Page 19 of The Vigilant

I hadn’t thought much of it at the moment. Hard to dwell on anything but the stab of metal through the skin of my cock. But afterward…it was like a seed planted in the recesses of my mind. Someone to care for. To take care of all her wants. To be the beginning and the end of all her needs.

But not her. Not Sutton.Not my mentor’s daughter.

My thumbs threatened to crack through the screen as I typed out my reply.

Don’t call me that.

Thank God my low growl didn’t get sent along with the message.

Don’t bother coming. I’m not hungry.

Another lie. But after our conversations today…maybe it was better if I didn’t go over there. I didn’t need to be in close proximity to that smart mouth I was already fantasizing about long before it called medaddy.

I’d give myself one night of reprieve and her one night to cool down and then go over to check on her first thing tomorrow.

Fine.

I’d have pizza delivered to her anyway. She was mine to take care of whether she liked it or not.

Three slices of cold pizza and another couple hours later, I finally hit the power button on the computer screen, and the room shuttered into darkness, only the small colored lights of the servers and networking equipment flickering in the room.

I stood and checked my phone. “Damn.” It was almost ten o’clock. No wonder my head was pounding; I hadn’t stopped staring at my computer for the last eight hours.

Burying myself in work seemed to be the only way to keep Sutton off my mind. She was safe. Fed. Angry, but out of trouble.What more was I supposed to do? Until I knew more—until she trusted me more—trying to get her to talk was like approaching a caged animal.

I walked out of the office, closing the door behind me, and headed for the elevator at the end of the hall.

The Sherwood Garage was a front—a legitimate front, but a front nonetheless—for the expansive compound that existed in the wooded acres behind it. We’d needed both secrecy and seclusion to chase vigilante justice and shelter and solitude from the world after that final mission. In the same way an open wound needs to be sterilized before it can heal, we needed to be sequestered to process our losses.

I punched my code into the keypad and waited for the elevator.

Behind the garage, tucked in the thick forest, we’d built cabins to live in.Where I still lived.One by one, the rest had become hollow shells as Harm and Rhys and Dare found love and their way back into the world, and Rob came and went more like a ghost than a guest, haunting the garage every so often before something in her own pursuit of justice pulled her back to San Francisco.

The elevator descended below ground and opened up to the main hallway that tunneled into the forest. There, coded doors gave individual access to additional lengths of tunnels and staircases that eventually ascended into our cabins, all but mine had become nothing more than hollow arteries of amputated limbs.

Maybe someone would call what I felt sadness, but it would be a cheap term. It was life, and it happened as surely as death. I knew a long time ago that I would be the only one left standing in the end. I knew it the moment I’d walked out of Jon’s funeral. I hadn’t been able to save him, just like I hadn’t been able to save Ryan, and just like I wouldn’t be able to save myself. It was…too late for me.

But maybe I could save Sutton from whatever her fucking demons were. It was the least I could do for Jon. After all, I was the one who was supposed to draw fire, not him. I was the one who was supposed to go in first, not him. And if I had, I would’ve been the one to die.Not him.

I jolted, but it wasn’t the ding of the elevator that shook me from my thoughts; it was the vibration of my phone in my hand. I scowled when I saw the number, a chill filtering into my veins that held me frozen.

“Hello?” I answered Dante’s call.

“Are you at the townhouse?”

“No. Why?”

“I just got a notification from the security system that the alarm was tripped.”

I spun and stalked toward the garage. “What do you mean?”

“There’s an alarm for the front door and garage door, but I installed a separate silent one for the sliding door off the master bedroom to the small deck.”

My pace slowed. “So, she went onto the deck and tripped the system.”

His silence was more ominous than any answer. “I’ll send you the footage, and you tell me.”

My phone buzzed again with his message. Putting the call on hold, I opened the video and watched the view from the exterior camera as Sutton slipped out the side door. Reality hit me like a one-two punch.

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