Page 56 of Unorthodox
I read about it in the news after I decided to keep her.
The soldiers who did it to her were “never found.”
One of them had hired me. I killed him instead.
That earned even more of her loyalty toward me. Her bravery, though, where I’m concerned forgets one thing, I would never leave her alive to fester on the things I’d do to her if she pushed me.
“Why do you want to make this harder on the girl?” she questions me, in only a way Mamie would ever question me.
I don’t answer her.
“You think getting into her head will make yours feel better?” She taps the side of her head with her index finger. “You feel good screwing around in there, Max?” She steps closer to me, finger still to her head.
My nostrils flare and I imagine shoving her against the wall. I imagine my hands around her throat. I imagine all the ways I couldmake my head feel better.
I don’t touch her.
I only touch my staff if I want to kill them.
I’m close, right now, with Mamie. But not quite there.
“She’s a teenage girl. Find better prey. Be a man about fucking with someone’s mind, Max.” She grits her teeth, drops her hand, and looks down at the pieces of playing card between us again. “Her life is going to be misery from here on out, until she gets shot in the head after she’s served her purpose.”
My blood runs cold as I imagine Ollie. Where he’s been the past eighteen years. What could’ve happened to him.
Then I think about my father’s face looming over mine when I woke in his bedroom after he let his bodyguard, Coda, and two of his friends fuck me into unconsciousness.“You had to be stitched up. And for what, Maximus?”
It wasn’t long after that my mother took me and my brother. Wasn’t long after that we started using the playing cards.
Mamie knows nothing about that.
“You work for me,” I tell her, stepping toward her, and watching that spark of fear light up in her eyes as she steps back. Yeah. Everyone has it. “You don’t advise me. You don’t lecture me. And you don’t fucking tell me how to treat my own goddamn property.” I point at the mess I made of the card. “Clean that shit up, and don’t ever fucking cross this line between us again, do you understand? I’d hate to do it, Mamie, but I’ll put you right back where I found you if you keep fucking with me.”
I don’t seeMax for four days.
Instead, Dante wakes me up every morning for breakfast, where I eat alone at the dining room table. I assume Mamie makes the food. It’s waiting at my place setting when I come to the kitchen, and it’s no longer tainted.
I’m not drugged anymore.
After breakfast, I work out in the gym. Then I go for walks around Max’s property outside, breathing in the stagnant, humid air of a southern summer. I might not know where we are, but you can’t fake this kind of heat. I’m convinced it only exists in the south.
I take a shower.
Eat lunch, again alone, save for Dante’s heavy, unnerving presence.
And after lunch, I’m confined to my room.
Until it starts all over again in the morning.
Max doesn’t come in the night.
I see no one but guards during the day.
I don’t say a single word aloud for four days.
But the night after Max ripped my heart out and Dante led me to a guest room, the next morning when I returned to mine, it no longer smelled like pine.
Lavender.
