Page 703 of One More Kiss

Wicked Liability

Beck Knight

Chapter1

I bit backa hiss at the sting of my heels digging into my bare thigh from cutting too close to the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. Slipping my shoes off and sneaking through the house had been cute…for a night or two.

This was one of those rare moments I had serious regrets about not taking my parents up on the offer of my own campus apartment. But what kept me bound here was so much more powerful than the thought of freedom. My parents, both computer geniuses, had been tasked with holding the trove of secrets of The Scorpio Society and secured those secrets with the best of the best security.

Security they’d designed.

Unbreachable security.

Unless you were their daughter.

Living at home gave me access to the beating heart of the most powerful people in the world. I’d be fucking stupid to pass that up, especially if I wanted to be one of them. I was so fucking close I could taste the sweetness of power on the tip of my tongue.

And stupid, I was not.

Well, present predicament excluded.

I’d done this shit to myself. Built my own prison after vowing no one would ever get a chance to banish me to one again.

Well. Fucking. Done.

I’d indulged my parents’ overprotectiveness without argument because of the look in their eyes haunting me since last spring. Anguish and self-doubt etched into their wary, terrified faces at the thought of what could have—would have—happened to me that night and who knows how many nights after had I not managed to get away from the men who’d snatched me a block from one of the most revered schools in the world.

Stonewall University.

Seeing my parents like that, their fall from powerful confidence into vulnerability, fucked with my usual chill sprinkled with giving zero fucks persona.

They never were good at showing emotion, but that night, it seemed to be all they were capable of doing, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to secretly relishing their flash of humanity. For once, they’d been like all of my friends’ parents. For a few minutes, I’d had a glimpse of the blissfully normal.

Not that I wanted it to stay that way. Normal got old fast. I had a string of respectable jock ex-boyfriends complete with blue-blood good looks and wallpaper paste personalities who lived for flashing their parents’ money and caressing their sports cars the way they should have been caressing their girlfriends.

I’d tried the samplings my parents’ rich friends offered with their offspring and found every last one of them lacking. They left me restless in my own skin, searching for something…danger, insatiable hunger, brutal lust—something to shake up the terrifyingly staid direction I seemed to be headed in since I’d been abducted. Well, staid except for my sneaking in and out, but even that had lost its appeal.

Six months had come and gone and still, I did this dance to get past them.

My phone buzzed and I glanced down to see a text from my friend River flash across the screen. I turned the vibration to silent just as another text came through. The top step creaked as I miscalculated my distance from the wall and put my weight on one of three spots that crackled like a fickle narc afraid of a looming maximum sentence under the slightest pressure. Twenty years old creeping through the darkness like some rebellious teenager who’d snuck out to dry-hump her boyfriend in the back of his car.

I’d never been that basic.

Humiliation complete.

I brushed my fingers along the textured wallpaper, the veins of the pattern alive under my fingertips, a feeling I would never take for granted again since my second chance. The sensation connected my past and my present, the pattern stitching together my innocent younger self before I shed my naivety and surrendered shards of my innocence for whispered secrets and slivers of power.

Enough power I’d managed to save myself that night six months ago.

I left my mark on the man who snatched me from the darkness and tried to feed me into his human trafficking ring.

I spilled his blood.

I’d been my own fucking hero.

Sure, he wasn’t dead, but he was…well, altered.

I smiled in the dark as I crept along the wall toward my bedroom stairs just past my parents’ office. His screams still echoed in my head, from after I sunk my switchblade into his most prized possession and twisted, knowing that if he was going to take something from me, I’d take something too.

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