The Pawn (Endgame #1)(39)

Every little boy looks up to his father. Little girls, too.

“You were a kid,” I say, somewhat offended by his judgment of himself. I realize that there’s a parallel between him and myself, but I choose not to follow that line of thinking.

“He never said anything that was true, almost as a matter of principle. He just conned as many people as he could meet, trying to get money so my mother could snort it, shoot it, drink it.”

My stomach clenches. “She was an addict?”

“If you could get addicted, it was her favorite thing.”

I swallow hard, glad he can’t see the sympathy on my face. Harper’s mother is an addict too. Most of the time she refuses to talk about it, but a few times, at night in our room at college, she would whisper in the dark about the fear, the dread. Hiding under the blankets at night while her mother was on a rampage, throwing everything in the house.

“I’m sorry for drinking your father’s last moonshine,” I say. “And if it bothered you to see me like that.”

“I don’t keep it to drink,” he says gruffly. “I keep it to remember him. To remember what not to be.”

A liar. A cheat. “That’s why it bothers you so much when someone steals from you.”

The reason he ruined my father. It wasn’t only about setting an example for the rest of the criminal underworld. It was about setting an example for himself. About fighting back for every time his own father must have told him a lie.

It’s King Minos who puts his bastard child into the Labyrinth. Not to kill him but to keep him locked away. The maze that Gabriel walks isn’t a physical one, despite the large manor that he lives in. It’s the emotional walls, the ones that make him strike out at people who get too close.

“And you’re the furthest thing from an addict I’ve ever seen,” he whispers.

The whole room seems to hold its breath with me. The thick carved bedposts, the sunny yellow stripes on the wall. Everything waiting. “What am I then?”

“You’re innocent. And I’m going to ruin you.” The certainty in his voice chills me.

Like he did my father. Except he stripped my father of his wealth, his power. And with this auction, Gabriel Miller is giving it back—to me.

In return he’s going to take my virginity. Not tonight or the next night. Sometime in the next thirty days. And he believes it will be bad enough to ruin me. Worse than being penniless, worse than being shunned. Whatever he’ll do to my body will be enough to break me.

You can have my body, I think. But you can’t touch my heart.





Chapter Twenty





When I wake up, I’m alone.

I know it before I open my eyes, before I run my hand over the cool sheets behind me. It’s in the air, a stillness. A loneliness that I was so used to it barely registered. Daddy tried to make space for me, but I still spent most of my time alone. And then after he was attacked, after I had to sell all the furniture, the house was achingly empty.

Even then I wouldn’t have complained. It helped to smile when he was awake, to say that everything would be okay. Maybe I’d gotten so good at lying I was able to lie to myself, telling myself that I didn’t really mind. That things would get better.

I could have kept on believing it except for those brief moments in Gabriel Miller’s arms, those short and unexplainable moments when he’d held me.

No sex. No ulterior motives.

Not even money bound us together then. We were two people clinging together on a raft, the entire ocean spanning in every direction.

Then he woke up and left the raft, leaving me here.

I ignore the sense of disappointment, of loss, and step out of bed. The weather turned crisp in the past few weeks, but the floors of his house are heated. I curl my cold toes against the hand-scraped wood, seeking warmth. Always seeking warmth.

I don’t bother to shower or tame my hair. I only throw on a shirt and some yoga pants, a complete morning mess. This is what he made me. And I have this urgent need to see him, to confirm that last night wasn’t only a dream.

He’s sitting at a desk, as if this is an ordinary morning. As if my axis didn’t shift last night. As if his hands and his mouth and his cock didn’t make me a woman.

He looks through papers on his desk despite the fact that I’m standing on the other side. Do people like him even have papers? My father used his printer quite a bit—his old eyesight never could get used to the screen. But Gabriel is younger than him, sharp enough to be fluent with technology. The file folder feels like a ruse.

“Gabriel.”

He looks up briefly, his golden eyes merely a flicker of flame before he looks back down. “Yes, Ms. James.”

Something inside me turns small and cold. I want him to call me Avery. I want him to call me little virgin again. “You left.”

“I have work to do.”

Present tense. It’s not only an explanation as to why he left. It’s a dismissal. Except that in yoga pants or a two-thousand-dollar Versace skirt, I’m Avery James. I was born and bred and goddamn raised to demand attention. I may not have deserved any of that privilege, but I don’t deserve his scorn. “Can you at least look at me after I sucked your dick?”

That gets his attention. His gaze snaps to mine. He narrows his eyes, though I can’t say he looks displeased. No, he looks hungry. Predatorial. He stands, and I take a step back.