Naomi was mentally unhinged. She honestly thought that she was helping me, and that by getting rid of Adam and Rob, I would be happy and we could be friends. She saw the drama at the house between the three men and me, the jealousy, the push and pull of a love triangle that was sometimes perfect and sometimes torture. She thought that she could “fix” it by getting rid of them. She was sick, and it wasn’t even her fault. I realized that the only thing I could do to save us now, and hopefully not be too late to save Adam and Rob, was to get out of this greenhouse. And there was only one way that I knew how to attempt that.
I loosened Michael’s grip from around my waist and pulled away from him so that I could walk toward the front of the greenhouse.
“What are you doing?” he whispered.
“Do you trust me?” I turned and whispered back.
“Always.”
“Then be ready.”
He didn’t know what he was supposed to be ready for, but Michael was good about acting and thinking on the spot under pressure. He stayed behind me at a careful distance so that he could still reach out for me if needed, and I walked toward the locked glass door to talk with my aunt.
“You’re right,” I said to her. “Thank you.”
Even though she had wanted a show of gratitude and understanding from me, she was completely taken aback and suspicious of me when I said it. I could tell by her furrowed brow that she didn’t quite believe that I was being sincere and wondered what I was playing at.
“I am the happiest when I am just with Michael, like we were tonight. I get so torn and indecisive when there are too many men around. I can’t seem to pull away from Rob and Adam myself, but now that you have pulled them away for me; I can see that you are right. I do want to be happy with just Michael, and to run The Sanctuary, and to be friends with you. You are my last living family member. But I still don’t want Adam and Rob to be hurt. They’re not bad people, despite them being men.”
I was really hopeful that my words would sound believable and convincing. They didn’t sound that way to me, but then again, I knew that I was lying.
“Tell me that you didn’t kill them,” I asked as I braced myself for whatever answer she might have given.
“They’re not dead,” she said. “I didn’t even hurt them at all. I just put them away somewhere so they won’t be able to bother you or interfere anymore.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. They weren’t dead and they weren’t hurt. I believed her. She had no reason to lie about it because she was the one with all the power right now.
“Okay,” I said as I conceded to her delusions. “Then I accept and appreciate your help. What would you like to do when we get back to The Sanctuary tonight?”
I could hear Michael shifting on his feet behind me and I knew that he was biting at the bit to ask what the hell I was doing. But I needed him to stay quiet for just a few minutes longer.
Naomi looked at me cautiously as if she still couldn’t believe that it was going to be this easy to get me to go along with her. I needed to say something else to convince her to buy into this completely.
“Hey, I know,” I said with a smile. “How about we have a movie night? That’s something that we haven’t done since I was a kid.”
I tried to make my face look as realistically excited as I could possibly muster.
“Okay,” she said as the corners of her lips started to turn upward and form a smile. “But none of those romantic chick-flicks. You know how much I hate that shit.”
She pointed over toward Michael.
“He can come, but if the two of you start making out or anything during the movie then I’m going to cut your tongues out.”
I inadvertently gave her a shocked and horrified look before I was able to catch myself.
“Relax,” she laughed. “I was just kidding. Well, I still don’t want you to make out during the movie, but I was kidding about cutting your tongues out. Michael is safe from me, for as long as you still continue to like him.”
“Okay,” I said with a smile so fake that it hurt my teeth. “Are you going to let us out now?”
Naomi seemed to bristle at my question.
“I mean, unless you’re going to somehow find a way for us all to watch a movie inside the greenhouse.”
I chuckled to make it seem extra nonchalant.
Naomi looked between me and Michael, and then must have decided that she believed the act that I was putting on, because she reached out and opened the lock on the glass door.
As soon as he heard the lock slide free from the mechanism that held it, Michael knew exactly what it was that I had asked him to be ready for. He rushed past me and out the door, tackling Naomi before she even had time to react to him. Naomi screamed in shock and I heard the cracking sound of her head hitting the floor of the roof. That had to have hurt. She wrestled with Michael against the ground, but he had a firm grip on her, at least he did have a firm grip on her for the first moment or so of their scuffle. Naomi somehow managed to slip out of his arms and got to her feet as Michael reached out to grab her again. She ran to the edge of the roof and Michael got up to run toward her again too.
“No!” I shouted to him as I held my arm out in front of me.
He looked back and me and paused as he waited for me to tell him why I had stopped him from getting hold of my aunt again.
“Stay where you are,” I said to him. “Please.”
There was something about the way that Naomi perched next to the edge of the roof that caused me alarm. There was a section of roof that had no border to it, just an open drop to the ground, and it was the exact section that she was standing in front of. She was carefully balanced with one foot on the rooftop and one on the thin strip of edging that stood between her and the plummet to the city streets below. I held both hands out in front of me as if somehow my fingers could root both her and Michael in their places and avoid anything else horrible from happening.
“You tricked me,” Naomi said with a sour face that looked as if she might actually cry. “You betrayed me.”
“Naomi please,” I said as I tried to inch forward toward her slowly.
“I was trying to help you and you tricked me,” she said. “You aren’t at all like your mother; I take it back. Paula would never have tricked me. Your mother would never have played with someone’s trust like that. You aren’t anything like her. You’re actually much more like me.”
I watched in slow motion as Naomi looked at me through tear-stricken eyes and took a step over the edge of the roof. It felt like everything happened at once then. Michael leapt forward to try to grab her and save her from falling to her death. I ran toward her, knowing that there was no way I could reach her in time, but feeling as if I had to move and not just stand there helplessly as I watched my mother’s sister jump to her death.
But there was nothing to do but watch it happen.
Michael walked over to the edge of the roof and looked down. Then he turned back around to me as I walked closer to him and he grabbed me in his arms as I buried my head against his shirt.
“I killed her,” I cried softly against him. “I killed her.”
“You didn’t kill her,” he said as he rested his head against mine. “She killed herself.”
“She killed herself because she felt that I had betrayed her. It’s my fault.”
“Lisette,” Michael said as he pulled back a bit to lift my head up so I could look at him. “None of this is your fault.”
“You’d say that even if you didn’t believe it. You’re just trying to make me feel better,” I said.
“No, I’m not. I will always be brutally honest with you, even when it hurts.”
“Prove it,” I said.
“What?”
“Tell me something brutally honest that you know I don’t want to hear—anything.”
“I don’t see how that will help this situation,” he said.
“I need to know that you’ll be honest with me, even
if it sucks,” I said.
I waited to hear what he would say.
“Fine,” he said. “You might hate me for this, but it will at least prove the point that you’re seeking reassurance on. That night—the one on the rooftop here when I held you over this edge; for a split second, I thought about letting you fall.”
“What?” I whispered in shock. “You were going to kill me?”
“Of course not,” he said. “The thought only crossed my mind for a split second. But yes, in that split second, the thought of letting you fall did cross my mind.”
“Why?” I asked in quiet disbelief.
“Because not being able to have you was killing me. It was the worst imaginable torture that I could think of or had ever been through, and I wanted to do something to make it stop.”
I stared at Michael and saw his jaw quiver and his pupils shake. He was telling me the truth; the cold, hard, painful truth about something that I didn’t want to hear.
“How’s that for painful truth?” he asked.
“I believe you now,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Are you upset about what I just said?” he asked with a worried expression.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I would have rather fallen to my death off this roof than to have been without you too.”
When we left the aquarium, we headed straight back to The Sanctuary to look for Adam and Rob. With Naomi dead, there were no clues to follow and no way to find where she might have put them. The first thought was that she would have somehow tricked or overpowered them here at the house and then locked them in a room somewhere. But Michael and I searched the entire place, and there was no sign of them.
“Hey,” Sarah said as she came out of her room and watched us frantically searching the building. “What are you guys looking for?”
“Adam and Rob, the other two guys that you met here last night,” I said. “Have you seen them?”
“No,” she said curtly.
“Have you seen anyone since last night?” Michael asked with tension in his voice.
“No.”
“Have you even come out of your room at all?”
I could tell that Michael was starting to get nervous about what had happened to the guys because he was starting to lose his patience on this poor woman who saw nothing and just came here to try to find some peace. His mood didn’t seem to rattle her though.
“No,” she said for a third time before turning to walk back to her room.
“That girl is weird,” he said to me.
“Hey, that’s not nice,” I said. “The people who will come here will need our support and understanding, not our judgement.”
“Sorry,” he said. “But we just don’t even have time for any of this right now. We need to find them.”
Agreed, we did. After we searched the house, we went to the campuses. Naomi was very familiar with both the Goldshire and the Lineage campuses, so it was probable that she would have put the guys somewhere there. We searched Goldshire first, checking every nook and cranny and asking everyone that passed by us if they had seen the two guys. But our search turned up nothing. Then we went to Lineage and did the same.
“The stone room!” I said as I got excited thinking that it would probably be the exact place Naomi was likely to put the guys. We ran to the stone room and when we got there it was locked. Instead of wasting time going to the main offices to look for the key (which Naomi had probably taken and hidden somewhere anyway), Michael worked on creating a wedge to yank the door open and break the lock from the outside. When it worked, I almost allowed myself to indulge in a sense of relief but as soon as I saw that the room was empty, that notion quickly faded.
We even went back to the aquarium and searched everywhere there, thinking that maybe she had somehow managed to drag both of the guys with her and hide them there right beneath our noses. It was highly unlikely that Naomi would have been able to drag both Adam and Rob anywhere all by herself without anyone else to help her, even if they had been drugged or something. And I couldn’t think of anyone that she would have been able to get to help her. There was no one there at the house aside from Sarah, and she seemed harmless enough. I doubt that she would have aided my aunt, especially not if she valued being able to stay at The Sanctuary.
Eventually, we headed back to the house because it was getting too dark to keep searching and we had run out of ideas of places to look. Adam and Rob were nowhere.
“What are we going to do?” I asked as I sat down at the table in the common room while Michael poured whiskey into glasses. Tonight was too much of a burden for wine, and we needed something stronger. He handed me my glass and sat down beside me. The first sip of whiskey always burned my throat in the most delectable and warming way. It made me think about sitting around the bonfire in the mountains of Asheville and I wanted to go back there right now. I wanted the four of us to be sitting around a crackling fire, drinking glasses full of burning whiskey as the snow-kissed air hit our faces.
“What if they’re hurt?” I asked.
“Naomi said they weren’t.”
“Yeah, I know. But do you really believe anything she said?” I asked.
“Yes, actually,” Michael answered. “I do. I really believe she thought that she was trying to help you. I don’t think she hurt them.”
That made me feel at least a little bit better.
“But I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of her putting them somewhere where they would eventually suffer,” he added.
And then I was back to feeling awful again.
“We can’t just sit here and do nothing,” I said. “We have to keep looking for them.”
“Agreed. But I can’t think of anyplace else to look right now and it won’t do us any good to keep spinning our wheels without a direction to head in. We need to get some sleep, and then we can start back at searching first thing in the morning.”
“I don’t want to rest. I can’t sleep knowing that the two of them are out there somewhere and possibly suffering,” I said as I felt the tears start to come.
“Then you need to rest,” Michael asserted. “Because a clear head is going to be the best way to find them.”
He was right, and so after we finished our drinks and pulled a few pieces of food out of the fridge to shove in our mouths, we went to bed. I curled up around Michael and tried to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes all I could see was Adam and Rob’s faces staring back at me. If anything were to happen to them, then I will have wished I had thrown my Aunt Naomi off the roof myself, several times over and over again.
13
After two days of searching, we still hadn’t found them. Two days, that was long enough for someone to die if the situation was ripe for it.
“We shouldn’t have come back here,” I said as I paced back and forth in the common room.
We had spent the day scouring the campuses again, and then even spreading out into the surrounding streets of the city to see if there was any place that looked like somewhere Naomi might have put them.
“We should have taken the money and run or given it to Naomi and gone back to our quiet and peaceful lives in Asheville. I should have listened to all of you. This was my idea to come back here and look what has happened.”
“No,” Michael said as he stepped forward and grabbed my hand to stop me from pacing anymore. “Don’t start with the self-blame again. Naomi would have found a way to make something like this happen regardless.”
I was just about to say something to argue that point, but then Michael looked as though he suddenly remembered something.
“Oh my god,” he said. “Money.”
“What?”
I failed to see what money had to do with finding the guys.
But Michael quickly cleared up my confusion. “You mentioned taking the money and it reminded me of a place that we haven’t looked yet. There’s a walk-in safe inside the headmaster’s office at Lineage.
Naomi would have known about it. It would be the perfect place to put someone that you didn’t want to escape because it won’t open from the inside. If she found a way to get the guys there, then it would make the perfect unescapable prison.”
I felt my eyes grow huge as soon as he said it and I grabbed his hand to start running out the door.
When we got to Lineage, Michael led the way toward the headmaster’s office. Inside the office there was a bookcase that looked as if it had always been built into the wall. But Michael knew more about the intricacies of Lineage since he had grown up on this campus, way before I ever became familiar with it. He reached his hand behind the tiny space that was between the bookcase and the wall and wiggled his fingers around until he found the latch that released it. All of a sudden, the bookcase moved as if it was on an electric track, and it parted to the side to reveal a large metal door—the safe.
“Do you know the combination?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But if the guys happen to be in here then that means Naomi had to have known it. Can you think of a set of numbers that would be meaningful to your aunt?”
I rattled off Naomi’s birthday, and my mother’s; the date of my mother’s death, and even the date of my grandfather’s death, thinking that it would have been a cause for celebration since she had hated her father so much. But none of the number combinations seemed to work.
“What’s your birthdate?” Michael asked me.
I looked at him with raised eyebrows.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I promise I’ll memorize it at some point, maybe after we get married. But for right now can you just tell me what it is?”
My eyebrows were raised not because Michael didn’t know my birthdate, but because I failed to see why that would be of any significance to my Aunt Naomi and therefore was a waste of an attempt at opening the safe. But after I told him the date, I felt my heart racing inside my chest and put my hand over the warmth that was growing down in the bottom of my stomach.
Vicious: A Dark Bully Reverse Harem Romance (Beautiful Tyrants Book 3) Page 10
