Page 37 of Captive

Eventually? Eventually those matters were taken into his hands, way too fucking long after the smoke cleared in his life if you ask me, but the long wait was necessary for no one’s fingers to point at him for the death of the man who took Kaitlin from him.

Kaitlin, AKA his long-term high school girlfriend-slash-future fiancé.

Yeah, while I might doubt that any high school love can last that long, if anyone could’ve made it work, it would’ve been Ezra. He’s everything good a man can be. I’m proud to stand beside him. He’s become a brother to me, as has Hawthorne.

“She doesn’t want to talk about it,” he goes on.

“Can you fucking blame her? You don’t ever want to talk about Kaitlin.”

“And you don’t ever want to talk about Reign, either.”

Hearing that name makes me pause my curling and whip my head in his direction. I don’t like hearing my sister’s name out loud, but I guess I get what I get since I said Kaitlin’s name. Can’t be too mad at him for throwing it back at me.

Ezra paces the space before me. “We got closure. What if she hasn’t?”

Shit. That’s something that never occurred to me. Were her two prior kills meant as practice? Was she planning on continuing to kill to sharpen her skills before she went after the person who created that wound deep inside her?

She had to have lost someone, or maybe… fuck. Maybe a man hurt her in the past. I don’t like thinking about that, but I’d bet anything that’s what is currently weighing on Ezra.

He says, “Maybe we should, I don’t know, talk to her together and see if she’ll open up? Maybe we can get her to tell us what happened. If someone’s out there who shouldn’t be, maybe they should be our next target. It wouldn’t be the first time we took care of something a little more personal.”

Somehow, I have the feeling the only way she’ll open up—if she even does at all—is if we tell her who we lost and what we did about it. It’s a gamble, and while the guys in the house might know already about my sister, it’s another thing to talk about her with someone else, someone like Abby.

Still, I could do it. It’d be tough, but I could do it. Ezra, on the other hand… I don’t know if he’s there. I don’t know if he’ll ever be there. Sometimes the past refuses to let go. It claws at you, digs its talons into your heart, and threatens to rip you apart at seemingly random times.

In other words, the past is a bitch.

“Do you think you’d be able to?” I ask him, saying it as gently as I can. Ezra gets touchy about this. It’s the one thing that can put him in a pissy mood, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about him in the years I’ve known him, it’s that once he’s in a mood, he stays in that mood for days.

It’s best to avoid those moods, obviously.

His shoulders rise and fall once as he says, “I don’t know, but it’s not really fair that she’s trapped here if whoever hurt her or someone she knows is still out there, living his damn life like he didn’t do anything wrong. If I were her and the person who…” Even now, he can’t say it, and I can’t blame him.

“I know,” I say. “I know. If you want to try to talk to her later, we can. We might not get anywhere, but there’s no harm in trying, I guess. If her reaction when we all piled into her room this morning is any indication, though… she won’t be too happy.”

Ezra smiles, but the smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Then she can join the club. I don’t think any of us are happy in this house.”

Ain’t that the truth? We’re all miserable here.

Well… no, wait, scratch that. We were all miserable here, content to go on with life as it’s been these past few years, up until Abby came into our lives. Lately? Things have been good. That last kill was something else, and taking her against the wall was the cherry on top of the fucking cake.

A cake I wouldn’t mind having again.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not miserable, not anymore, and I owe it to Abby. If I can help her get over something in her past, return the favor, then I’m fucking glad to do it. Even if Ezra isn’t ready to have share time with her, I am.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Lately, this house hasn’t been too bad.”

Ezra groans and rolls his eyes at me.

“And I ain’t just talking about the sex, although that was fucking fine too. I’m not saying I’m a different person here, but…” I try to think of a good way to put it without sounding like I’ve lost my fucking marbles. “There’s something about her that makes things easier.”

There, that didn’t sound too cheesy, did it?

He stops pacing, and although he currently stares off into space, I can tell my choice of words got to him. “Yeah,” he says after a while, “there is something about her, isn’t there? She’s, um, something else.”

“More than that,” I say, and though I try to fight it, I feel a smirk coming on. “She feels fucking amazing, too.”

That gets Ezra to groan again.