I groaned with joy. I gasped with delight. And as his fingers slid between my pussy lips once more, it wasn’t long before I unraveled again. With my tits bouncing and Adam planting his face directly between them, he growled so deeply that it rattled my ribcage.

Then, he fell over the edge with me one more time as his cock poured itself into me again.

Just as I collapsed in a fit of fluids and sweat, Adam slid one arm behind my back and pulled me up into him. He kissed me, his tongue raking against my own, until our bodies were an indistinguishable tangle of sensual, tantalizing flesh. We made love for hours, exploring positions I would have never come up with in my wildest dreams. And when we were both drenched in sweat and panting for water, I laid against his chest and ran my fingers over the black ink on his muscles until we both fell asleep.

That night I dreamt that all three men were making love to me. One at a time. Even Julian, whom I hadn’t even been with yet.

And when I woke up in the morning, I realized that I wanted them all.

Adam held me in the bed for as long as he could before one of the Lineage Deans came bursting through the door.

“What the hell?” Adam said as he tossed a blanket over my body to cover me and tried to shove the Dean back out of the doorway.

“Please,” the man said as he rolled his eyes drolly. “It’s not like we all haven’t already seen it.”

“What are you talking about?” Adam asked.

The Dean reached up into the bedroom ceiling corner and tipped up the loose tile that was dangling there. He pulled down a small camera that still had an active red light glowing on it, which showed that it was on.

“What the hell is that?” Adam shouted as he tried to snatch the device out of the man’s hand.

“I guess you could call it an insurance policy,” the guard said with a nasty edge to his voice. “Would you like to tell Lisette about your backstory, or should we leave that up to her father to do for you?”

I looked up at Adam and saw that he looked as though all the blood had just been drained from his body. He stared at the Dean and said nothing.

“What is he talking about?” I asked Adam as I stood up with the blanket wrapped around me and put my hand on his shoulder.

Then, Adam silently turned to face me with a look in his dark eyes that made me feel like I was staring into an encompassing abyss.

“I’m sorry, Lisette. Please understand that I’m more sorry for this than I could have ever imagined.”

And even his apology didn’t cushion the blow that came next.

25

After the guard took Adam, I was left in the apartment alone and with more questions than I had started with even before all of this began. Everyone was gone, Michael…Julian…Adam, and I was left here alone in the deafening silence of my thoughts.

Everything was wrong, and I didn’t know how to make it right again. I didn’t know what the guard had been talking about, and from Adam’s reaction, whatever it was wouldn’t be good. Instead of sitting here waiting, I decided to get dressed and go see my father. I wanted answers, and if he wanted me to parade around in front of the press today like some sort of puppet being held hostage, then he would need to answer at least a few of my questions.

I walked across campus to the administrative office building and thought about all the ways that I would kill my father if I ever had the chance. I had almost settled on choosing to slit his wrists so that he could suffer what my mother had suffered. But then I remembered that he deserved to meet with a much more painful death than that. I wondered how many people my father had killed or been responsible for ordering the kill order on. I also wondered how many people were actually loyal to him and how many were just afraid. It was sickening that one man could have so much power and generate so much fear. My mother must have been ever braver than I thought to go up against him; as far as I knew, she had been all on her own.

Marta, on the other hand, was a coward. I watched her pour my father’s coffee into his cup as he sat at the Headmaster’s desk and smoked a cigarette, blowing foul-smelling puffs into the air. No wonder his teeth were so yellow.

“There’s no smoking in here,” I said as I walked into his office and sat at the furthest chair from his desk that I could find.

He laughed, and it distracted Marta enough to overflow his cup, just a tad.

“You’re a real pain in the ass,” he said to me.

“So, I’ve been told.”

Marta hurried around his desk to grab a napkin and wipe up the small spill before he noticed it had happened. She seemed more like a personal assistant now than a Headmistress. I thought back to seeing them holding hands and that visual, along with the smoke-filled room, made me want to gag.

“I have to say, I’m surprised that you came to see me today,” he said. “I figured that I’d end up having to send someone to drag you out of that apartment and bring you to me.”

“Like you did with Adam?”

He looked over the bridge of his thick nose at me.

“You don’t know that boy as much as you think you do.”

“Then please,” I said. “By all means, tell me about him. It’s why I came.”

“Is it? You came here this morning to see if I would tell you what you want to know about one of your lovers?”

My father’s choice of words made it sound like I was some sort of goddess with men falling at my feet, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Instead, I was some ridiculously conflicted girl that found herself torn between three very flawed, albeit gorgeous guys. Although I guess Julian wasn’t that flawed, at least not that I knew of…my world seemed to change colors every day lately.

“If you expect to parade me around in front of the cameras without calling out the fact that you are a murderous bastard who is bleeding the top two colleges in the city dry of all their old money, then I want you to give me some answers.” I sounded much braver this morning than I felt.

My father didn’t seem to find that as funny as the last thing I said. He curled his lips around his words as he sneered at me.

“If you so much as put one dainty little finger of yours out of line, I will make those three boys suffer more than you can imagine.”

I felt my face drop, and all the courage that I was pretending to have was immediately sucked away.

“I don’t need to tell you anything,” he said as he smudged the tip of his cigarette out on the top of the desk. “It’s amusing how you think you can threaten me when you have no idea how much of this city I already own. My hands aren’t just in these two schools; I have my fingers dipped in this whole town. There is a rushing pulse of illegal trade beneath almost every building here that you know. The aquarium, the police station, hell even that stupid halfway house of your mother’s. I own everything and everyone here. So, don’t think you can threaten me, girl. You can’t.”

If what my father was saying was true, then he was planning to bleed the entire city dry, not just Goldshire and Lineage Academies. He was going to suck the wealth and inheritances from every source he could by funneling it all right below everyone’s noses. And then when he had bled it dry, he would kill off everyone who knew about it. I bet he even planned to have all the board members killed as well. You know, once he had taken all their money and used them to further his plans. The sickest part was that they actually thought he was helping them.

It was obvious that he wasn’t going to tell me anything. I was a fool to have thought that he would have. People don’t get away with faking their own death and hiding from the public for this long without being extremely careful and prudent about who they talk to and what they say. He must have had some help, though.

“Can I have some coffee?” I asked.

Marta looked at me with disdain as my father waved her on as if instructing her to serve me.

I might as well at least enjoy the small things that I can, like watching Marta serve me coffee.

“You must feel pretty shitty about yourself, huh?” I said with a patronizing smile as she poured the black coffee into a cup in front of me.

I saw her face turn red and her lips purse, but she didn’t say anything in retort, and it was delightful to watch her squirm.

I snickered. “I mean, to think that all these years, you’ve been taking care of my father instead of taking care of your own son.”

“I haven’t been taking care of him, you little twat!” she hurled as she slammed the coffee pot down against the wood surface of the desk. “You think you know everything, just like your mother thought she knew everything too. Well, smarty-pants, why don’t you go ask your other boyfriend what his parents have been up to this whole time?”