I shrugged. “I don’t know the answer to that part. Haven’t gotten that far yet.”

“It’s an interesting theory,” Michael said. “And I think you may be right.”

I puffed out my cheeks with a sigh. “Well, that was fun. So, what’s for dinner?”

And as Adam turned on the stovetop, he peered over his shoulder at me. “Spaghetti.”

We all sat around the common area of the dormitory floor with bowls of spaghetti and glasses of wine and talked about how we thought David was going to accomplish what he said he would set out to do.

“I dunno,” Adam said, “It’ll be a lot harder for him to hide something as huge and large-scale as a drug manufacturing plant. I mean, trafficking is one thing, but all of the equipment and staff that you would need to be able to pull off the entire thing from development to distribution? That would be big enough to fill the size of—”

“A campus,” I whispered as I finished his sentence.

A shiver worked its way through my bones. I felt my stomach drop to my toes. I set my spaghetti onto a table that sat next to my chair in the common room to keep from dropping the entire fucking thing in my lap. Did David really have balls that big? Did he really think he would utilize this entire campus to do nothing but formulate and peddle his drugs while under the guise of ‘top-notch education’?

“Jesus, do you really think he could do that?” Julian asked.

None of us dared to answer the question, though. We all knew he could pull it off. We all looked at each other and just knew that David’s plan could work. Not only did he have one college campus, but now he had two. He already had a small fortune for a startup and the town was already in his pocket due to foundations set before he even came onto the scene. It was almost as easy as a turnkey business, except on a larger and much more illegal scale.

“I think this is getting too big of an elephant to bite,” Julian said.

Adam wrinkled his nose. “Wait a second, who bites an elephant?”

“It’s a figure of speech dumbass,” Julian retorted. “What I mean is that I think we should just get the hell out of here the first chance we get. If he keeps us alive and we get any chance to run off this campus and get on the first plane or train out of here; we need to do it.”

“Agreed,” Michael said.

I was surprised to hear him agree with Julian. I had thought he wanted to stick around and exact vengeance. But then I remembered what he had said to me in the stone room, that we needed to get out and get away.

Maybe David was too sinister even for Michael to want to deal with.

The image of him slicing my father’s throat open and watching him bleed out over a chocolate cake was certainly disturbing enough to make anyone want to run.

I wondered about my life thus far as compared to other women my age. I was guessing that many of them had childhood memories of playing with dolls instead of memories of dead insects, and college-aged memories of watching their parents take snapshots of their graduation ceremonies instead of watching their parents being essentially beheaded. I knew my life was pretty messed up in comparison to the norm, but I could also hear my mother’s voice in my head telling me that the hardships I had been through would only make me stronger, smarter, and kinder.

Still, it would be nice not to have to go through them all the damn time.

David was right, however. Even though we had the entire dormitory floor all to ourselves, the four of us chose one of the small rooms to stay in together. Each room had two twin beds in it, so the guys moved some furniture around and pushed the two beds together. We piled in like a den of wolves and laid together in the shape of a perfect trifecta. This wasn’t so bad, as much as we were still trapped.

At least we were comfortable and together.

“Do you think he’ll ever change?” I whispered to Michael.

He and I seemed to be the only ones awake in the middle of the night. I wondered if it was both of our partial ties to David that haunted us when we tried to sleep and woke us back up when the dreams started to encroach on us.

“Who, David?” he asked from beside me.

I nodded softly. “Yeah.”

“Why are you trying so hard to save his soul?” Michael asked. “You didn’t have that kind of mercy for your father, and he even came around toward the last second there. David is a beast, and you know it. So how come you keep trying to find something inside him to save instead of showing him the same thirst for revenge that you did toward your father?”

He makes a damn good point. “I don’t know,” I said as I bunched the blanket up in my hand. “I guess it’s because my mother did.”

I heard Michael sigh and then felt his hand run along the side of my cheek. “I know that your mom was an amazing woman, Lisette. But you’re an amazing woman, too. You don’t have to be here. You can be yourself. Besides, maybe David has changed since your mother knew him; gotten worse and more corrupt. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so kind and lenient to him back then if she had seen the kind of man that he is now.”

“Oh no,” I said with conviction. “He was exactly the same kind of person back then too.”

3

Several days passed and the four of us spent most of the time hanging out and talking in the dorms.

I took as many long, hot showers as I wanted and drank as much wine as I could, simply because I didn’t know when this reprieve would end, and we’d get shoved back down in a hole somewhere. I also got as much sleep as my brain would let me have and started to do some fight training with the guys.

At some point, I knew in my gut that it would be needed, and my muscles had gotten weak with all of the non-use.

I liked training with Michael the most, though. All of the guys were pretty good fighters, especially Julian. He had gotten a lot better since his first kill back at the apartment at Goldshire. It was strange to see how much he had changed since before all this began, but how much he also still stayed the same.

But when I trained with Julian, he always still went too easy on me. He acted like he wasn’t going to go easy, but then every time it was the perfect opportunity to land a big blow, he found a reason to either miss or hit me softly instead. He just couldn’t bring himself to knock me on my ass.

Adam was fast, and when we trained together it was always a workout that left me breathless. He also always trained without his shirt on so I would get immediately distracted by looking at how his tattoos moved against his taut chest muscles and he would end up being able to get a shot in simply because I wasn’t paying attention. It was good practice for me because fighting against him reminded me to always keep my focus no matter what my opponent tries to use as a distraction.

The only drawback about training with Adam was that we never finished a fight. By the time we were deep into it, we would both get so turned on by all the touching and energy exerted, that we ended up turning each tackle into something sexual, which mean, of course, that the fighting was over.

Which is why Michael was the best one to train with. He was tough on me and didn’t hold back at all. He was a skilled fighter, and he was ruthless. When he distracted me, I paid for it with an uppercut to the jaw. And when he tackled me to the ground it was terrifying and not arousing in the least. He would sometimes put me in a chokehold until I nearly passed out, and every match left me sore and a little dizzy. The other two guys would get on him about how rough he got, and one time I even ended up needing to put a package of frozen peas on my chin to ease the swelling of one of the punches he threw.

Adam even got in his face about that one.

“What the hell, man? What is your problem? It’s training, not an actual fight,” Adam said to him.

He was pissed off that Michael had left a mark on my face and several bruises on my arms and shoulders. But, just like he didn’t hold back with me, he didn’t hold back with Adam, either.

“And what do you think it’s going to be the next time we have to go up against David and his guards?” Michael snarled back at him. “Not an actual fight? They’ll be ten times as rough with her as I am. They aren’t going to go soft on her, or play-wrestle as if they’re flirting instead of fighting. If she doesn’t learn to fight against that, then she won’t survive, dude.”

After that, Adam didn’t say anything further. He just came to sit with me as I held the frozen peas to my jaw. I watched Michael pour himself a glass of whiskey and swig it before pouring himself another. There was tension in his shoulders and a look on his face that seemed like he was disgusted with himself. That’s when I knew that he didn’t like it either. Michael didn’t like training with me at all. In fact, he seemed to hate how tough he went on me even more than Adam did. But he knew that someone had to teach me how to fight hard or I wouldn’t be able to protect myself.

That’s when I realized that he was the one I wanted to train with every day.

A few days later, David’s men came onto the floor of the dormitory. It had been a while since we had seen or heard from anyone and it had started to feel like we were in our own little existence up there. When a pair of doggish looking men came in, eyeing me up and down as if I were some sliver of meat tossed to them for dessert, we all stopped what we were doing and stared at them.

Wondering what was going to come next.

“David is going to take you on a tour of the grounds,” one of them said. “Get some shoes on.”

A tour of the grounds? Of Lineage?