The thing is, I knew Ryan Cunningham — we all did. We’d studied him and pieces of shit just like him like it was our religion, preparing for his take-down. And men like Ryan — men who enjoyed hurting women — were easy to figure out.
They were all weak, and when push came to shove they broke.
All of them.
Because it doesn’t take a strong man to beat on or force himself on women, it takes the weakest fucking kind of man there is. It takes a spineless piece of shit to do that.
Which is exactly what he was. It was also exactly why we knew he wouldn’t do it. It was why we knew he was a man of backing away, not a man of action.
Like us.
Because when push came to shove, Ryan Cunningham and men like him were really just big pussies.
He screeched as we rushed him, letting go of Mia in his haste to scamper away. I roared as my fist got him in the teeth, bloodying his mouth. Oliver’s swing got him across the face, breaking his nose and making him scream, and Erik’s elbow to the ribs most certainly broke a few.
We pulled Mia behind us as we pushed Ryan back, fists raining down on him as he stumbled further and further back in his futile attempt to get away from us.
This was for Amy. This was for Mia. This was for every single other woman he’d hurt over the years.
“Okay! Okay!” he screamed. “I’m sorry alright?! Fuck, keep her!”
We kept moving.
“You want money?!”
Oliver laughed bitterly.
Ryan’s face paled. “Well what the fuck do you want?” He gasped as he felt his back come against the shattered frame of his floor-to-ceiling windows, the wind from the city streets thirty stories below whistling past us.
“What the fuck do you want!?” he screeched.
“What do we want?” Erik said softly, grabbing him by the collar and yanking him close.
“We want our fucking sister back, you piece of garbage.”
The three of us grabbed him, and without a second’s hesitations, we pushed.
His heel caught, his body tripped backwards, his eyes went wide— And we turned away.
Mia’s eyes were wide as we turned back to her, and I shook my head. “Before you say anything, before you tell us that was wrong, or murder, or—”
“I’m not going to say any of those things,” she said quietly, stepping over the rubble before she just gave up and ran into our arms. She melted into us as we held her tight, breathing in her scent, and letting the warmth of her radiate into us.
She lifted her face and pressed her lips tightly to Erik, kissing him fiercely before pulling away and moving to Oliver, who scooped her close. She pulled back and turned to me, her face flushed as she threw her arms around my neck and let my mouth sear itself to hers.
“I was just going to say thank you for flushing that piece of trash away,” she finally said as she broke away.
I grinned. “My kinda girl,” I murmured, as I leaned down to kiss the top of her head.
“Can we go home now?”
Oliver grinned. “Oh, it’s home now?”
“I could keep calling it the tower, where the wicked beasts have me locked up.”
“The locking up part could be arranged,” Erik murmured.
“I’ll wear my finest choker.”
We all grinned as we pulled her close, kissing her, claiming her.
Loving her.
Always.
Epilogue
Mia
And somehow, the three evil beasts who locked me in the tower turned out to be the knights in shining armor after all.
Well, maybe more like knights in black, tailor-fit, non-shiny armor, but you get what I mean.
You’d have thought crashing a helicopter into a building in midtown Manhattan, getting into a gun fight, and then throwing a man off said building would land you in a world of trouble. And you’d be correct — that is, unless you worked under the table for the US Government. And let me say, friends in high places are a very good thing to have if you plan on doing any of those things.
Especially the helicopter part.
Whoever Ash, Erik, and Oliver’s “friends” were, they made the whole thing disappear. Completely. The crash was deemed an accident, and the gunfight and dead thugs swept under the rug. Ryan’s death was declared a suicide in the papers, but the message had been sent.
And it was heard.
The night on that penthouse roof changed a lot. It’s funny to think of there being “good” criminals and “bad” criminals, but the fact of it is, there are both. After that night, the bad ones — including Johnson Cunningham and the rest of his goons — sort of disappeared.
The Auction House has reopened — back to its original concept, and with its original clientele — both the women who choose to be there and the men who take them home. It’s still a funny concept to me, but then, it’s not a scene I or my men have anything to do with anymore.
Not since we decided four was a pretty solid number.
My mother never heard the real story, because honestly, there was no need to freak her out. I did come clean about the fact that I was moving in with three rich, powerful men, and I even leveled with her about the nature of that relationship. Eyebrows were raised, and pearls were clutched, but at the end of the day, she was just happy that I was happy. It certainly didn’t hurt that when she met them, Ash, Oliver, and Erik were the most freaking charming versions of themselves I’d ever seen.
Andrea was another story. Andrea got the whole story because she’d been dragged into it.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Ryan’s people had her when I’d called. They’d kicked down the door to our apartment earlier that very day, dragged her away, and waited for me to call. They’d had the chopper and the men on standby, and made her at gunpoint talk me into stepping outside, where they could grab me. Luckily, we’d found her right after Ryan went over the edge that night, pounding on a closet door a floor below. She was a wreck, of course, and she’d thrown her arms around me as we’d both let the tears come.
“I’m so sorry! About all of it!”
She felt the whole thing was her fault, of course, what with setting me up with Blaine’s friend. But Ash, Oliver, and Erik set her straight soon enough, helping me to calm her, and to let her know about the divide in the scene. As it turns out, Blaine really was a good guy, and out of the Auction House scene enough that he had no idea what kind of guy Ryan really was. My three men actually knew him, at least peripherally, and I think them vouching for him being one of the good ones went a long way with Andrea.
He’s since stopped paying her for dates and asked her to marry him, and their wedding is next month.
And the month after that?
Well, the month after that I get to figure out how to throw a wedding with one bride and three grooms without causing the scandal of the century.
I know the saying is “three is crowd,” and you know what? That’s actually true. But who’s to say a crowd is a bad thing? A crowd is a group, or a tribe, or a club. A crowd can be connected, and bound together. And our crowd?
Well, our crowd is a family, and that’s something I’m never giving up, no matter what they say.
Besides, let ‘em talk.
…We’ll just have to go out of our way to give them something to talk about.
The End.