My mouth was hanging slightly open as I just stared at him. He had an easy answer for everything, and they were all so simple, too. I couldn’t live alone, but I could continue to stay here if they were with me, because so much of my relative independence relied on them being there to help me with even the everyday stuff. “What if you three leave?”

  Malcolm gave me a little smile and moved his hands closer together on the couch so that they were just on the outsides of my feet. If he stretched his thumbs out, he could touch my toes. “We’re not planning to—ever. We like it here. But most of all, we like you. What else is there, Blake? Tell me what’s bothering you.”

  “What if you get tired of dealing with me and my issues?”

  Malcolm chuckled, which I hadn’t expected him to do. “You’ve got about as much chance of that as CJ and Rex do of someday killing each other. They bicker and yell a lot, but they really do love one another. Their little fights are nothing a bit of sex between them won’t fix. Look, we get that you have boundaries that we need to respect. We’re all okay with that. But when you get upset or something bothers you, we need you to be strong enough to tell us what it is so that we can come together and fix it as one unit, like Rex says we are. We all need to work together, and sometimes that’s harder than others. Sometimes I wish we all had single houses and weren’t together constantly, but that’s not how these relationships work. We talk, we work things out. Sometimes that means yelling and sometimes that means cuddling and having sex. It works, but only if the primary things are trust and communication. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  I slowly nodded. “I just wish that I could be more like the three of you.”

  He sighed and closed the distance to my feet, but he didn’t grab my ankles. Instead, he just rubbed his fingers lightly over the tops. “I know you do. And I’m sure you think the outside world is great and all. But it’s not, and sometimes I’m really glad that you’ve been kept sheltered from it. You’re safe here. We will keep you safe from anything out there, from anything in here and also from yourself. Now, would it be okay with you if I got a hug or do I need to ask one of the idiots behind me?”

  I smiled at him, just a bit because I still felt a little shy around all of them, especially when I wanted to ask for affection, and I opened my arms up for him as I dropped my legs down to the floor. Malcolm gave me a loose hug and I rested my head on his shoulder. “Thank you.”

  “Anytime. You’re ours, and we care about and protect what’s ours. You just need to figure out how to talk to us, even if it means writing on notes that you stick on our shirts. That would be fine, too, as long as you tell us when you need something from us or when we’ve crossed a line. That’s all we’re asking you to do.”

  I nodded into his shoulder, and he rubbed my back. He hooked one hand under my thigh and lifted me up. I didn’t have time to yelp before he set back down on his lap and let me curl up against him.

  “Where are you sleeping tonight?” Malcolm asked.

  It was way too soon for that question. “In my room. Alone.”

  He just smiled at me. “I wasn’t asking you for sex. I was offering to let you sleep in our bed so we could cuddle you and keep you warm all night.”

  “Oh…” I bit my lower lip. “I’m still going to sleep in my room.”

  He nodded and kept smiling at me. He didn’t look upset at all by my decision.

  “I’m sorry,” I quietly told him.

  “Don’t be. You’ll decide when you’re ready. If you want to start slow and just have one of us up there at a time, that’s fine, too. The other two will entertain each other.”

  I blushed deeply and slid off his lap so that I could get to my feet again. “Thank you all for bringing me down.” I picked up Bandit from the couch before she could decide that Malcolm’s lap was where she’d be spending the night. “I should go to bed now. I’m tired.”

  CJ nodded. “Don’t forget to take your pill before you go up. You left it on the island.”

  “Thanks.”

  They said goodnight to me. I swallowed my pill with some milk from the jug, then I went back upstairs and stepped around my door. Surprisingly I wasn’t having a panic attack over that invasion and loss of privacy, but I did lock my bedroom door before I went to sleep.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I was working the next afternoon when CJ knocked on my outer door. I liked that he did that, even though he could have just walked through the opening in the other half of it. They’d cleaned up the splintered mess sometime in the night. I needed that separation, even though it was completely mental for me right now.

  “You can come in,” I said after checking the feed to see who it was. I wouldn’t have said no to any of them, but I felt better checking, all the same.

  CJ came into my office with a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk for me. “I thought you might be hungry. You missed lunch.”

  I had? I checked the time and, sure enough, it was almost two. I hadn’t thought it was much past noon. I eyed the plate of chocolate chip cookies greedily. He’d brought me six cookies, though, which seemed like a lot just for me. “Do you want any?”

  CJ smiled at me and shook his head. “No, thanks. Rex found your frozen cookie dough stash and baked them all. We’ve already had over a dozen between us and there’s still a good pile downstairs. We should really figure out a way to hide the sweets from him.” He laughed, and I smiled up at him before taking a cookie for myself.

  “What are you working on?” CJ asked as he came around the side of my desk so that he could see my monitor.

  I looked at the character animation I was evaluating, then back up at him as he stood right behind my shoulder. Normally I couldn’t stand for people to loom over me. It had irritated me when Uncle Phin had done it the few times he had, but CJ didn’t loom. He was more just standing behind me, looking over my shoulder at my screen.

  “That’s kind of terrifying,” he said after a moment.

  I tried to see the animation from his perspective—one of a person who didn’t spend all of his work day surrounded by a video game based in horror and nightmares, and I realized that maybe the toddler with the bloody knife could be seen as scary then. “Kids freak me out,” I told him. ‘Sally,’ as I called this character, had been created by me and was part of the original game, but she’d been a background horror in the first Underworlds. Now, in the expansion, I wanted to give her—and the hundreds of copies that I planned to put of her in the game—a much bigger spotlight. “She killed her family when her parents told her that their dog had to go away because of her little brother’s allergies.”

  I saw CJ’s sideways look at me, and I ducked my head. “If you weren’t already in therapy, I would say that you needed some.” He sounded like he was only half-joking. I nodded. He was probably right. “So your game… It’s all creepy and horrible like this?”

  “Pretty much. Do you know anything about it?”

  He shook his head, and I turned around in my chair to really be able to face him. I pulled one knee up to my chest and leaned my chin on it while I looked up at him. “Underworlds is a game I thought up as a teenager, then I hired some people to help me make a prototype. We partnered with an international game developer who made it go big. But the core of the game has never changed. In it, you’re a person who goes to sleep one night then wakes up in a different realm, right below this one. There are fifty-seven worlds that you need to get through to be able to get back home or stay in Underworlds forever. With the expansion that my team and I are working on now, we’re making a side world that the villain from Underworlds is from. Another fifty-seven worlds, all new nightmares.”

  He nodded along with me. “Why fifty-seven?”

  I pulled my other knee up to my chest and hugged my legs tightly to me. “Officially? It’s because it’s the villain—Saleen’s—number of minions who roam Underworlds for her, causing chaos. One for every world that a player has to go through. Unofficially, it’s the number of days from the one when we were taken to the day I got to come home.”

  “And each of those worlds is a day in the hell that you spent kidnapped and trapped in a hole or in a room somewhere being medicated for what you had to endure,” CJ quietly said.

  I turned away from him. He was right. He came closer to me and I looked up at him without lifting my head, just staring at him and waiting for him to do something, but he only leaned over me and kissed me on top of my head. He didn’t touch me, except to do that. When he moved away from me, though, I grabbed his hand, stopping him. And CJ gazed down at me with so much pity and sadness that I wished he’d never read my whole file. I was glad that he knew what had happened to me, since I thought that was important because they wanted to be close to me, but skimming it would have been so much easier on him. I knew what had been done to my parents and how they’d found me. I heard their screams all the time. They hadn’t died quickly, and he hadn’t been merciful with them. I don’t know why I’d been spared the worst of it. But those were my memories, my horrors. I wished that CJ didn’t have the burden of carrying them, too.

  I got off the chair and slowly stood up. I walked into his arms and he instantly hugged me. While Malcolm had been loose with his hug, only barely laying his arms around my shoulders, CJ kept me close to him to the point where I could smell the clean scent of his aftershave as it mixed with the peppermint on his breath. I rested my forehead against his neck and simply leaned into him for a long time. It was so good to be held, to be cared about by someone as gentle and loving as CJ. If I broke them down into game terms—as I’d tried to do to describe the three men I was living with to one of my designers—CJ would be the healer, Malcolm the warrior and Rex the thief, because he was fast and cunning. They made a good team together, and I desperately wanted to belong in their group.

  I tilted my face toward CJ’s, and he brought his mouth to mine. His kiss lingered on my lips, despite the fleeting contact of it. He moved away before I was ready for him to, and I brought my trembling hand up to cup the side of his face and keep him turned toward me. He was like drinking warm peppermint tea as I opened my lips for him and invited his kiss again.

  “I should let you get back to work,” he said as he lifted his mouth away from mine.

  I was disappointed, because I’d been enjoying the intimacy of our moment together.

  “Don’t look so sad,” he told me lightly. “We have plenty of time for kissing, but I’m pretty sure you need to get more work done. Eat your cookies and come down when you’re ready.” CJ gave me a kiss on my forehead then headed out of my room, leaving me pouting after him.

  Somehow, I’d managed to initiate a kiss with one of the guys. I remained shocked about that hours later.

  * * * *

  As I came downstairs that evening with my empty plate, knowing I still needed to eat something for dinner, even though I was full of cookies, I saw someone pulling up the driveway. Malcolm—I knew from watching him on the cameras—was walking around outside. And CJ and Rex had gone into their bedroom about a half hour before I’d come down. They’d been kissing, holding hands and running into walls. I’d been cracking up watching them.

  But now I really wished someone were downstairs with me and could see who it was that was parking in front of my house. I put my plate and glass in the sink as calmly as I could and went over and knocked on their door. I heard moaning and I really hated to interrupt them while they were having sex but this was important too, so I knocked again.

  Rex opened the door with just a sheet around his hips. I saw CJ under the blanket behind him. I really hated that I couldn’t just see what the person wanted on my own without having to bother them.

  “Hey,” Rex said as he leaned against the doorway. The sheet slipped down his hips a little, revealing a tattoo of an eagle on his left upper thigh. “Want to join us? There’s plenty of room.”

  I went bright red and shook my head. “N-No thanks. There’s someone in the driveway.”

  Rex’s attention focused and he nodded. He didn’t bother to close the door when he went back into the room, dropped the sheet, then stooped to get his pants on. CJ was right behind him, and I’d already seen quite a bit more of Rex’s butt than I probably should have.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to see,” I told Rex when he and CJ walked past me now that they were fully dressed, but in rumpled clothing.

  “See what?” he asked, positioning himself near the door with CJ standing a few feet back from him.

  “Your butt,” I admitted quietly.

  Rex laughed. “Feel free to look whenever you want. But right now, I want you to stay right where you are so that you’re out of the way and not in any danger, in case this guy isn’t just trying to convert you to his religion. Okay?”

  I nodded and pressed myself against the wall. When Malcolm came around the back of the house, I quickly waved him in. Then the three of them were surrounding the door and positioning me well away from it when the man finally got his briefcase and jacket out of the car.

  Rex opened the door before he could get to it and, for a while, the man with the briefcase just stared at him—or maybe at the gun Rex had pointed at him. “State your name and purpose for being here,” Rex demanded.

  “Ezekiel Winthrop. I was Phin’s lawyer. I’d like to speak to Blake.”

  Malcolm looked over at me. “What was your uncle’s full name?”

  “Phin was short for what?” Rex asked Ezekiel, who was looking more worried by the second.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  I nodded to Malcolm. “His name was just Phin. People kept thinking it was short for Phineas, but it wasn’t.”

  “Let him in,” Malcolm said, and the three of them backed up to let Ezekiel come through the door. I stayed where I was, until Rex moved in front of me. Then, with him between me and Ezekiel, I managed to get to the dining room table where they had taken Ezekiel. I sat down as far as I could away from him, and, once I did, he started to get up and come toward me, but Malcolm got between us.

  “For our client’s protection, you’ll stay where you are.”

  I’d known that he had a stern side to him, but this protective side was even better. With CJ behind me and Rex beside me, I felt like there was nothing Ezekiel could do to me. He probably wouldn’t have even tried, given how freaked out he seemed. But I really liked how they’d all converged to protect me. And with them all around and looking like big warriors there to guard me, I could relax a bit. Not a lot, but enough that when Ezekiel took out some papers and offered them to me, I was able to take them from Malcolm to look them over without too much panic. It was unthinkable, but somehow I’d become more relaxed because they were there. Before getting to know them, I never thought that would have been possible.

  “As I’m sure you can see, Blake, I worked as your uncle’s lawyer. I was sorry to hear about his passing, and I have begun to get his estate in order. In the meantime, you have bills and other expenses that he was taking care of for you to make things easier for you. His instructions—in the event that he would die before you—were that I come to you and see how you would like to proceed with your financial matters. He set up everything else with a living will and pre-paid for his final expenses, so there is nothing for you to do there, and none of it is a cost to you. But when it comes to things like your phone, your electricity, insurance on your home and other incidentals like that, I need to know how you’d like to proceed. I have all of the information for your accounts and the people you regularly pay, including the person who cleans your pool and your housekeeper.”

  I stared at the paperwork in front of me and wished that I’d thought to bring a highlighter in with me. I was frowning down at a few lines in particular. “I need to give Sophia a big raise,” I mumbled.

  Rex snorted. “You could afford to pay her half a million a year and hardly even notice it.”

  I looked up at him in confusion. I had no idea what he was talking about until he leaned over my shoulder and put his finger by a line at the bottom of the page. “That’s your net worth, and these are your liquid assets. Down here…that big number? That’s how much actual cash you have in the bank between all of these different accounts.”

  I stared at what he was pointing at, but it was a lot of numbers.

  “You seriously didn’t know that you’re that rich?” Rex asked.

  No, but I was starting to get the hint, and I felt pretty stupid for not realizing it sooner. “I never thought about it. Uncle Phin just took care of everything for me. The only expensive thing I’ve ever bought is the computer system upstairs.”

  Rex ruffled my hair and I batted his hand away, but I wasn’t really fighting him on it. We were more just playing around. I was amazed I could do that now—and so soon, too. “Can we get a raise?” he asked.

  “Rex!” CJ hissed at him.

  Rex chuckled. “I’m joking. Jesus, you’re hostile when you don’t get to come.”

  I groaned and closed my eyes.

  Malcolm cleared his throat and I looked to him for help controlling them for the moment. He gave me a soft smile. “What would you like to do, Blake? It sounds to me like everything else is covered and Ezekiel doesn’t need any help from you. All you have to do is decide if you’re going to handle your money on your own, or if you’re going to hire someone to do it for you.”