Caged by His Twisted Love novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Back Seat

She swings first, he writes down her terms, and Declan's text says he already knows.

He put me in the back of the black car, and I got in on my own two feet.

I wanted that on the record, at least in my own head.

The big man in the dark coat took the front seat beside the driver, and a glass partition rose between us and them.

Ronan sat across from me with one ankle on his knee, as relaxed as a man in his own living room.

The car pulled out into the rain.

There was a small bar built into the door, with a bottle of whiskey in a rack.

I looked at it, and I looked at him.

He saw me look and did not move.

I took the bottle by the neck and swung it at his head.

He caught my wrist before the glass got halfway there.

His hand was warm and not hard at all, and I could not pull free.

"There it is," he said, almost gently. "The same arm."

"Let go."

"Put the bottle down, and I will."

I set it on the seat between us.

He let go, and my wrist burned where his fingers had been.

"You can try that again whenever you like," he said. "I'd rather you did it with a reason."

"I have a reason. You were going to shoot my brother."

"Yes," he said. "I was."

He said it so plainly that I stared.

"So you admit it."

"I had a gun on him. I never said I meant to fire."

"You were on a pier at eleven at night with a gun on a nineteen-year-old."

"I was," he said. "And I would like to talk about what you did, not what I did."

The windshield wipers beat on the other side of the glass.

"Here is how it stands," he said.

"Three years ago a man very close to me had me shot."

"You are the only person outside my family who saw it."

"My family will not take my word against his."

"Declan," I said.

His eyes sharpened.

"You know that."

"He told me you were dead. He told me to forget the whole thing."

"Did he."

His voice did not change, but the car got colder.

"Then he's afraid of you," he said. "Good. That makes you useful."

"I'm not helping you."

"You're not helping me for free."

He reached into his jacket, and I flinched, and he took out a folded sheet of paper instead.

"Ninety days," he said.

"You live in my house, and you don't leave without my driver."

"When the ninety days are up, you walk out the front door, and I let you."

"At the end of the first week, you stand in front of my family and tell them what you saw on that pier."

"That's all I ask of you."

"That's all?"

"It's enough to keep you alive."

"And if I say no?"

"Then I do nothing," he said.

"I don't call anyone, and I let you go home."

"And on Monday Declan hears from someone that you left a gala with a ghost."

I understood then that the choice was not a choice.

Either I was in his house, or I was alone out there with a man who had already sent someone to a pier once.

"I have terms," I said.

His mouth moved, very slightly.

"I'd be disappointed if you didn't."

"My brother Kieran stays out of it. Nobody touches him, nobody follows him, nobody asks him anything."

"Agreed."

"My father is in a nursing home in Quincy. His bill gets paid. I pay my share when I can."

"Agreed. You don't pay."

"Nobody puts a hand on me unless I say so."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"I have never needed to," he said.

I did not know what that meant, and heat crawled up my neck anyway.

"Write it down," I said.

He took a pen from his jacket and wrote my three lines under his own on the sheet of paper, in small neat letters.

He signed his name.

He held the paper and the pen out to me.

I signed.

My hand hardly shook at all.

"Ninety days," he said. "Starting tonight."

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I took it out, because I needed something to look at that wasn't his face.

It was a text from a number I had not saved but knew by heart.

Declan.

"Saw you leave with a ghost, sweetheart. Come see me."

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