“Screw you,” Soph whispers, stepping away from me. She turns her back, hiding herself from me.

“I’m betting you’d be ready for that, too,” I tell her. I move myself behind her, pressing my body up against her back. She goes utterly still again, seemingly at war with herself. Slowly, I reach up, brushing her hair away from her neck, and then I stoop down to graze my lips ever so slightly against her soft, sweet-smelling skin. “I’m betting if I were to slide my hand down the front of your panties…” I slide my hand around her, starting from her hip, heading in that direction. “I’m betting if I were to do that, I’d find that you were more than ready for me to screw you.” My fingertips are almost doing it, almost sliding down the front of her lacy white underwear when she slaps my hand away.

“Stop. Please, Rebel. Just stop. I can’t…I don’t know what the hell is happening right now.”

I tuck my hands into my pockets, smiling softly at her. “I can tell you what’s happening right now, what’s been happening for days, but you won’t want to hear it.”

“You don’t know me, Rebel.” She says the words harshly, and I can hear the fear in her voice. She’s afraid, because she already knows what I’m about to say, and she knows that it’s true.

“You’re attracted to me, despite everything, and I’m attracted to you. We want each other, Sophia. It’s the reason why you’re so terrified right now. And it’s part of the reason why I’m letting you go.”

I leave the room, my head too messed up to even be in the same room with her right now. She doesn’t say anything as I go. She doesn’t deny that what I’m saying is true.

******

When I come across Leah, she’s in the foyer refreshing the flowers, dressed from head to toe in the ridiculous maid’s uniform Louis insists all his female employees wear. She looks up, sees me charging down the stairs, and grins.

“Well if it ain’t the devil himself,” she says. She throws her arms around my neck and hugs me. Thank fuck my hard-on’s vanished is all I’m thinking as I hug her back.

“Looking good, little Leah.” She does look good. When I first brought her here, her bruises had healed and she was clean of the heroin she’d been addicted to, but she was still thin. Still quiet and withdrawn. Still broken on the inside. Now, with her hair a natural blonde and tied back in a neat ponytail, the dark purple circles under her eyes gone without a trace, she looks healthy. More importantly, she’s smiling. “Feelin’ good, big brother,” she replies, elbowing me in the ribs. I’m not her brother, of course. It’s just what she’s called me ever since Cade and I dragged her out of that dingy brothel in Seattle.

“You staying long?”

“Not if I can fucking help it.”

She pouts, hitting me lightly on the arm with the dying flowers she’s holding. “Carl says you got a girl here. Is that true?”

“For the moment. She’s not staying, though. I’ll be driving her back into town as soon as I’ve suffered through breakfast.”

“You pissed her off already?”

“Of course I have,” I say, laughing. I start walking, heading in the direction of the dining room, and Leah walks along with me. I throw an arm over her shoulder, making her chuckle.

“Why don’t you go up there and apologize. Maybe she’ll stay.”

“I doubt that very much.”

“Fucker.”

“Bitch.”

My father’s eyes nearly bulge straight out of his head when he sees me walking in with my arm around one of his employees. “What the hell are you doing now? For fuck’s sake, James.” He tosses his napkin on the table, releasing an exasperated breath, and I see that Soph was right; he does have a split lip. I let Leah go, giving her an apologetic smile. She returns it, and then hurries out of the room. I’ll need to talk business with her later, when the old man has his back turned.

“You realize I should fire her for that,” Louis says. “She has to know her place around here. I must have been out of my mind the day I agreed to hire her.”

“Must have been,” I agree, slumping down in the chair at the opposite end of the table, the furthest from him that I can possibly sit. “I doubt it could have been a moment of compassion.”

“Why should I show compassion to someone who can’t administrate their lives effectively? It’s not my fault the girl involved herself with an abusive partner.” This is the story I told him—that she was hiding from an ex who liked to raise his fists to her. The reality of her situation—that she was kidnapped, hooked on drugs and used for sex by countless men against her will? That would have made good ol’ Louis squeamish. In his eyes, that, too, would somehow have been Leah’s fault. “I take it you won’t be staying long?” he says.

“I’ll leave in the morning, once your little soiree is over. I think that’s just about my limit as far as maintaining this charade goes.”

Louis grunts, forking some scrambled egg into his mouth. “In all honesty, I’m surprised you even came. Having not heard from you in four years, I’d assumed my invitation would go unanswered. It’s not as though you’ve felt the need to uphold any of your other familial responsibilities.”

I don’t bite. He wants to bait me into an argument, but I won’t give him the satisfaction. He narrows his eyes, looking first at me and then out of the window. “You know, I’m not as clueless to the life you lead as you might think, son. I know you’re not living in New York.”

“So you’ve been checking up on me. How fatherly.”

“I need to know what you’ve been involving yourself in, James. With this re-election on the horizon, the last thing I need are skeletons being dragged out of the closet. No surprises.” He points his knife at me, his expression severe. “Tell me right now and I can bury all of your dirty secrets in time, before my competitors have the chance to discover them.”

“All right, Pop. Let’s see. Where shall we start? Oh, yeah. Okay, since we’re talking about burying things, you should know I have a plot of land out in the desert where I’ve been hiding the bodies of all the people my friends and I have been murdering. Rapists. Drug dealers. Child abusers. You name it, we got it. There are even some crooked government officials out there, actually. Men after your own heart.” I lift the glass of orange juice in front of me, toasting him before taking a sip. He just stares at me, his knife and fork gripped in his hands like he’s about ready to launch them across the table at me.

“Oh, and then there’s the fact that I grow copious amounts of marijuana. I don’t deal in the hard stuff, but a bit of pot here and there never started any wars. And I’m sure you’d like to know about the guns? The Glocks and the Berettas and the semi-automatics that I supply to gangs all over America?”

Louis throws down his cutlery, his face turning redder and redder by the second. “You’re a spoiled little shit, James. You think of no one but yourself. If you can’t respect me enough to tell me the fucking truth, then you should get the hell out of my sight. Now.”

I smile so wide my face hurts. Patting my mouth with a napkin, I stand and give him a small bow. “My pleasure, Sir. Honest to god, sincerely, it would be my pleasure.”

SOPHIA

I don't know who I am anymore. I never thought I'd become this person.

In August 1973, two armed gunmen forced their way inside a bank in Stockholm and proceeded to take hostages—three women and a man. They held them for five whole days inside that bank, one hundred and thirty-one hours, and during that time, something happened to the hostages. The gunmen got inside their heads. They altered their perspectives so dramatically that when the police finally stormed the building and set them free, the hostages thought their captors were there to protect them from the police. One of the women ended up becoming engaged to one of the bank robbers. One of the other women set up a charity canvassing for donations to cover the robbers' legal fees. And so Stockholm's Syndrome was given a name.