“Aleks—”

When he reached for me, I couldn’t help but step back. The trust I’d so unfailingly given back to him the night before felt like it had been obliterated in the last two minutes.

They were brothers.

Vaughn’s nephew was the one who’d been taken just like me.

And Vaughn’s brother had been the one who’d had me kidnapped again.

“Oh God,” I whispered as I took another step back. I ended up in the front room of the house. The door was right there. Thankfully, for once, my body overruled my brain and I did something I hadn’t done enough of in my life.

I ran.

But Vaughn caught me before I could get the door open.

“No!” I shouted.

“Aleks,” he began as he grabbed my arm. Then the gun was suddenly in his hand, but he didn’t point it at me. Amazingly, he pointed it at the other two men who had followed us into the front entryway. “Don’t either of you fucking move,” he practically snarled. I’d never seen or heard him so angry.

Until a few seconds ago when he’d been fighting with the one named Luca.

His own brother.

I tried to catch my breath as bits and pieces of that argument came back to me.

You knew he was off-limits! I never asked for one goddamned thing from you, Luca! Not once in the eight years I’ve been doing this! All you had to do was leave him the fuck out of it…

What did that mean?

“Aleks—”

“Talk fast, Vaughn,” I said. “Because you’re scaring me and you promised me last night you wouldn’t let me down and I believed you—”

“The men who took you from the alley the other night weren’t his men,” Vaughn interrupted.

“But you said he had plans for me.”

Vaughn’s eyes remained on Luca and the other man as he spoke. “His men were there too. That’s why I couldn’t get to you before the men in the van grabbed you.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand,” I admitted. My head felt like it was going to explode. I could feel the chill settling over my skin, beckoning me to the darkness. It would be so easy.

“No, Aleks, stay with me,” Vaughn said desperately as he gave me a little shake. I felt his hand cup my cheek. “Baby, please, just stay with me.”

I forced myself to take several deep breaths in order to stave off the blackness that was lining the edge of my vision. I managed a nod.

“When I got to Seattle, I recognized Luca’s men sitting in a sedan on a side street near your shop. I wasn’t expecting to see them there,” he said, his eyes going dark as he snapped his eyes back to his brother. “I disabled them, but I didn’t know what was happening in the alley.”

“Disabled… like you did with the guys in the van?” I asked. Bile churned in my belly. As much as I’d hated those men and I was grateful to Vaughn for saving me, it had been a gruesome sight.

“No,” Vaughn said. “I knocked them out. I know both men and I know Luca… he wouldn’t have let them hurt you.”

I didn’t miss the fact that there was more to that sentence than he was saying. He clearly believed that his brother’s men had been given orders to take me just like the men in the van.

“I managed to catch up to the van, but I needed to wait until it was far enough outside the city to make sure those men were alone. Then I pulled ahead of them and parked my car in the middle of the road to force them to stop. You know the rest.”

I nodded. I hesitated and risked a glance at Luca, whose face was as bloody as Vaughn’s. But despite the cuts and bruises, he looked unaffected.

And very dangerous.

I automatically sidled closer to Vaughn.

“They took his son?” I whispered.

“Yes,” Vaughn said. “Gio. It happened eight years ago. Gio was seven.”

I felt my knees go weak.

A whole year younger than me.

“And you’re trying to find him?”

Vaughn wiped at his face with his gun hand, smearing the blood. The second he was done, the gun was trained on the two other men again. “Yes. We knew our only chance of finding Gio was by getting in on the ground level.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Vaughn went undercover,” the other man who wasn’t Luca said. He was nearly the same size as Vaughn and Luca and had the same dark hair, but it was long on top and pulled into a ponytail. The sides of his head were shaved. He had a little bit of dark stubble. Unlike Luca and Vaughn, his skin tone was darker, though. His jeans and dark blue T-shirt were a stark contrast to the dress clothes both Vaughn and Luca were wearing.

“This is Con,” Vaughn said as he motioned to the man. “Constantine. Luca and I grew up with him and his brothers, King and Lex.”

Con sent me a small nod and said, “Vaughn was the best equipped of all of us to look for Gio from the inside. Luca’s name was too recognizable.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I didn’t care either. To Vaughn I said, “What does he mean ‘you looked from the inside’?”

“I started pawning myself off as hired muscle,” Vaughn said.

I felt like I was going to throw up. “You… you helped men like Father keep their secrets?” I whispered.

“Yes,” Vaughn said.

“No,” Luca cut in at the same time. “It was an act,” Vaughn’s brother said. “He never directly hurt any kids and he’d pass the information about the kids back to me. I’d send someone in to get them out as soon as Vaughn had moved onto the next client.”

It took me a moment to process what Luca had said. When I spoke, it was to Vaughn and only Vaughn. “But you had to wait to get them out until you’d gone to work for someone else?”

“Yes,” Vaughn whispered, and I could tell he knew where my mind was going.

I pulled away from him because it was hard to think when he was touching me. “So, when you worked for Father all those months, you weren’t really working for him. But you didn’t try to help me…”

My voice dropped off as everything clicked into place.

“I’m sorry, Aleks,” Vaughn said softly. “I didn’t have a choice.”

I let out a harsh laugh. “Yes, you did. I was the one who couldn’t choose, Vaughn.” I shook my head in disbelief. “All those weeks you knew what he was doing and you had the power to stop it but you didn’t. You… you…”

I couldn’t even put words to what he’d done. “I want to go,” I said as I reached behind me to try and find the knob for the door. But to my own horror, I’d moved in the wrong direction and was closer to the stairs than the door.

And Vaughn was between me and the only way out.

“Aleks,” he began.

“No,” I said, shaking my head violently. “I want to go home.” I backed further toward the stairs. “I want to go home. To Dante.”

I was on the verge of having a complete breakdown. I wanted to believe Vaughn wouldn’t hurt me or turn me over to his brother, but I didn’t know what to think anymore. If I’d been looking at the blue sky and Vaughn had told me it was red, I would have believed him.

He’d done that to me… played me so well I didn’t even know which direction was up and which was down.

Aleks… please… would you... would you call me James… just this one time?

I clapped my hands over my ears and began shaking my head. “No,” I shouted. The darkness came for me and this time I let it in.

“Don’t fucking touch him!” I heard Vaughn shout and then there was more yelling, but I couldn’t make out the words. A hand closed painfully around my wrist.

“Aleks, open your eyes, damn it!”

Not Vaughn’s voice.

“Get your fucking hands off him, Luca!”

Vaughn sounded so distressed that I opened my eyes to look for him. He was trying to get Con to let go of his gun arm. The one holding onto me was Luca and I was no longer by the stairs but in the kitchen. There was blood on my shirt… Vaughn’s too-big shirt, actually, because I hadn’t put my own shirt back on yet.

Had I been shot? Was that why I was so cold?

“Vaughn?” I whispered in confusion.

“Aleks, put the knife down.” The order came from Luca.

Knife? What knife? I looked at the arm he was holding the wrist of, but my hand was empty.

But my other wasn’t.

I gasped at the sight of Vaughn’s utility knife in my right hand. I’d grabbed it off the nightstand when I’d left the room earlier. My intent had been to give it back to Vaughn, but I’d forgotten all about it when I’d heard him, Luca, and Con fighting.

Hadn’t that been a few seconds ago?

I shook my head to try to clear it. Vaughn was shouting at me and Luca. I watched in horror as he slammed his fist into Con’s jaw. I was so distracted that I didn’t notice Luca move until he grabbed for the hand that was holding the knife. Everything happened so fast I couldn’t keep up. One second Luca was grabbing my wrist, the next Vaughn was standing over us, his gun pressed against the side of Luca’s head.

“Take your hands off him!” he snarled.

But Luca didn’t release me.

That was when I registered the blood pouring from Vaughn’s forearm.

The blood that was also on the knife I was still holding.

“Look, Aleks!” Luca yelled at me. “Look at how far he will go for you, no matter what! He’s never betrayed you! You could put that thing in his fucking gut next time and he’d still lay down and die for you!”

“Luca!” Vaughn warned.

I looked between Vaughn, Luca and the knife.

And then dropped it when an image flashed through my head. “No,” I cried in a broken whisper as I realized what I’d done.

The knife clattered to the floor and then Luca was pushing it away before completely releasing me and backing away, both hands in the air as he faced his brother. Vaughn was on his knees in front of me a second later. “Aleks, it’s okay,” he said. “You’re okay.”

I wasn’t okay.

I’d hurt him.

I’d cut his arm open with the knife and I barely remembered any of it.

“I’m sorry,” I cried as I tried to get away from him.

I really was going crazy.

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Vaughn said gently as he tucked the gun into his waistband. “It’s barely a scratch.”

I let out a hoarse laugh that wasn’t really even a laugh. Blood was still gushing from the wound, but he barely even seemed to notice.

“Vaughn,” I said with a shake of my head.

“It’s okay, baby,” Vaughn said, then he was pulling me against his chest. “We’re both okay,” he repeated over and over. I was dimly aware of Con tying something around the arm Vaughn had wrapped around me, but he didn’t let me go during the process.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I admitted.

“I do,” Vaughn said as he put just enough space between us so he could cup the sides of my face. “Your mind’s finally ready to start fighting back,” he murmured softly.

I didn’t know what that meant, but I was too tired to give it much consideration. I leaned back into him. “I think the blood loss has made you as crazy as me,” I whispered.

I swore I felt him smile against me right before he kissed the top of my head. “I’m good with that.”