Defiance (New Adult Romance) (Isaac & Maya) (20 page)

“Fuck, Sloane,” Jace exhales. He’s obviously offended too, but he also notices how rattled I am and he’s buying me some time. “You think I’m a rapist too now? Or that I’d hit her?” Sloane doesn’t answer him. “What the hell was she doing under your desk, anyway?”

“Servicing me.”

“But you’re supposed to be meeting with someone.”

“I’m wearing a skirt in case I had to get out of the chair.”

“That is so fucking rude,” he tells her.

“To who? Audrey? She gets off sneaking around like that. She was good and this was her reward.”

Jace stands
there speechless, blinking as his jaw hangs open. I guess this is my cue. “I’ll make this quick,” I say, shaking off the sting of betrayal. “Is this office bugged right now?”

“No.”

She’s probably lying. “Has it ever been?”

“A few times, but they gave up after Jace started sweeping it at totally random intervals.”

“I’m taking that as a compliment, just so you know,” he snaps.

“You should. The place is falling apart without you. What will it take for you to—”

“You let me call her from here, Sloane,” I interrupt before she pisses me off even more by trying to get him back. “You let me
bring
her here.” Actually, I couldn’t get much angrier because now I’m thinking about Maya. “Do they know about her?”

“Maya? Yeah, of course they know about her, Isaac,” Sloane replies like it’s no big deal. “Diego knew you were training Luke’s real girlfriend.”

“Yeah, but do they know about the rest of it?”

“They do. I told them because it made you look like a good person.”

“Do you expect me to thank you for that?”

“You should,” she says, smirking at me.

Jace puts his hand on my shoulder before I rage out on her. “This is ridiculous,” he says. “Cut the crap and actually fucking talk to each other.”

He’s right. I’m letting her get to me. This isn’t a huge surprise, I always figured they knew about Maya. “How did they find out about what we were doing, Sloane?” I ask calmly, taking a seat.

Sloane drops her defenses when I do, the arrogance on her face lifting until I see my old friend. “Phil’s wife, from what I can tell. She hired a PI to catch him fucking around. They started digging on the hot young blonde he had living in that apartment. The dick was a disgraced FBI agent or some shit, so he still had friends. It went up the chain. They leaned on Phil, Phil gave them me, and I… didn’t have much of a choice but to pass it on to you.”

“How long ago was this?”

“It all went down while you were on that last job with Maya. That’s why I was so jumpy when you showed up.”

“You tried to get me to talk about it all that day while this place was bugged, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. I did. I’m fucking sorry,” she says.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Glory said you took those girls to the police yourself.”

“Glory’s a backstabbing cunt, Isaac.”

As much as I despise her choice of words, she’s right about that. “How the fuck could you do this to me?”

“I didn’t have a choice. I’m the one that held her leash and handed it over to Phil. You’re the only name I had to get out of some seriously deep shit. Deep shit that I was only in because you brought me a
bona fide fucking sex slave
.”

I’m the one that brought this to her door, maybe she does have a right to be angry. “I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, you did, Isaac,” she hisses. “Hell, I fucking knew. That’s why I was able to pinpoint the other two.”

“I knew they were more broken than the others, but I didn’t know where they came from.”

“No, you didn’t want to think about where they came from,” she shoots back. “Or you just accepted it as a fact of life, I was never sure.”

“I never hurt any of them.”

“And that’s what I told the feds. They didn’t give a fuck. It was a shitty thing to do and I didn’t want to do it, but I figured you’d just tell them what you knew and it would be done with.”

“There is no fucking way that you thought it would be that simple. I didn’t know shit, Sloane! Nothing.”

“I find that hard to believe,” she scoffs.

“So did they! I had
nothing
to bargain with. I don’t have anything to do with that, I never have. How the hell could you think that about me?”

“You’re forgetting that I’ve seen you in action. I’ve seen you make someone scream, and not from pleasure.” Her eyes burn as they stare through me. Sloane always did get squeamish around the heavy shit.

“They wanted it,” I whisper.

“So did you.”

“I got off on the power sometimes, but it was a job. I never fucking forced that on anyone.”

“Will you
ever
stop deluding yourself?”

“Sloane… you don’t understand. That’s just what sex was, I didn’t know any better yet. I never had anything else,” I confess, trying not to glance over at Jace, who is way outside his comfort zone. “I
tried
pretending to be somewhat normal with the other girls. I fucking tried, but every time I treated them like a person instead of a thing when I was inside them, they lost interest. Physically. They fucking hated it. Those girls were messed up in the head and reeling from the abandonment. They needed something intense and twisted to feel alive, to feel wanted, and I was a safe place to get it.”

“I know, but… we were supposed to make them better.” Sloane bites her shaking lip and stares down at her desk. She likes to play the bad ass, unattached, always-in-control domme of steel, but deep down, she’s a teddy bear with a heart of gold. She might have misjudged me, but I still know that’s true about here. Maybe that’s why it rips my fucking heart out.

“Sometimes, there’s no turning back Sloane. You’re just broken inside and there’s nothing anyone can do to fix it.” I whisper. We’ve had this conversation, when she’d break down about what happened to a new girl and wonder why we couldn’t figure out a way to help them. I always feared that would be my story, but that’s not how it turned out. I got lucky. I found someone like me and we fixed each other.

“Isaac…” Sloane murmurs, shaking her head as her face hardens. Sloane takes excellent care of her subs, she loves them. The pain those girls have been through, what I’ve been through, it makes her so angry. She knows what made me this way. I never liked her pity, which she always hid well, or so I thought. Maybe she never had any, maybe she’s always thought I was a monster. “There’s one thing I could never understand about it and I guess this is
the best time to ask,” she says.

“What?”

“Why were they your favorites? Why did you like those three the most?”

I shudder, my cheeks flushing in some form of shame, even though there was never anything shameful about it. I clear my throat loudly and stand taller in an attempt to shake it. “They needed me the most and I liked taking care of them. And they were… the cuddliest,” I confess, shocking her. “They actually enjoyed it when I was gentle and they wanted to get held afterward.” Jace shifts on his feet uncomfortably next to me. “The others hated that. I made them feel safe. That was my favorite part. You already know this, Sloane,” I say. “I told you.”

“I guess I thought you might be lying,” she admits.

“Is that why you thought I was involved with that shit?”

“You’re his son, Isaac.”

My stomach churns. That’s how everyone will always see me once this all goes public. It’s how they’ll see my little brothers, too. “There are a lot of different clubs. A lot of different circles,” I explain, mostly for the assholes that are probably listening. “He has never,
ever
let me see any of that shit. I might be his kid, but I’m simply not that high up on the totem pole. Or maybe he just doesn’t trust me enough, or maybe it’s just a matter of taste and he knows that doesn’t mesh well with mine. I don’t fucking know.”

“You saw those three girls.”

“There’s five others from Eastern Europe in his harem, too. They came here legally, according to the feds. How the fuck was I supposed to know the difference?”

“So then… how the hell are you getting out of this Isaac?”

I’m not telling you. Let’s see how much you really fucking care.
“Maybe I’m not getting out of it, Sloane,” I whisper. “They want me to go back in there and try to buy a girl from my dad, or hopefully get one as a gift.”

Her lips part as her eye widen in horror. “That will never happen. You’ve been gone for
way
too long. You can’t go back.”

“Yeah, no shit,” I snap. “But now I’m the one out of fucking options.”

I watch her scrambling for a plan of attack, grasping at straws for a few moments until she can’t escape the fact that there’s nothing she can do. “Isaac…” Sloane’s jaw starts to tremble. “We need to get him out of the country,” she tells Jace in a panicked voice, fighting back tears as the reality of what she tried to do to me sinks in.

“They’re watching him,” Jace responds, playing along. “It’s pretty much impossible at this point.”

“But we have to do something.”

“Yeah,” I breathe. “You need to go back in time and tell me when I could have slipped back in and poked around until I found something to give them. I could have done something to save my ass if I had known. Now I’m fucked.”

“We’ll figure something out,” she assures me, but I can see how frightened she is.

“No,
we
won’t. You know me, I’ll get out of this somehow, no thanks to you. And when I do,
we
are fucking done. You can keep that fucking money, you can keep this fucking club. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I never want to see your face again.”

“I’ll still help you any way I can.”

“Don’t you
dare
make a move and fuck me over. I’m handling this.”

“I won’t.” She steps away her desk, almost like she wants to hug me goodbye like we always did. “I am so sorry, Isaac.”

“So am I.”

“When this is all over—”

“It is over for us, Sloane. It’s fucking over. Have a nice life.”

Her eyes meet mine and I do see the remorse I’m craving, but it’s not comforting. It doesn’t matter if she cares and it doesn’t matter if she didn’t have a choice. She really thought I was capable of that. All this time, she was the one that I thought believed in me. I guess no one really did until Maya. And if it wasn’t for Glory, I’d be exactly where Sloane thinks I am. Royally fucked.

27

Isaac

“Are you sure that was a good idea?” Jace asks when we’re clear of the building.

“No. But fuck it, she can squirm.”

“Isaac, what if she—”

“There’s nothing she can do. Why do you think she got so upset?”

“Because she fucking cares about you and she made a mistake.”

“Well, I don’t fucking care about her anymore and I don’t need her bullshit apologies.”

“Isaac…” It isn’t like Jace to defend people when they fuck up, especially to this degree. He must know what it’s like to need forgiveness now.

“Did you think I could do that, too?” I ask tentatively, unsure if I even want to know.

“Um… I don’t know, honestly. I never really thought about it before. I never thought you were raping anybody, if that helps. It was pretty obvious that you didn’t really like that shit, what with your crazy politically correct language standards and the raging drug addiction that almost killed you.”

“Thank you for going with me to see Sloane.”
And not thinking I’m a horrible person.

“No problem.”

“My mom… my real mother, not my dad’s wife…” I trail off until Jace nudges me with his elbow. “She was only twelve when she had me. Glory bought her for my dad.”

“Shit, Isaac,” he exhales. “How long have you known that?”

“Not very long. That’s the reason I’m off the hook, I guess.”

“Yeah, I’d fucking hope so. So, what, Glory’s doing all this to save her own ass?”

“No, she’s still doing it to save mine. She didn’t have to say anything.”

“Fuck, man, that’s rough,” he says, growing more and more uncomfortable. “Uh… so, like, how do you feel about that?”

I bust out laughing, making him even more confused. “I feel like going to the fucking gym and hitting something.”

Jace breathes out a sigh of relief. “I am so glad you said that. I couldn’t suck more at this shoulder to cry on shit if I tried.”

“Thanks for asking anyway.”

“You told Maya that stuff, right?”

“Of course.”

“Does she know about your money?”

“No. I haven’t told her. What if she…”

“That’s not going to happen,” he insists. “You guys are already solid. Don’t fuck it up with any big secrets.” We drive in silence for a few minutes. Jace looks like he wants to tell me something else. “My dad is sick, Isaac.”

“How sick?”

“Less than six months to live sick.”

Fuck. “Jace, I’m so sorry,” I say.

“I didn’t want to tell you because… your father has come by a few times to visit him,” he murmurs, nervously glancing in my direction.

“Jace… this one isn’t about me,” I assure him. “How’s your mother doing?”

“She’s already fighting with his other kids about his fucking money,” he snaps. “Even though there’s a will and he’s not dead yet.”

“Not all women are like that.”

“I know. I guess it was easier to think that because then it’s not really her fault that she’s a… bad person,” he corrects himself.

“She’s a gold digging bitch,” I say, shocking him. “I admit it, they exist. They can’t all be as perfect as Maya and...”

“You can say her name, dude” he chuckles. “I’m not getting all Voldemort with this one.”

“Does Piper know about your father?”

“Yeah. She’s known for a while. She knows… everything. Everything there is to know about me.”

Good. That’s how it should be.
“I’m really fucking sorry about how that all went down.”

“I know. No hard feelings. I’m getting her back anyway, this is just a temporary setback,” he says, like he’s trying to convince himself as much as me.

I hope so, but I doubt it.
“That’s the spirit.”

“Okay,” he exhales, shaking his head. “This sad bro therapy session is officially over and we’ll never speak of it again. Let’s go punch something.
Actually, I’m fucking starving, let’s eat first.”

“Alright. I’ll text Maya and tell her I’ll be home late.”

“I want to rag on you about that, but I can’t come up with anything good. But just so you know, I think you’re totally whipped and it’s pathetic.”

“Thanks, asshole,” I laugh. “Guilty as charged.”

I get a chance to tease him back later, because we stuff ourselves with food like a couple of ladies trying to eat away their problems and never get around to punching anything. We drop by the gym anyway. Jace is flush with cash now that he isn’t paying me back, plus he knows how much I have, so he’s more than happy to discuss the logistics of expanding and upgrading the place. By the end, we’ve digested enough to lift a little bit, and I resist the urge to poke fun at his disappearing eight pack because jokes that make people feel like shit aren’t funny. Apparently he’s been eating away his problems for a while now.

I don’t get home until 7:00, which gave Maya plenty of time to work on her thesis but it also means she’s been alone for a long time. I hope she’s okay. I hear her scampering around on the other side of the door and can’t help but grin like a madman.

She’s wearing a maniacal grin of her own when I open it. It’s been a while since we got to perform the running leap welcoming ritual because I’m always here when she get home from school. Giggling, she runs toward me from the back of the apartment, so there’s a lot of force when I catch her. It’s one of the greatest feelings in the world.

I lock my arms under her ass as she squeals my name and pecks around my face so quickly it tickles. She’s not as tiny as she was when I first got her back. Maya’s not as heavy and healthy as she was when I left her last fall, either, but her eyes are almost as bright and her laughter is strong. She’s almost back to normal. It’s unbelievably satisfying.

“Did you have fun?” she asks, laying her head on my shoulder as I carry her into the living room.

“Yeah, we did.” I should tell her about Sloane, but for once I’m coming home from dealing with this bullshit in a good mood. I don’t want to ruin it by worrying her. “Piper answered one of his phone calls last night,” I mention.

“She did?”

“Yep.”

“Did she have anything nicer to say other than her standard, ‘fuck off’?”

“Yeah, they talked for a little while.”

“That’s a good sign, right?”

“I think so.”

“Me too,” she murmurs as I flop us onto the couch. Leaning back, her eyes drop down to my raging erection that’s digging into her thigh and she bites her lip, which only makes me harder. “So what am I in for tonight, Isaac?” she coos.

I groan out a laugh. The only thing I’d rather do than tear her fucking clothes off right now and devour her is actually talk to her. “I was thinking about
not
having hours upon hours of raunchy sex with you until neither of us can walk.”

“Really?” she says, trying to hide her excitement.

“Yeah, really. How was your day, baby?”

Her nose crinkles up and she gets all wiggly and adorable in my lap, kissing me before she starts babbling about something I pretend to remotely understand so I don’t feel like a total idiot. She sure jumped on this no sex thing pretty quickly without protest. That probably means I should ease up on jumping on her. She’s just so fucking hot and I have more energy than I know what to do with now that I’m coming off the zombie pills. It’s not like we never talk, but I don’t want her to start feeling like a piece of meat. That’s not what she is.

She trusts me so much, she loves me so fucking much, probably as much as I love her. I can see it in her eyes, feel it in the way she touches me every time. Once she’s done telling me about school, I wrap my arms around her waist and squeeze, burying my face in her chest. Her breasts press into my throat, the softness threatening to distract me.

“Maya,” I mutter, hugging her tighter. “I have something to tell you.”

“What?” she asks, that awful worry in her voice returning.

“Nothing bad, Rookie.” I pick my head up and kiss the tip of her nose. “I want to buy you something ridiculously expensive.”

“Like what?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Isaac… you already spent way too much on my clothes,” she replies, shaking her head. “Maybe in a couple of years when you get that inheritance, but—”

“I already got one. I’ve had it the whole time.”

“Are you serious?”

“I didn’t lie, I just left something out.”

“I don’t care,” she replies quickly. “It doesn’t make a difference.”

“Yes, it does. Ask me.”

“Absolutely not. You hate talking about money.”

“Not when I get to spend it on you.”

“Too bad,” she scoffs. “I don’t want to know.”

“You’re so fucking impossible,” I laugh, locking my fingers with hers. “Thirteen.”

“Thirteen what?”

“Well, it obviously wasn’t thirteen thousand.”

“It better not begin with a B.”

“No, it’s the M word.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” She isn’t the least bit excited, it made her nervous.

“No. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I don’t want you to think it’s because I don’t trust you.”

“I…” She’s so cute when she gets overwhelmed, but she’s fucking cute when she does anything and this face still concerns me. “You’re still not spending it on me,” she insists.

“Oh yes, I fucking am. What do you want?”

“Isaac… all I want is to know that we’ll be okay if we ever have to run. That’s all I want.”

“Maya, we won’t have to run. That is not going to happen.”

“Promise?” she says, raising her eyebrows at me.

“Fuck… a 95% promise.”

Her eyes light up. “Are you sure it’s a 95% promise? Not an 82% promise or a 64% promise.”

“It’s a ninety fucking five percent promise, Maya. I’d even go to 98%, I’m being conservative here.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?” I say, grinning. “So what do you want?”

“No, okay I believe you. You’re still not buying anything. You already got me a frigging apartment.”

“Rookie, I am not bending on this.”

“Don’t you get all Dom voiced with me,” she shoots back, pouting as she leans back and crosses her little arms over her chest. Holy fucking hell, she is
so
hot it hurts. Literally.

“You are seriously turning me
on right now,” I inform her.

“Well, I’m seriously not having sex with you for at least an hour because then you’ll think I’m all turned on by your money.”

“Fuck,” I laugh, bucking my hips up in to hers.

She purposely keeps her face neutral and coyly shakes her head. “No,” she quips.

“You know…” I flip her onto the couch, her eyes widening as I climb on top of her.

“Red,” she says seriously. My stomach sinks as my heart starts to thump. She hardly ever says that, and every time she does I have to hide how much it rips me up inside or she might start thinking twice about saying it. But Maya knows me too well, seeing my discomfort and reaching up to wrap her arm around my shoulders. “You don’t have to get off me,” she murmurs, dragging her lips across my jaw. “Just don’t keep going.”

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I whisper, resting my forehead against her.

“You didn’t. I love feeling you on top of me.”

“Me too.” My insides jump around when she starts giggling as I pull her with me into the air, landing so that she’s the one laying on top of me. I take a deep breath so that she rises up because she really likes that trick. “I know that you don’t love me because of my money, baby,” I assure her.

“But…”

“And I know you’re thinking about our first fight right now,” I say, trying not to sound as disgusted with myself as I am.
I didn’t think you were a whore.
“I don’t care if you partially wanted him for his. I know you don’t want me for mine at all.”

“Promise?”

“1000%”

“There’s no such thing as 1000% promise, Isaac.”

“I’m just trying to make a point,” I chuckle, kissing the top of her head.

“I honestly don’t want anything that I can think of off the top of my head.”

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“I swear.”

“Spoiling you gets me so fucking hot.” I place my hand on the small of her back and press her down into me.

“I know. I’ll keep an eye out for something, okay?”

“Okay? So we only have to wait like 55 minutes now, right?” I laugh.

“Nope. Longer. I thought of something that I want.”

“That was quick.”

“WoW. I want to play WoW.”

“Alright,” I say happily, even though I should be grumbling now because it’s going to be a lot longer than 55 minutes.