that night. The hunt was supposed to be a mere demonstration of power—a punishment for the woman Ronan thought deserved to suffer. But when I'd caught Beatrice, something had shifted. I'd seen past her carefully cultivated society persona into the raw need beneath it all.
For that brief time with her wrists bound, under my mercy, her breath hot against my neck, I'd let my control slip. I'd shown her the real me—the one who found beauty and release in dominance. The one who understood that true power came notfrom making someone scream, but from making them beg for more even as you broke them.
And she had responded not with fear or disgust, but with hunger. Total surrender, despite the insanity I sometimes glimpsed in her eyes.
That was what truly disturbed me. For a lifetime, I'd been neither fully accepted nor completely rejected. Always straddling two worlds, belonging to neither. And yet, in that moment with Beatrice, I'd been seen. Recognised for exactly what I was.
It was intoxicating. Dangerous.
I set the mask aside and locked it away. Beatrice O'Brien was not my concern. The security breach was. My position, everything I'd fought for, depended on maintaining control—of the estate, the business, and most importantly, of myself.
I moved to the computer, pulling up the surveillance system. Was someone playing a game?
My phone chimed with a message from Coyne:Team found something. Meet me same place.
I grabbed my coat, my mind already racing. Whatever game was being played, I'd find the player. And when I did, they'd learn what happened to those who threatened what was mine.
As I stepped outside, the night air carried the scent of coming rain. I cast one last glance outside the window at the lawn and garden that featured a maze from this angle, its shadowy pathways reminiscent of the tangled situation I now faced.
Something was coming. I could feel it in my bones, with the same instinct that had kept me alive all these years on the knife's edge between servant and master, outsider and family, controlled and controlling.
Let it come. I'd been fighting for my place in this world since birth.
And I had never lost a battle I couldn't afford to lose.
Three
AOIFE O’MALLEY
The O'Malley estatestill smelled of ash and gunpowder ten months after its destruction. I stood among the ruins, letting the wind tease strands of auburn hair across my face. My father's ancestral home, reduced to blackened stone.
I tasted rage like acid on my tongue. The Flanagans had taken way too much in a single night. My father. Our home. But not me. Not the daughter Connor O'Malley had hidden from the world while secretly grooming her to inherit his empire. And not the ties that bound us to the dark world and sense of honour my family lived by.
My father had almost ruined things by pushing the envelope in the wrong direction. His ruthlessness was mostly feared but his recklessness and impulsiveness, along with his lustful inclinations, had cost us nearly everything. Now, I was the only one fit to step in Connor O’Malley’s shoes.
This was my time.
"Miss O'Malley, you're too exposed here."
I ignored Barrett's—my driver’s—concern, watching a raven pick through debris, its methodical scavenging strangely soothing.
