Prologue
Our captive lies before us, a pretty little thing with a face so innocent you wouldn’t believe what she is capable of. That face swims with a combination of guilt, fear, and lust. Is there anything more intoxicating than a pretty girl who knows she deserves to be punished? Who craves it as much as she fears it?
Once upon a time, we thought she was just a girl, a sweet young thing too curious for her own good.
Now I am obsessed with her.
And I’m not the only one.
My brothers are also feasting their eyes on her body, and I know each of them wants her as much as I do. Lustful tension is thick in the air, vengeance and desire making for a heady combination.
“Please let me go,” she whimpers.
“You are beautiful when you beg,” Aiden says. “But you don’t really want to go. What would you go to? Back to a world where you are used by the worst of the worst? Back to being treated like a disposable commodity or worse, a normal girl? No, my dear. We intend to keep you for our own, use you as we see fit, and ensure you atone entirely. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
“But this is… you’re going to hurt me.”
“We are going to exact a price for your sins, and yes, it will be painful at times,” he says, elegant as ever. “But you like pain, don’t you? If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“I don’t know what you think I did…”
“Shhh,” he drawls. “The time for arguing is over. The time for amends is beginning…”
“But…”
Thwack!
She lets out a wail as his crop makes sharp, swift contact with her mound. Her face and chest flush with arousal she would deny if only her body wasn’t displaying it in full glory.
“As I said,” Aiden says. “The time for arguing is over. Spread your legs for me. It is time you showed contrition through surrender.”
She hesitates before parting her legs a fraction of an inch.
“More,” Aiden says patiently.
She whimpers and spreads them a little wider still. She knows what is coming. We all do.
“No,” she whines, reaching down with a tentative hand to cover herself.
“Move your hand,” Aiden says with deceptive gentleness.
She keeps it there.
He lifts a brow at her, demanding her obedience through sheer force of will.
She shifts her hand. Smart girl. But it’s too late.
The crop comes back with a hard stroke that catches her directly above her sensitive little bud. Aiden is nothing if not precise.
Her yowl hits a register only cats can hear.
“I told you,” he says. “Do not cover yourself. You are not for yourself anymore. You are for us.”
She whimpers softly, and I almost feel sorry for her.
Then I remember what she did.
What she took from us.
And how she will never, ever be able to give it back.
[divider]Chapter One
Leo
No good love story starts with a funeral. But a dark one does.
My brothers and I watch grimly as our youngest brother is prepared to be lowered into the ground. It’s a cold fall day, and leaves are blowing their way into the maw in the earth, dancing over his coffin with the indifference nature likes to display to all tragedies.
It rained overnight, and again this morning. The area around the grave shimmers with gray puddles reflecting the dismal sky.
I have flashes of memory of stamping in puddles like the ones around the grave when we were small. Teddy loved it the most. I can hear his laugh, innocent and small. It is hard to believe that so many years have passed and now we are all grown. There is little innocence left in any of us now. We are adults, and the best of us has been taken too soon.
“Dearly beloved…”
The priest endeavors to start a small graveside service. It is ill-fated indeed.
“Don’t.”
Luke cuts him off with one rough word. Luke is built like a pit bull, all muscle and rage. He’s never been angrier than he is today. I wonder if he’s taken something to wear the edge off. He’s supposed to be sober. Then again, Theodore is supposed to be alive, so I suppose we’re all letting one another down in various ways.
The priest looks at him in surprise.
“Don’t give us that funeral bullshit,” Luke says. “It doesn’t belong to us. We’re not that kind of people. Just say he’s dead and put him in the fucking ground.”
The priest looks at Aiden for confirmation. People do that. He is the eldest of us, and he has a natural demeanor of authority.
Aiden nods. None of us are much for pretty words, and even less for ceremony. Luke is blunt, but right. Theodore is gone, and no amount of pretty morbid words and religious pageantry is going to bring him back, or assuage our grief. Funerals are supposed to be for the living, but we will deal with this loss in our own way. On this day, we are here because you have to put the body in the ground sooner rather than later.
I never imagined Teddy would go first, though maybe I should have. He was always the sweetest of us, the most innocent. He never wanted to be involved in any of our dealings. He wanted to live a simple, easy life. We indulged him. We allowed him to stray from the family business, to strike out on his own and to enjoy himself.
He was the one the bastards went for. He didn’t protect himself because he didn’t think he had to.
I look around at our little familial grouping. Once upon a time there were six of us. Now there are only three. Fate and bad men have taken half of us. Luke is right; the response to that really shouldn’t be standing around dressed in stiff clothing listening to even stiffer words.
Aiden and I are in black suits, black ties. White shirts. The simple attire of mourning. It’s also the attire of dining, and of business. There’s probably something to that. Luke is wearing an emulation of our attire. Black jeans. Leather jacket. Black t-shirt with a design on it that would probably be inappropriate if I could be bothered looking at it properly.
To a casual observer, we might not even look all that much like brothers save for the fact we are all tall. Other than that, the three of us threw to different parts of our heritage. Aiden is lithe, with a natural elegance. He can be underestimated at times, if he chooses to hide his charisma. Aiden’s eyes are a reddish brown, and his dark hair curls riotously if it is left to grow. He mostly slicks it to the side to give the semblance of orderliness. Today it is slicked down hard all the way.
Luke is built like a bull. His face is chiseled. When he takes care of himself, he looks not unlike Captain America. Luke is the one most likely to be mistaken for being wholesome, though I think he struggles with his demons the most. He is blond, and his hair currently looks like he was dragged out of a bar after a hard night. Which is accurate. Today isn’t a day to police Luke’s fashion, or force him to brush his hair. It’s a day to mourn Teddy, though I think we all know we are going to mourn him forever.
I am somewhere in the middle in terms of appearance. Somewhat elegant, but built powerfully. A dancer’s body, I’ve heard it called. My features have some refinement, but are strong. I am the second eldest of the three of us, and I have very specific recreational tastes that make me useful to Aiden and that will make me exceptionally useful in the avenging of Theodore’s death.
The priest starts the crank that lowers the coffin into the ground, and the three of us watch Teddy’s last journey.
“He deserved better than this,” Aiden says, breaking his silence.
I know he is blaming himself. He’s the eldest, and he has been taking responsibility for the rest of us pretty much since the day he was born. Our parents were both killed when Teddy was just a few months old. It was an assassin who took our parents, and it is another who has taken Teddy, we can be sure of that.
At the time of our parents’ death, other extended family members and various business partners seemed to be poised to take over the family’s businesses. It was likely to be a complete seizure of all our family had achieved and attained. But Aiden got himself emancipated at the age of sixteen, and used our funds to engage lawyers. He was just a boy, but he fought with skill and documents and legal prowess. To this day, there is nothing that man cannot do with a contract.
Aiden ensured we all got to grow up in the same house together. He is the reason we are who we are, and have what we have. At the time our parents died, I was just twelve years old. Luke was four, and Teddy was less than a year old.
It was challenging, but we made do. We had a nursemaid for Teddy, and a butler to run the house, but even as a teenager, Aiden was firmly in control and he had no qualms about enforcing his will. He made it clear to anybody who underestimated him because of his age that it was a mistake to do so.
Because of Aiden, the four of us were a family for the last twenty years. Teddy had only just turned twenty-one when he was killed. He had his whole life ahead of him. He was innocent.
Aiden is thirty-six now, and I am thirty-two. Luke is twenty-four. The difference in age also contributes to how we can seem almost unrelated at times. The gap between Aiden and Teddy was especially stark. I think Aiden related more to Theodore as a son than brother.
I listen to the mundane, maudlin creaking of those wheels and yet again I swear private vengeance on whoever has caused us all this much pain. Luke is going to be borderline impossible to handle now. He already liked to drink far too much, and indulge in recreational substances. He’d gotten clean, but how long will he stay that way with grief gnawing at him?
I know Aiden will stay strong, but I have to wonder how long he will be able to resist the darkness that must surely be growing by the hour. First he lost our parents, and now he loses the brother he raised. It must feel to him as though family is a very transient concept.
Myself? I do not need to worry. I know precisely what I am going to do. I am going to hunt the responsible parties down, and I am going to unleash the kind of cruelty on them that cannot be depicted in cinema due to legal regulations.
This funeral could have been packed, but we have elected to keep Teddy’s passing a secret.
We still do not know who killed him.
He had plenty of friends. Everybody loved him. But none of them were there at the end, and they don’t deserve to mourn him intimately now. We are the ones who have a part of ourselves forever gone. And we are the ones who are going to ensure the person who did this suffers.
“Someone’s here,” Luke grunts.
He’s being hypersensitive. He gets that way when he indulges in things he shouldn’t. Of course people are here, in the broader sense. This is a public cemetery. People are allowed to be here. We would rather they weren’t, but we can’t stop them passing through.
Luke has been agitated by the presence of strangers since the funeral began. If he had it his way, we’d shut down the whole city, tell all nine million of them to get the hell out so we could bury our brother.
Still, I glance in the direction his bloodshot blue eyes are staring. Aiden’s eyes follow as well.
There’s a figure standing a hundred or so feet away. She’s wearing a black coat and standing under a tree in a hapless attempt to avoid the rain. We might not have seen her, except for the way that the wind catches a corner of her coat and the lining is exposed. Looks like a red satin flag being flapped at us.
We turn back to the grave after a moment. There are a lot of reasons for a woman to be in a cemetery. None of them are pleasant, and we have no interest in interfering with other mourners.
Teddy’s coffin continues to squeak its way into the ground. They should really oil the mechanisms, but I suppose operating in these conditions makes it hard to maintain gears correctly.
“She’s still staring at us,” Aiden murmurs a minute or so later.
We turn our heads again. This time, when she sees us all looking, she turns and scurries into the weather. I feel my heart leap like a hunting dog sighting a bird going down.
“Follow her,” Aiden says. “Find out who she is.”
I know he is talking to me. By now, Luke has slumped to his knees by the grave. His filthy blond hair is hanging in a soaked, shaggy mess around his head because he’s refusing an umbrella, and it has started to rain more heavily. He wants to suffer, I think. Luke believes that if he suffers, things will improve. My personal beliefs are different. I believe that making others suffer will improve things for me.
Luke takes after our mother, as did Teddy. She was an artistic woman with a whimsical nature. She loved her babies intensely, and I know that being taken from us so early must have destroyed her more than actually dying did. I pray that she did not know it was happening. I hope one moment she was alive and full of sweet joy, and the next she was at rest. I hope that for her, and for Teddy.
Me, on the other hand, I follow in my grandfather’s mold. He was a stoic bastard whose name is still feared in certain Latvian villages. He was the one who insisted on coming to America and making something of himself. When it turned out that it was almost impossible to do that by strictly legal means, he turned to more creative modes.
The Levin family has run every kind of organized crime gambit there is. We are legit these days, of course, but our grandfather ran moonshine, guns, and anything else he could get his hands on. He was a one-of-a-kind man, and I like to think he lives on in me.
Aiden is more like our father was. Controlled. Precise. Specific. Words that should really only be used to describe an accountant, but when paired with his native dangerous aura… Aiden does not seem like he should be as frightening as he truly is. Foolish people underestimate him all the time. But they only make that mistake once.
I will not see my brother’s coffin reach the end of its journey, and for that I am grateful. I have seen enough. Too much. I have carried enough impotent grief. Following this woman gives me something to do.
I am good at this sort of thing. I keep a good distance, and I do not walk right behind her. If she happens to glance around, she will likely not notice me. I stay at a right angle behind her, triangulating her movement. It allows me to keep her in sight and over a little bit of distance, draw even with her and even get in front of her.
I am closer now than before, and can see her face from time to time. She is pretty. Very pretty. She has wide eyes that give her a perpetually innocent expression, and a full mouth that speaks to sin. She is young. Perhaps around Teddy’s age. I wonder if she was a friend. Or something more.
Levin men do not date much. Aiden does not have time, I am not often able to find a woman who can match my intellect, let alone my interests, and Luke, well, he is likely the exception, though he keeps quiet about it.
I am not so simple as to assume that any woman hanging around a grave is necessarily a girlfriend, however. Teddy was popular. He was liked by a lot of people at college. I suspect if this was one of his school connections, the cemetery would have been inundated with coeds.
It’s very possible that this cute little blonde with the short bob and the snub nose is something else altogether. Something closer to a spy. Plenty of people use attractive young women as runners. They are overlooked as potential threats usually. Traditionally, nobody would dare touch a woman, let alone use her in this way, but it’s 2026, and a lot of the old rules are changing in response to a world that doesn’t play by many, if any, anymore.
She looks over her shoulder repeatedly, nervous. I can practically feel her anxiety as she hurries away, head down. I wonder if she can feel me close. Some people have good prey senses. She certainly looks like she wants to go to ground as soon as possible.
It’s too late for her, though. She is on my radar. I have her scent, and I will not leave her tail until I know everything there is to know about her.
If she is known to Teddy, then she knows she shouldn’t have been at the cemetery. We, the family requested privacy and showing up to stand ominously at a distance is not really the definition of privacy. At the very least, she has been a naughty girl.
She seems to have a pretty figure, though it is hard to tell under a coat. I like the way it seems to flare out around her bust and hips. There’s something a little old-fashioned and classic about it. The coat looks expensive, too.
Either this young lady has impeccable fashion sense and a very generous clothing budget, or someone has dressed her. Strange thought to have about an adult, but there is something about the level of polish I’m seeing in her attire that makes me think she either is a designer, or has one.
It’s the bob, I decide. It’s too classic to be contemporary. Or maybe it’s the hat. A dark beret set at an angle far too jaunty for a funeral. The shirt beneath the coat has broad lapels. She could have stepped right out of a vintage era. She is wearing brown leather boots, also well shined, also vintage.
Interesting.
She walks far longer than I expect her to, several blocks through the city. At one point, she pulls out her phone and loses herself in it for a moment, but the streets are too busy to do that for long before she almost walks into someone and is cursed at roundly.
“Sorry,” she says, her head low. She holds herself much like the incarnation of an apology for a few steps before straightening again. An actress of sorts, then.
I do not really think she had anything to do with Teddy’s death. A girl like this is much more likely to have been a friend, perhaps a girlfriend, perhaps someone who wanted to be a girlfriend, but never caught his eye. Women are capable of all kinds of quiet madness when it comes to adoration denied.
I am beginning to doubt that following a pretty young woman is going to get us any closer to Teddy’s killer. To find him, we are going to have to look into any number of cartels, shadow governments, or general assholes. The police investigation has gone nowhere. Teddy was found dead in an alley, left like so much trash. I don’t like to think about it. None of us do. But the fact of the matter is our brother is dead and we do not know who did it. This woman is the first lead we have had since the terrible event happened a week ago.
I continue to follow her as she weaves between people. Sometimes I am ahead of her, other times I am inside a store, then behind, then across the street. I flow with the city, and she appears entirely ignorant of my presence. I have been trained by the best when it comes to surveillance. Each of us brothers has a role in the family business. Aiden is the brains, in the sense that he is a consummate negotiator and capable of synthesizing data from sources obvious and not so obvious. That second part is where I come in. I am the one who is known, inside our family at least, for ferreting out secrets.
My methods are sometimes surreptitious, but often rough. I employ very little in the way of ethics when it comes to discovering what I need to know. Aiden pretends not to know, though I think deep down he is more dangerous than I am.
And then, of course, there is Luke. Poor Luke. The lost boy. The middle child in a family of four, somehow.
It is time to use a few of the tools I am fortunate enough to have access to. The first of them looks like a phone, but is actually a different device. When I activate it, it scans the phones around me, cataloging their numbers. As I follow the girl, it continues to sort through the numbers around us, discarding the ones that drop out of range, and adding new ones. Because I am following her, and only her, her number is sorted to the top of the most frequently pinged list. And just like that, I have not only her number, but in effect, her location.
The concepts of privacy and freedom were lost longer ago than most people realize, but most would still be shocked if they knew just how much each and every one of them had become part of a walking swarm of cloud data. The Matrix had it right, a stream of code corresponding to redheads, brunettes, and this mysterious blonde who is now getting into a ride-share car.
If I wanted to flex my digital muscle, now would be the opportunity to do something very, very funny. We have access to all manner of databases. In fact, we own significant shares in the company that car is working for. We also own significant shares in the manufacturer of the car.
I smirk to myself darkly, a real sense of pleasure running through my veins. My brother is dead, and frankly I did not anticipate smiling again so soon, but this sort of thing is my lifeblood.
I pull out another device that has been syncing with the first. This one performs a different set of actions. This one allows me to tap into the back end of the car by entering the license plate.
I could drive that car, now pulling away, like a toy vehicle if I wanted to. I could amuse myself as much as a boy with an RC car on a dirt track. The city would be my playground, and the driver and my quarry would be my playthings.
But that would ruin the game. It would certainly tip our hand. If she is connected to a crime family, organization, or just a company out for blood, doing that would certainly ruin the element of surprise, which I still have.
Instead, I content myself with tracking her as she moves, discovering her home address, perusing all her social media, most of her private messages, hacking near instantly into her email, and accessing every bit of data on her from her credit score to her dental records. Best to be subtle about these sorts of things.
[divider]
Ella
I shouldn’t have gone to the funeral. I should have stayed away, not drawn attention to myself. I’m sure they saw me. I shouldn’t have stared. I looked too hard. People have a sixth sense for when others are looking at them.
When they turned around I felt a bolt of energy going through me. I was almost physically jolted by it. The three of them had so much grief and menace in their gazes. I didn’t recognize any of them, but I felt as though they all stared right through me in that moment.
I left as quickly as I could, but the feeling of having brought some dark thing with me out of that grim cemetery has persisted even as I step into the shower.
Teddy deserved better, in every way. That was not a proper send-off for a man whose smile made my world brighter. Usually women are given credit for lighting up rooms and such things, but Teddy truly did that. Everywhere he went, his energy was effervescent. Now he is gone and the world is fifty shades of beige. The color seems to have gone out of everything.
I knew the interment was supposed to be private, and there was no official funeral. Teddy often told me that his older brothers were obsessive, and I guess he was right. It was no simple matter to find out when and where their little ceremony was going to take place, but I had to go. For him. For me. For my sins.
As hot water from the shower runs over my face and down my body, I feel oddly numb. This should be comforting. I should feel warm after being out in the chilly cold. But I don’t know if I will ever feel truly warm again. I don’t know that I deserve to, either.
The image of those three big men flashes back into my mind. They dominated the entire cemetery. They seemed almost as large as giants. The priest seemed almost incidental in his white robes turned greige with the rain and sort of blending in with the bad weather. It was as though he was more part of the tableau of grief than a real person.
None of it seemed real, actually. Nothing has seemed properly real since Teddy passed.
That’s part of why I had to go. I had to know that it was real. I had to confirm for my own mental health, or lack thereof, that I hadn’t imagined those horrors that took him. So I was drawn to that grave, and even though I kept my distance, I was also drawn to those three men who must be in even more pain than I am. They are the only ones who would understand me now, I think.
I almost went up to them and introduced myself, but then they turned around to look at me and I felt a chill go right through me. Something in my gut told me I needed to get away.
They didn’t come after me, but that hair-raised-on-the-back-of-my-neck feeling is still with me no matter how hot I turn the shower up. Steam fills the room in that thick curling way it can only do on very cold days. It’s eerie and unsettling. Are there eyes on me now? A shiver passes through me at the thought.
I’m being paranoid, I tell myself. Nobody followed me. Nobody who matters even knows I exist. I run through the events after I left the cemetery. I walked for what felt like forever with no real destination in mind. I just had to move. Block after block I slipped through the city, surrounded by life, and yet feeling drained of it myself.
When I tired myself out and started to become exhausted, I used my phone to grab a ride with a ride-share car that happened to be less than a minute away. My boss would have wanted me to have called one of his drivers, but I don’t want anything to do with him ever again.
The driver was a cool-looking guy who had red dyed hair. I looked at him closely, just in case. I’ve been doing that lately, not wanting to trust anyone. Not believing what my own eyes tell me. His car was pretty fancy, and he was dressed in a way that I could call timeless. Not the way I dress. He was wearing ripped baggy jeans and a vest over a black graphic t-shirt. He could have been in a 90s hacker movie, or an early two-thousands rave, or a twenty-ten… you get the idea. It’s strange what becomes classic, and what just becomes dated.
I think back to what happened next. It’s already starting to fade. It feels like I have to fight my brain for memory now. I have a feeling something important took place, but I don’t know what, and it’s not coming to me. It’s that horrible feeling, like when a word is on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t remember it.
I just sat back in that car and I did what I’m doing now, but in the shower. I wondered what I’m going to do. I thought Ted and I were going to get married. He hadn’t asked me, but our relationship was new and I was delusional enough to have planned it all out—without having told him a single detail, of course. Ted had no idea what our future was going to be, but I did. I’d already decided we’d have two boys and a girl. The boys would be Clark and Kent. The girl would be April. Ted would refuse to name his sons after Superman, but I planned to sneak it by him anyway. Maybe name the first boy Ken, and then the second one Clark. I have a thing for heroes. That’s what Ted seemed to me to be.
But that’s all over now. Those dreams were lowered into the ground today, and there’s nothing I can do to bring them back. There won’t be any justice for Ted. I know his brothers will try to find the killer, but all they’ll find is pain.
When I came home, my house didn’t feel like mine anymore. It was that same weird floating feeling but projected onto the walls I decorated myself. Did I ever really think ducks with little blue bows on their necks were cute? Or did I just see it in an old magazine and let a curator from the nineties make that decision for me?
I get out of the shower, almost entirely wrinkled, and I wrap myself in a towel. I know I should get dressed, but somewhere between my bathroom and the chest of drawers that is practically directly outside it, I get lost. I find myself wandering my apartment in aimless, small circles, cooling quickly from the shower.
This place does not seem like home anymore. I don’t feel like home anymore. I feel like a stranger to myself. I look around and I see places Ted once stood, things he touched, the picture of the silly frog that he laughed and laughed at. He only came here once, but I can picture him here as clearly as if he’d lived here with me for a lifetime.
Tears fog my eyes as I finally pull on a pair of flannel pajamas, then go and sit in the yellow chair by the window, and stare out of it until it is time for bed.
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