This. Is. Fucked.

Rebel rubs his hand over his jaw, lifting one eyebrow at me. It appears my imagination is misguided; he doesn’t come for me after all. He turns around and starts tacking pieces of paper that he tears from the notepad onto the wall. God knows where he found the tacks. And god knows why I’m feeling slightly disappointed.

"What are you doing?"

"Something to occupy my mind while I problem solve. You're welcome to help." He pulls a sharpie out of his back pocket and begins to write. I stand there, mouth open, watching him as he scrawls what essentially equates to hieroglyphs on the papers he's pinned to the wall.

I angle my head, hoping that a different perspective will give what he's written some meaning. It's pointless, though. The mathematic equation—I'm smart enough to know that's what it is, at least—makes absolutely no sense. "What is that?" I ask.

"This," Rebel says, tapping his pen on the paper, "is a proof sketch for the prime number theorem, using big O notation. I'm gonna use this to try and solve Legendre's Conjecture.”

“How long will that take?”

Rebel, shirtless, absolutely covered in tattoos…Rebel, the leader of a motorcycle club, the man who refuses to let me go home to my family, shrugs. “I don’t know. Been working on it since I left college. I could prove the conjecture tomorrow. I might never prove it.”

“You’ve been working on this for years?”

He gives me a broad, reckless kind of smile. The kind of smile that makes women’s insides twist. “Only eight. My old professor’s been working on it for over fifty.” Turning around again, he starts scribbling at the paper, leaving a wake of marks and symbols behind him that are liable to give me a headache just looking at them. I’m beginning to feel really rather foolish. He’s obviously way smarter than I gave him credit for. Way smarter than me, and I accused him of never even finishing high school.

Oh god. He definitely did finish high school because he was just talking about finishing college eight years ago. I feel rather triumphant when I realize this gives me insight into a little tidbit about himself that he wouldn’t share with me earlier. I sit down on the edge of the bed, his bed, clutching one of his pillows to my chest like a shield. “Twenty-nine.”

Rebel glances over his shoulder at me, a bemused expression on his face. “Twenty-nine is not the correct answer.” He carries on scribbling, the muscles in his forearm, his tricep and bicep, across his shoulder blades and down his back all shifting beautifully underneath his skin. “It’s not forty-two, either. Might have worked in Hitchhikers but this is slightly more complicated.”

“Your age,” I say. “You’re twenty-nine. You finished college eight years ago, which means you’re twenty-nine.”

He doesn’t seem even remotely fazed that I’ve worked this out. “Am I?”

“Yes.”

“And what if I went on a gap year to Europe with an ex-girlfriend in between high school and college? What if I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to major in and switched out courses halfway through?”

“Did you do either of those things?”

“Nope.” I can hear him grinning, even though he doesn’t turn to look at me. He doesn’t take his eyes off the paper in front of him and the ever-increasing spider web of mathematical figures. “Hand me that whiskey?” he asks, holding out his hand behind him. I pass him the bottle, wondering how alcohol is possibly the answer right now.

“Seems to me coffee would be more appropriate. I don’t think you’re gonna solve a super old math problem if you’re wasted.”

“Solving this problem isn’t the point. Solving my DEA/Maria Rosa problem is the point. I just have get my brain working. And since you won’t have sex with me, this is the next best thing.”

I can’t help but laugh. “You think you use your brain when you’re having sex?”

Rebel’s pen freezes on the paper. He turns, then, towering over me, my face level with his belt buckle. It’s as though I can literally feel the heat rolling off his body. He’s intimidating and overwhelming, his presence a powerful force to be reckoned with. “Oh, Sophia. I use my brain. Every time I sleep with a woman, I’m using my head to figure out what she likes. How she likes it. What I can do to have her screaming my name until her throat’s raw.” He takes a step closer, his perfect fucking abs pretty much filling my eye line. He knows how he looks. He knows how perfect all of him is. “I’m also thinking up ways for my partner in crime to make me happy, too. How she can defer to me, hand herself over to me, let me use her body for my own pleasure.” Gently brushing a wet strand of my hair from my face, Rebel makes a low humming sound. It sends shivers through me, making me feel shame for the first time in my life. I shouldn’t be reacting this way to him. I just told myself I wasn’t stupid enough to fall for my captor, and yet right now…

It’s so fitting that he just referred to his sexual conquests as his partners in crime; I get the feeling sex with Rebel really would be criminal. “If the guys you’ve been sleeping with haven’t been using every single part of their bodies when they’re fucking you, Sophia, including their heads, then they haven’t been doing it right.” He takes a drink from the whiskey bottle, and then he offers it to me. “Is Matthew the boyfriend not a very good lover, Soph?”

“That is seriously none of your business.”

“What you mean to say is, you’re a virgin.”

I feel like my face is on fire. “I am not a virgin!”

Rebel’s expression hardens a little, almost imperceptibly, but I catch it. “Didn’t Hector check you?”

“Yes, he did. And he wanted me gone, so he told Raphael I was a virgin. He said he couldn’t afford the attention I’d bring with me.” I shiver at the memory of Hector’s fingers inside me. That disgusting look on his face. Suddenly, I feel very sick. I snatch the bottle from him and drink. I drink deep, lighting up from the inside out as the explosive alcohol tears through me. Surprisingly, the burn dulls down after the first few mouthfuls. Rebel folds his arms across his chest, watching me swallow once, twice, three more times. I let my eyes drift a little, catching brief flashes of the ink that marks his skin. A skull sits over his ribcage, crowned in thorns, flocked by birds. A banner runs through the design, and on it, the text: Forgive Me Father, For I Have Sinned. Two full sleeves, bursting with color, scroll down his arms. The designs are filled with dragons and water lilies, Japanese designs mostly. The lines of them are harsh and dark, but they’re beautiful. On his chest, more birds—two swallows perching on top of the handles of two crossed guns, their barrels pointed downward. In the center of the design, a heart, bright red and bleeding. Live For Something runs along the top of the ink. Or Die For Nothing is written in cursive underneath. As he lifts his left arm, leaning against the wall, I see something else that catches my attention: Arabic script tracing up the inside of his bicep, leading toward his heart.

“You getting a good look there, sugar?” Rebel asks. Amusement colors his tone, to the point where I feel like kicking myself for being busted checking him out. And I was checking him out. I’ve seen Matt naked a thousand times, but I’ve never felt this intrigued by his body. Not even the first time we had sex. Our bodies just came together without any fireworks, whereas right now I feel like it’s the fourth of July inside my head and I haven’t even touched this guy. I resent that he can produce such a reaction from me. It makes me feel weak.