Atonement, page 5
His heavy, thick boots are planted on the floor, and his hands are on his hips. I sit in his huge, leather desk chair, absolutely dwarfed by it, and nonchalantly plop my feet up on his desk.
I like poking the bear.
He growls low.
“What?”
“Strip.”
I stare at him in surprise, not expecting that command. “Strip?”
“You heard me.” He doesn’t move.
Oh, great. He’s pissed, and now he’s either going to fuck me to remind me who’s boss or use my body in some way to punish me.
“Okay, so let’s get this straight. You made me a promise. I made you one. I kept my end up, and now you’re… getting mad at me or something?”
“Do I look mad?”
I nod. “You look fucking pissed.”
He frowns slightly, then nods. “I am.”
I throw up my hands in exasperation. “You’re maddening, you know that?”
“Takes two, babe.”
“What? You think I’m maddening?”
“I do.” No reaction. He glances at the clock on his desk. “You have two minutes, starting right now.”
“Or what?” I throw back at him, even as my hands fly to unfasten my shoes.
“Or I’ll strip you myself, and I’ll strip more than your fucking clothes.”
Oh God.
My hands tremble as I remove my shoes, then stand up and quickly disrobe. The rest of my clothing falls to the floor in a crumpled heap until all I’m doing is standing in front of him wearing nothing but my birthday suit.
“You’re beautiful.”
I look away. I can’t handle praise like that. It makes me uncomfortable.
“Thank you,” I murmur. I shiver, though I’m warm in here. He pulls out his phone and talks into the speaker. “Tell everyone I don’t want to be disturbed until further notice.”
He slides his phone into his pocket.
“Come here, baby,” Cain says. He walks to me, sits at his desk, then pulls me onto his lap. Once again, I’m struck by the contrast of him fully clothed and clothed well, and me stark naked, straddling him.
He lives for an imbalance in power.
Thrives on it.
I’m not so sure how I feel about this.
“Are we… talking about avenging my parents while I’m… naked?”
“We’ll be talking about a lot of things with you naked on my lap like this.”
A glimmer of excitement rushes through me before I can stop it, and it aggravates the hell out of me because this puts him at a decided advantage. After only days with Cain mastering my body, I began to be conditioned to crave more.
And I like it. I like all of it. I love the way he is with me. But I wonder if this isn’t to his full advantage to “discuss” things when I’m not wearing any clothes.
“It sounds to me like you’ll be getting the long end of the stick on that one?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. You might be getting the long end of the stick, too.”
Oh God. Men.
There’s a smile in his voice though.
He wants me naked and at his mercy, begging for him to touch me or allow me to come… because that’s when I’m at my most submissive with him, and he knows it.
I sit up straighter on his lap, as if to remind both him and me that I’m not going to cave so easily.
“I know there doesn’t seem to be a pattern about the cases I’ve been taking, but there is. You think I’ve been wasting time or taking random cases, but I haven’t. Every single one of these cases were related.”
“Were they?”
He nods, gently kneading my shoulders, and my rigid spine begins to soften. It doesn’t take long before I nestle up against his chest, and he weaves his fingers in my hair. “They were.”
“How so?”
“I’d like to see if you can put it together like I did.”
“Checking on my intellect and ability?”
“Violet.”
His tone is a warning he underscores with a sharp tug of a lock of my hair, but I don’t back off. I want to know.
“I’m serious. Are you checking to see if I’m as astute as you thought I was when you hired me?”
He leans in close, gathering my hair between his fingers, and pulls me to him so that his eyes bore into mine. “No. You’ve blown every fucking employee I have here out of the water. I want to go over the facts, because I want to be sure I didn’t miss anything.”
“Alright, then,” I say, very, very aware that I’m naked, and he’s not, and I’m at his mercy.
When he’s got me good and secured on his lap, he wraps his hands around my waist like a seat belt. The concept amuses me, even as my body thrums with need. His thick fingers graze the very edge of my sides. As he talks, he strokes the pad of his thumb down my side.
“You assumed I’d forgotten about your parents.”
“Well… no, I wouldn’t go that far.”
He stills the gentle massaging. “Why the tantrum then?”
I sputter. “I didn’t have a tantrum.”
“Babe, you stormed out of the house. You went to the training field. You grabbed a fucking cudgel.”
“I love working out with a cudgel.”
He holds still, his fingers still wrapped around my body before he continues. “You like working out with a cudgel when you’re angry.”
I don’t deny this.
“And you’re angry because something set you off today, reminding you that we’ve made no headway with your parents.”
I’m glad his back’s to me since I don’t really want to look in his eyes right now. He has a way of peeling back every defense mechanism I have with his eyes alone. If he had a superhero talent, I’d hazard a guess it would be x-ray vision.
I stare at the painting on the wall that hides his safe. When I speak to him, my voice is low, tremulous. “I know how to move that painting, Cain. The one that hides your weapons. I know the numbers to push to unlock the safe. I know when the safe door opens, the exact pile of weapons that will wait for me, the heft of the knife or the barrel of the gun when it slips into my palm. To others, the closed safe looks like a work of art. I, however, know it’s only a doorway.”
His arms tighten an infinitesimal amount. He doesn’t speak.
“Anyone else would think it’s only something pretty to decorate your wall. I know better, though.” I draw in a deep breath. “Do you know that you’re the only one in the world who’s ever found me out? The only one who knows how to manipulate me so that I open up, revealing my inner truth.”
My eyes flutter closed when he kisses my bare shoulder before he grazes the sharp edges of his teeth along my bare skin. A pulse of arousal thrums between my legs when he licks the place he bit.
“Don’t I fucking know it,” he says in a low whisper. “And feel honored that you’d trust me with that.”
I close my eyes, trying my best to hold onto the truth, to really push him to reveal everything he knows to me. I decide to let him in a little more.
“Today, when Skylar began pulling out the decorations, it reminded me that Christmas is coming. Every time the door opens, and the freezing cold air rushes in, it reminds me that Christmas is coming.” I draw in a breath, before I release it slowly. “My parents were killed at Christmas.”
I can still see the bloodstained carpet in front of the tree, the flash of brilliant red that told me they were gone. I had been only four years old and remember hardly anything else about that time, but I can’t forget those few details.
He nods slowly. “I know.”
He knows. What else does he know? My voice is quiet, but I’m slightly on edge when I respond. “You have done research, then.”
“Every damn night, Violet. I haven’t said anything to you because I didn’t want to give you false hope.”
My heart soars, then sinks, that quickly. Elated that he’s done this, that he’s given himself over to doing exactly what he promised—then deflated again when he admits he may not have much to go on. False hope?
I square my shoulders. “What have you found?”
Nestling me square in the center of his lap, he pulls me slightly to the left so he can get a better view of the computer screen. “First, public records.”
He double taps an innocuous icon on the bottom right corner of the screen, and several police reports come up. They’re poorly written in scratchy handwriting and the details are hard to read with the darkened page, but they are neatly organized. My throat feels tight when I see my parents’ names alongside mine… or the name I used to go by, anyway.
* * *
Russell and Anya Bates, murdered on Tuesday. Found dead. Buried in a funeral mass celebrated by Pastor Descamps at the First Church of Christ, Salem
* * *
“Why did you change your name, Violet?”
I don’t know why it surprises me that he knows I changed my name. Security and investigation are his bread and butter.
“How did you know that?”
He doesn’t answer at first, then scrolls further down. “When I began investigating, I found no local deaths for anyone by the name of Price. And there aren’t that many Violets in the world, you know.”
He hasn’t really answered the question.
“I know.” It’s why I changed my last name. I couldn’t bring myself to change the name that my mother gave me. I have this strange feeling that it’s the only part of me that’s unique, the only part of me that no one else can ever replicate.
“Once I found out my parents were killed, I felt it best to hide who I was.”
It feels awkward that he knows my history, this small part of me that no one has ever really truly seen, but in order for us to find the real truth, he has to.
He nods. “Now it’s time to tell me everything. I can’t help you piece together what you need to find if you don’t.”
I knew this was coming. I’m prepared.
I nod.
“Violet, you told me when you came here, your father was an assassin. How did you find that out?
“I was only four when I first went into foster care, so I don’t remember much about the first few couples that had me. I was thrown around like so much baggage, really, but it wasn’t until I was much older that I realized someone fabricated a story around me. By the time I was ten, it was well accepted that my parents were killed in a car accident during a rainstorm. I didn’t argue with what people thought they knew. By then, I knew there was a reason for the lies and discrepancies.”
“Understood. I’m not surprised you were clever even as a child.”
I shrug. “I tried. Sometimes I succeeded and other times I didn’t. I was terrible in school…”
“Let me guess. Not because you weren’t academically gifted, but you had a hard time doing as you were told.”
I smile at the sardonic lilt in his voice. “How’d you know?”
He pinches my bare ass. “Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out, baby.”
I smile. “So anyway… I was finally taken in by a minister and his wife.” I can’t keep the bitterness out of my tone. “They made no pretense about liking me but had no qualms about taking me into their home. Their kids were sheltered and judgmental, and the years I spent with them were the most miserable of my life.”
Cain’s quiet while I tell him this. I stare at his screen, at the old police reports, and imagine I can see the police station, the officer who’s likely retired by now, filling out all the details and leaving so many blanks. “Tell me what they did to you.”
I can’t stop the shudder that runs through me, that runs through him, at the memories he pulls from me with those few little words. The memories I’ve tried so hard to keep hidden.
“No.”
Again, his arm tightens around me. No one says “no” to Cain, so when I do, it always seems to throw him for a loop.
“Violet.” Another warning tone, but the gentle caress of his thumbs across my thighs softens the rebuke. “I want to know.”
And just like that, I’m ten years old again, locked in the dark closet where they punished me. I didn’t have to do anything wrong to make them put me there. It was who I was they were trying to cleanse from me. It was the wife who beat me, when her husband wasn’t home. I wasn’t the only one—she beat all her children, quoting scripture as she did. None dared to cross her, and even the littlest one would flinch when her mother turned her way. But I bore the worst of it.
“Look at my back and tell me what you want to know,” I say. “That bitch told me she’d scourge the devil out of me and God, did she try.” I flinch at the memory.
I feel Cain’s fingers along my back. I don’t see them, but I never forget they’re there.
“Their names.”
“Cain, no.”
I know him. I know what he’ll do. He’ll make it his mission in life to punish them for the harm they did me, over a decade before he ever met me. His justice is swift and merciless. I’ve stared into his eyes after he’s killed, and I know when he feels it’s justified, there’s no remorse. My grim reaper in the flesh.
“I’ll find them, Violet. You know I will. I just wanted your buy-in before I do.”
I blow out a breath. Now that he knows, I can’t stop him.
He strokes my back until I relax, until I’m slumped against him.
“Now, baby. Tell me the rest, and we’ll get started.”
Chapter Six
Violet
* * *
It’s late into the night when we’ve compiled everything we know between the two of us.
It’s admittedly not much to go on.
I’ve known since childhood that my father was an assassin because I overheard the minister’s wife talking to her husband. They knew, somehow, and used the knowledge as justification for the way they treated me.
We scoured everything we could together; he’d made some progress before we even talked.
We have the names of the people who fostered me, all of them, including the ones who had me for the longest time.
As an orphan in the system, someone could’ve adopted me, and it was a question I struggled with for most of my childhood.
Why not? Why not me? Why were other kids in foster care adopted into homes, but never me?
I didn’t want to be part of the families that took care of me, not until I was a much older teen and found myself in the care of a family that treated me like a human being. But by then I was independent and headstrong and wanted nothing to do with ties to anyone.
I’m still on Cain’s lap, snuggled in like I belong here. He lazily strokes his hand across my shoulder. Behind me lies the tray with the dinner we ate a while ago, the remains of chicken and potatoes that filled our bellies.
“It’s time to come up with a summary. You’ve filled in more blanks than I have. Took me four fucking weeks just to compile the list of foster parents.”
“Why?” I shake my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. And for God’s sake, if you’d only asked me…”
“You’d remember the name of the family that took you in when you were six?”
“Well, no, but I could remember some things.”
“You did, baby, but not the details from when you were a child. Hell, Violet, I think you blocked half of them from your fucking memory.”
Maybe I did.
He pulls up a screen and begins to read the notes we’ve compiled.
“Your dad was killed when you were four. Your name at the time was Violet, should’ve been Violet Bates, but nowhere in any record do you exist.”
According to public record, my parents had no children. “That’s odd, isn’t it? How was someone who didn’t exist put into the foster care system?”
He nods. “But you needed something to graduate high school, to get a job. What did you have for paperwork?”
I shrug. “My social worker gave me everything. But if there’s no record of my birth, where did she get it from?”
He makes another note to find her, then taps something onto his phone to Joe before he continues summarizing everything we’ve found.
“You believe your father was an assassin, because your foster parents at one point mentioned to each other they had you in their care because they were trying to right a wrong, and we can assume that wrong was your father’s history.”
“Well, yes. They said my parents.”
He pauses. “Is there a chance your mother was an assassin, too?”
I sit with this for a moment. “I… remember her being gentle. I remember she liked to sew. She didn’t eat meat, but she’d make me chicken tenders.” I shake my head. “How could a seamstress vegetarian be an assassin?”
Cain spins me around to look at him. “Never, ever assume.” He bends down and kisses me, a gentle brush of his lips to mine, before he looks away. “I can be gentle, too, Violet.”
I shiver. I know Cain’s called The Executioner, and he’s told me a bit about his past, but I never really put the words assassin and executioner side-by-side.
“Do you consider yourself an assassin, Cain?”
He doesn’t blink or look away. “I do.”
I’m falling in love with a murderer. Someone who takes the lives of others without regret, and I don’t know how to stop.
He holds my chin so I can’t look away. “You knew when you came here who I was, Violet. You knew when you offered to work for me what I do.”
“I know some of what you do, yes, but not all of it.”
“You knew that I killed for hire, and that I’ll do it again.”
My voice is hoarse with emotion. “I do.”
“But this isn’t about me. Soon, I’ll tell you everything I learned about how to be a good assassin, since this knowledge will help us find more about your parents.”
I straddle him, reach for his face, and frame it in my hands. My fingers graze his stubble. “Tell me now.”
