Page 85 of Ghost Hunted

“I’m not. I’m not hopeful at all.”

It’s a lie, and Damien knows it, but he merely shrugs as he parks the car in front of the apartment building. Then I grab the bazooka from the trunk.

“I’m gonna go get Lia,” I say.

“Don’t open the cage,” he warns me. “She’s not fixed. She’s still a murderous head case.”

“Shut up.” I don’t know what I’ll do, but the thought of leaving my girl in that cage any longer with a collar around her neck, chained like some animal, makes my heart hurt. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. One moment, I want to keep her in there for the rest of her life, the thought of her suffering making me hard. The next minute, knowing she’s in there devastates me.

She does that to me. She sends me into a turmoil of pain and anguish and desire, and it feels like I’m suffocating whenever I’m with her. But when I’m not with her, I’m drowning just the same.

I still haven’t made up my mind by the time I’ve reached my bedroom, but my key is out. The one that opens the larger entrance, because whether she’s getting out or I’m getting in, all I can think is that I need her in my arms now, or I’ll go crazy.

It takes a full minute of staring for my mind to comprehend that the cage has been opened. No, not opened. Its bars have been sawed clean off.

“Oh, fuck. Damien!”

My voice comes out far too high-pitched. The door opens, and both Damien and Seraphina walk through.

“She left.” Seraphina’s breathy voice reaches me, her words making the situation final.

“Your girl might be a bad-ass, Logan,” comments Damien, “but I doubt even she could have sawed those bars off from inside her cage, when there isn’t a saw in this whole apartment. Someone took her.”

I groan, sinking down on the bed, before sitting up abruptly. “I’ll look at the feed.”

Damien snorts. “Did you really install a camera in here, you sick bastard?”

“You’re one to talk,” I hiss, “with the cameras you set up around Seraphina’s apartment when you had her locked up…”

It’s clearly not news to her, but she reddens all the same.

“It was an apartment, not a cage. Yeah, I liked watching her. I still do. It’s a whole new level of fucked-up to film your girl after you’ve locked her stark-naked in a cage.”

“I think the cage is fucked-up enough already,” mumbles Seraphina.

“I mean, the cage is a normal level of fucked-up.” Damien sits on a chair in the corner of the room, drawing Seraphina onto his thighs. “The camera thing takes it to a new level, though.”

Clenching my jaw so I don’t punch him, I grab the card from the small camera I had set up near the ceiling so that it pointed straight at her. It was enjoyable, watching the feed today during my downtime. Though I didn’t see her eat much, if at all. And she looked depressed. Still, she was naked and in my cage, and even though the image made my heart squeeze with an indecipherable mix of emotions, my cock only felt one thing.

Damien yawns. “You probably won’t find anything. If whoever it is knew enough to realize he’d need to bring a saw, then he must have known about the camera too.”

“Right.” I still plug my reader into my computer, looking through one file after another, turning away from Damien. He’s back to being the asshole from high school, laughing at Lia’s pain, because in his mind she’s responsible for mine.

I guess she is, in a way, but I’m also responsible for hers. I need to find her and fix her. I promised her I would. And his joking around isn’t helping matters.

“She’s probably fucking a bazooka as we spea—”

He interrupts himself as I face him, not even taking the time to pause the video as the current file I’m on plays. I grab his collar, shoving his back against a wall, ignoring Seraphina’s gasp of surprise. I haven’t raised a hand to him in years, but he deserves it. He really fucking deserves it. Right now, I’m so angry I could kill him.

“Oops,” he half-apologizes. “I’ll shut my mouth.”

“Too late,” I hiss. “Too fucking late.”

I slam him against the wall again, my blood boiling. I have no idea what I’ll do. We’ve both discovered over the years that we have it in us to kill the other, but it would take a lot. I don’t think I’ve reached that level of anger. I close my hand into a fist, drawing it back, and…

“Who’s that?” says Seraphina suddenly.

Reluctantly, I loosen my hold on him and turn back around. What I see is so surprising that my anger is wiped clean from my mind.