by Jade West
Elaine
Even now, in pain with my blood still flowing under the bandage, I didn’t care about anything but holding the man I loved.
He was home.
Safe.
Alive.
But that wasn’t going to be the case all that much longer. Not with the pointer fingers coming up from all directions.
My eyes must have been terrified when they met his.
“Have you heard the news?” I asked. “Have you seen Terence Kingsley on the news?! They’re looking for him, Lucian! They want information on Terence! That’s what’s bringing them here, isn’t it? They’ve put the pieces together!”
I expected him to freak out and curse, or at least do something in shock, but he didn’t. Even though he shook his head, and said no, he hadn’t seen Terence Kingsley on the news, he didn’t look shocked.
“Sure, them hunting down the jackass journalist is a nail in the coffin, Elaine,” he told me as he grabbed hold of our things around us. “But believe me, baby, there are a whole load worse nails coming for our coffin than that. You’ve just met one of them.”
“There are more people coming, aren’t there?” I pushed.
I’ll remember his answer for the rest of my life.
My beautiful monster was so proud and terrified both at once when he told me, his expression will be etched into my soul for all time.
“Plenty of people will be coming for us,” he told me. “But I’ll be protecting you and dishing out revenge with every breath in me, I swear it on my life.”
And then he paused.
Lucian Morelli actually paused before he told me what he’d done.
“Talking of revenge, Elaine. I just killed your fucking uncle,” he said.
8
Lucian
Her face was magic. A perfect picture of shock as her hands clasped over her face.
“You… you killed Lionel?”
“Yes, my beautiful princess. I killed the vile fuck who delivered you for abuse. Shot him bang in his fucking face.”
“He’s really dead?”
I could tell she was still trying to process it. Still trying to believe my words.
“He’s dead. I bid him a fair fucking farewell.” I paused. “And I delivered Colonel Hardwick a fair fucking farewell alongside him. Both of them can rot in hell.”
She was still hurting from her wound, but in that moment it didn’t matter, she was too caught up in what I was telling her.
“I don’t even know what to say…” she said.
I took hold of her shoulders and kissed her forehead.
“You don’t have to say anything. It was the greatest achievement of my life. I’m just fucking grateful I made it back here in time.” I sucked in a breath. “I won’t be leaving you again, I guarantee you that.”
She sucked in a breath to match mine, and then my angel shone bright and perfect. A tear dropped from her eye and ran down her cheek, but there was a smile on her face. The most beautiful smile I’d ever seen.
It was the little girl Elaine who was smiling at me. Grateful. Humble. Surprised.
The little girl Elaine I was more petrified of losing than anything else I’d ever felt.
“Thank you,” she managed to whisper, and then she broke, sobbing hard and deep.
I wrapped her in my arms and soothed the stunning girl as she cried. It only made my black soul thrum even harder. Pride. I was proud of what I’d done for her. I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat and enjoy every second more than life itself. Only now wasn’t the time. Now was the time we needed to get the holy fuck out of there.
“I’m going to get the rest of those vile cunts,” I said. “As long as there is life in my body, princess, I’ll be hunting the rest of them down.”
I didn’t tell her that one of the main reasons I was choosing the UK as our runaway destination was that the other main members of the fellowship were based there, in their stuck-up British empires. It had been one of my motives—to reach Baron Rawlings and Lord Eddington. A far bigger attraction to me than Buckingham Palace, that was for damn sure.
“I can’t believe it,” she whispered through her tears. “You did that for me… you made them pay for what they did to me…”
“They deserved a whole lot fucking worse, Elaine. They’re lucky I didn’t have more time.”
I held her close, savoring the touch of her body against mine. She was tiny, pressing hard to my chest, and I loved feeling her like that, so trusting of me. I don’t know how long we were standing there, but the sky was turning pink to dusk outside when she pulled away from me. Her eyes were puffy but every bit as stunning, and her smile was delicate in the most gorgeous of ways.
I told her how I’d tracked them down at the golf course and accosted them at hole four. I told her how they knew exactly what I was taking revenge for, but all the while I was finishing up gathering our things ready to go.
“I’d have killed Lionel myself if I could,” she told me, and the flash of hate and hurt in her eyes showed me just how true that was. “Honestly, Lucian. I’d have killed him myself.”
I was very glad to have delivered her wish by my hands.
Her mind seemed to click back onto our own situation as I gathered the rest of our suitcases.
“Terence Kingsley,” she said again. “They’re looking for Terence Kingsley. His face is all over the news. There’s a hotline wanting information about him.”
I knew we were fucked. She didn’t need to tell me. The Terence Kingsley nail in the coffin was just one of many. We just had to pray that we could make it through the hours to get to the airport tomorrow. It’s not as though we could even check into a hotel for the night with one of my other fake IDs. We were too recognizable with Terence Kingsley’s face all over the news alongside Elaine Constantine’s.
I got the suitcases ready to go, positioned at the bottom of the stairs. She told me how she’d packed everything she could see we’d need, and how I should check it to be sure, but I shook my head at her.
“Whatever you’ve packed will be fine.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Getting out of here is our biggest hurdle,” I told her between loading up the suitcases into the trunk of the car. “But the UK isn’t going to be all that easy. People will be screaming out for our blood, on both sides of the family divide.”
“I know,” she said, then took another deep breath. “My uncle Lionel has sex with my mom, you know? Well, she used to. They’ve had that thing for years. She’s going to be screaming out for blood louder than anyone when she finds out you killed him.”
“She’ll hopefully be screaming out for Colonel Hardwick’s blood, then, since I set it up to look like he shot Lionel. She won’t be screaming out for his blood for very long though, since he’s already dead. I made sure it looked like he killed himself after murdering your uncle. Only that won’t wash. Not for long. Not for the people who know us.”
“Hopefully they’ll never know it was you. Not ever.”
“There’s that beautiful optimism again.” I shrugged. “Your mom should have listened to you when you were a little girl begging for her care and protection. She’d have probably killed your sick fucking uncle herself.”
Elaine said something that shocked me right to the fucking core.
“Not so sure about that.”
“Not so sure about that?” I pushed, helping her out to the passenger seat of the Merc. “That your mother wouldn’t want to kill a man that was setting you up for abuse?”
She shrugged. “Just not sure she really ever loved me enough that she would have turned against him.”
If I’d have had a heart, it would have broken to see the pain in her face. My angel truly believed that she was unloved, by everyone. Only it wasn’t just that. It was the twiddle of her fingers in front of her again that spoke words she’d never say. The way they were twisting, hurting. The way she was clearly so broken inside.
My angel really believed sh
e was worthless.
Only she wasn’t worthless.
She was worth everything in my whole fucking world.
“I really am going to make them all pay,” I told her, and my voice was a ripple of well-deserved hate for those disgusting pricks.
“Thank you,” she said, and there was the young Elaine again, staring over at me with a smile.
It was all I could take. I grabbed her hard and strong before I lowered her down to her seat, showing her my full depth of emotion before letting go of her enough to belt her in, trying to show her everything she deserved and had never had. Protection and love. I’d give her both until my very last breath.
Unfortunately, that last breath might not be all that long coming.
I was still holding her tight when my cell sounded out again, three times straight in a row before I broke away to pick it up from the counter.
Trenton Alto.
My right-hand man was a long way from being my right hand right about now, but still, he was trying.
I managed to answer his call on his fourth attempt, grunting out a yeah, what?
“Yeah, what the holy living fuck are you doing?!” he hissed at me. “Did you just fucking kill Lionel fucking Constantine on Hanborough Park Golf Course? People are saying it was some Hardwick guy, but you were there too, weren’t you?”
“What do you think?” I hissed back. “Not that it’s any of your fucking business.”
He cursed at me.
“Fuck you, Morelli. You’d better be glad it is my fucking business, or you’d be up to your neck already.” He paused. “You’re fucked both as Lucian Morelli and as Terence fucking Kingsley, you know. The cards are all falling down. The Power Brothers have someone on their way already. Warren, a guy with a scar down his face.”
“Yeah, tell me something I don’t know,” I scoffed. “I’ve got a handle on that one.”
“But you haven’t got a handle on anything, have you?” he said, and his voice got lower. “Because if you’re in Kington Peak, and I suspect you are, you’d better get the fuck out of there right fucking now.”
My blood froze.
“You’re there now, aren’t you?” he said. “You may think it’s a private refuge, Lucian, but you’re wrong. People know it’s out there. People know it’s where you go.”
“People?” I asked him. “Who do you mean by people? I still don’t know how the hell the Power Brothers ever found out about this place, so who the hell else are you meaning?”
“I mean your father,” he told me. “And believe me, Lucian, he’s after you. He knows you’ve fucked up and gone after the Constantines. He thinks you’ve killed Lionel and taken the little bitch Elaine, or even worse than that… he thinks you’ve kept her. For you. The cleanup team are on their way, right fucking now.”
I knew Trenton was breaking every rule of self-preservation and common sense he had in his head.
There was no way he should be warning me. No way he should have ever tried to save my ass from my own undoing.
I stayed on the call long enough to give him a response.
One single phrase.
“Thank you.”
I rarely said it, rarely felt it, rarely considered anyone worthy.
He confirmed what I already knew would be the only route ahead for him.
“This is it for us,” he said. “From this moment on, I’m on team Morelli. They’ll take my life if I’m not. They’ll take Lucinda’s life, too. If they tell me to come for you, I’ll be coming for you.”
Lucinda was his little baby girl. Four years old.
“I know,” I told him.
“Goodbye, Lucian,” he said.
And then he hung up.
9
Elaine
It was bad and I knew it.
“We need to go,” he said. “Now. People are already on their way.”
I nodded, mute, praying I’d packed everything we needed to take, only there was nothing for me to be taking. I had nothing here.
Nothing except Lucian Morelli.
It seemed Lucian did have things left to pack up, though. I should have waited in the car, holding my wound tight in my bandage, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stay still. He was already in the kitchen when I joined him, pulling the panel from the bottom of one of the cabinets, then pulling out several cases to follow. He opened them up one by one to check the contents, quick and sharp. Cash. Lots of cash. Several guns came out after them in a case of their own.
He was a machine as he headed outside and loaded up the trunk with the final contents ready to roll. I would have helped him, but I was too busy getting my feet into my high heels with trembling fingers, managing a surprising amount given the pain I was in.
“Stop it, Elaine,” he hissed when he stepped back in to join me. “Let me do this for you. I was going to help you into this before we left, I just wanted you as safe as possible in the damn fucking car.
I was startled as he dropped his cell onto the porch step and smashed the hell out of it with his boot heel. It was a trashed wreck as he tossed it into the bushes at the side of the house.
“Don’t use that thing again,” he said. “It’ll be a beacon.”
The car was already started up when he slid me back into the passenger seat and fastened me in for the second time.
The tires screeched against the driveway as he sped away, and I stared at the house in the rearview with a strange pang of homesickness in my belly. Yeah. This place had been the closest thing to a home I’d ever known.
The roads were quiet, but he veered off onto even quieter ones. Rural, remote and out of sight of any kind of main highway.
“Who’s on the way?” I asked him when his driving slowed down a little.
“It’s my own family coming for me this time,” he said, “I’m now my father’s enemy, not his son.”
I felt awful for him.
“Sorry,” rolled off my tongue without a thought.
He looked right at me.
“You have nothing to be sorry for, sweetheart. I have no regrets and you have nothing to take accountability for.”
“Still,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I had no idea where we were headed until signs for the city showed up and told me directly. I had no idea what the plan was, or where we were going to end up, not until Lucian pulled another surprise out for me.
“I’m trusting your friend Jemma isn’t back from her world-saving mission yet?”
I spun in my seat to face him, taken aback he even remembered her name. Jemma. My friend who gave me her apartment keys whenever she was on a charity project or a protest drive somewhere. The friend whose apartment Lucian had followed me to downtown and threatened to kill me in her kitchen. Only he hadn’t. He’d walked away and left me bleeding from my own self-harm on her living room carpet.
“Yeah, she’ll be away for weeks,” I said.
“Good. I have a set of keys to her apartment that I had made up, we’ll wait it out there overnight.”
It was yet another shocker for me.
“You have keys to her apartment?”
He smirked, even through his tension. “Yes. I have keys to her apartment. I was planning on using it to finish you off in. Trenton Alto made them for me.”
I smirked back. “Life works out pretty damn weirdly sometimes, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. “It sure does.”
Gaol Street was barely more than a dive, and definitely nowhere that people would ever come looking for Lucian Morelli. He ditched the car a few blocks away in an underground parking lot, as far into the shadows as he could, and then he took the suitcases from the trunk. He couldn’t carry all of them, so I took hold of the cash. It felt so bizarre to be carrying that much money in my hands. Bizarre and painful, even though I was lucky enough that the wound from the blade didn’t seem to be nearly as bad as I was fearing.
Painful but manageable. Torment, not quite torture.
Together we made
our way over to Jemma’s place. I was teetering with every step, heels feeling crazy. I must have looked absurd, dressed in a long shirt and one of Lucian’s jackets with stilettos on my feet.
Sure enough, Lucian had keys to Jemma’s place. He looked up and down the street before he let us into the apartment block, but it seemed there was nobody around.
I was so used to being in this place that the hallway actually felt relaxing as we made our way along to apartment seven. I took the key from Lucian and let us inside, and there we were, back at one of the very first places we first truly crossed paths.
I still remembered him being there, pinning me to the kitchen countertop.
Holy hell, how I wanted him to do it again. Even though I had a slice to my chest, I still wanted Lucian to take me.
We dropped the cases down in the living room, then I headed on into the kitchen. I took two mugs out, staring at him afresh all over again as he stepped on into the hallway. It didn’t matter how many times I looked at the man I adored, he still took my breath away.
He looked bigger than ever as he stood looking at Jemma’s whale tapestry up on the wall. His hair looked darker and slicker, and his eyes looked fiercer, and his stance was more powerful than I’d ever known.
Yes. He was the man I was destined to be with. I could feel it with every breath, right into my heart. Romeo and Juliet had nothing on us. We were as soul bound as it would ever be possible to be.
Lucian gestured to the bedroom.
“This may solve another issue at least,” he said. “You might leave this place with some clothes that actually fit you.”
He was right on that. Jemma was almost exactly the same size as me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I can pack a suitcase of her stuff. Or try to, at least.”
Making us a coffee gave me tingles, reminding me so much of the first time in that space together. He stepped up close to take his mug and I couldn’t fight the waves of shivers rushing through me. Only this time they were good shivers. This time they were shivers because I was so desperate for his touch.
