“By bringing me to a haunted house?” She looked around the room at all of Raven’s pictures on the walls. Then, her eyes returned to mine with more questions than before.
“You are my rare and radiant woman whom the angels sent for me. There is no one else for me than you.”
“That’s not true, Van.”
“We are meant to be, so we must be. I don’t want to be alone anymore. Make it stop, make the hurting stop, Raven!”
“Why do you keep calling me Raven?”
“Because—”
I stopped moving and stared into Alise’s frightened, light brown eyes. For the first time since I saw her, I saw her. She had distinct differences from Raven. Her skin tone was a shade browner, and her hair was curly at the nape where Raven’s was coarser. Alise’s dimples were more pronounced, and her eyes a little bigger. Yet, I wouldn’t allow myself to believe she wasn’t meant to be here with me. “You are my wife. I mean, you may not be her in the flesh, but her soul rests within you,” I explained.
“Van, I’m not your wife. I may resemble her, but I am not Raven.” Alise took that moment to look around the room again, this time studying Raven’s pictures hanging on each of the four walls. Her wonderment over their resemblance showed in her stunned eyes.
I was done talking. She now knew she was mine. At this point, I felt like we needed to connect on a much deeper level. I hoisted from the bed and walked over to the closet. I pulled out one of Raven’s silk nightgowns and handed it to Alise.
“Here…”
✦
Alise
“Put this on,” was all he said before he turned and walked out of the room. I had been in this room for hours, waiting for him to come back. I checked the door and the windows and everything was locked. I was stuck here waiting on a madman’s next move.
He had snatched me from Tameka’s wedding as if I was his. Now, I really didn't know what he was gonna do with me. What I did know was that we had driven for miles to get to this isolated place, and I had no clue where we were. After he knocked me out, I lost my sense of direction. I assumed we were somewhere near Birmingham since that was the direction we were headed. All I knew for sure was that I was far away from home. Fear rushed all through me with the thought of what he was going to do to me when he returned back to this room.
What kind of man was this?
I felt like I was watching a movie as I looked around the bedroom of my confinement. There were pictures of a woman all over the walls, and the eerie part was that she looked just like me. I mean, really. They say everyone has a twin, and she was mine. I got up and went closer to the pictures to see if they were actually me, but there was one picture of the woman in her wedding dress. One of her standing by a beachfront. Then, I saw a picture of Van and her together on their wedding day. There was an inscription that read: “On this day we began our love journey, evermore.” It had their names Van and Raven Deveraux inscribed underneath. She was his wife.
My attention went back to the various framed pictures of her on the wall, and it clicked. He had called me Raven at the reception. The first time he saw me at the club, he said Rav— then caught himself and called me Alice, and I corrected him and told him my name was Alise. I wasn’t the person he was interested in having here. It was her. If that was the case, why wasn’t she here? What had happened to his wife? If the madman had kidnapped me from a wedding at gunpoint because I resembled his wife, what had he done to her?
Now, I was terrified. Just when I achieved success as a musician and found love, I had to die out in the middle of nowhere with a stranger. I had the worst luck in my love life.
The door handle started rattling, and Van reentered the room. He was wearing a smoking jacket and had a lit cigar in his mouth. In his hand, he had incense and a bottle of wine. “I know you like these, so I brought them for you. This is your favorite kind of red wine, and I brought a lavender incense.” He smiled, looking more relaxed than I had ever seen him look.
I, on the other hand, was slowly losing it. “How do you know my favorite wine and that I like incense?”
“I’ve been keeping an eye on you, my Alise.” He set the bottle of wine down on the bedtable and walked over and set the incense in a jar on the dresser. He lit it and inhaled the air. “Ah, I can see why you love it. I think I will fall in love with it too.”
Van looked at me with hungry-looking bedroom eyes and walked over to the corner of the bed. I was standing on the other side. He pointed to the bed since I wasn’t taking his cue to lie down on my side.
“Lay down, my Alise. It’s bedtime, my love.” Van slid into the bed on the side he was standing on. I kept standing. He reached around his waist and took out his gun, and I followed his order and laid down. “Oh, my love, I was not about to point this at you. I was only going to put it under my pillow to protect us against anyone who might come here to harm us. Come.”
He reached an arm out for me to move closer to him in the bed. I didn’t move. I was glued to that spot.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I asked, lying as far away from him in the bed as I could without falling off the other side.
“I thought you wanted this,” he replied in a low tone.
“Why would you think that?”
“You told me you loved me,” he said.
From the look in his bright gray eyes, he sincerely believed I had told him that.
“I’ve never said that to you,” I replied.
“Yes, you did. The night at the club when I yelled ‘I love you,’ you said—”
“And I love you back,” I said, remembering my famous line to say to fans when they told me they loved me. “Yes, I said that. But that’s something I say to all of my fans. I meant it in an ‘I love all of God’s children’ kind of way. I didn’t know you were taking that seriously.”
A scowl slowly grew in intensity on his face. “I did take it seriously. So, before you toss out words like that, make sure they mean something,” he said harshly.
“Okay, I will,” I said. The tense features of his face once again relaxed. Hoping that sparking a conversation about his wife would buy me some time, time from whatever he planned for us to do in this bed, I asked, “What happened to her?”
He shot me an icy glare as he pronounced, “I killed her.”
“You…killed her? Was it a mistake or something?” I could only hope he wasn’t a hardened murderer. At this point, I had to know. I was in the middle of nowhere, lying down in the bed with him. At least, I should know what happened to Raven in case he was planning to kill me next.
“She wanted to start a bakery,” he answered. He had a far off look in his eyes as he stared at the wall, not looking at any particular thing.
“A bakery?” I asked to be sure that I’d heard him correctly.
“One night, she came back from a grocery trip and told me she was opening a bakery and that she would call it Raven’s Delights. I smiled at her excitement. She had done this many times before, come home saying she was going to start her own bakery. She never followed through. It was just something to talk about. That night, Raven went to our bedroom, and an hour later, she came out with a full plan mapped out on starting her bakery. She had written her business plan and everything. I—” He sucked the rest of his words back in as if they were too painful to say.
I waited patiently for him to continue. He tossed the covers back and got out of bed, walking over to stand and look at a picture of Raven in a kitchen, smiling up at whoever was taking the picture. Van sucked in a deep breath.
“In no uncertain terms, I told her she wasn’t opening a bakery, and that no wife of mine was going to work outside of the house. I told her I had enough money to take care of her, our children, and grandchildren for the rest of their lives. I told her to go into the kitchen and cook me dinner if she wanted to cook.”
Wow.
“And what did she do when you said that?” I asked curiously.
“She— she said she was going
to have to ask me for a divorce if I didn’t support her. That’s when I stood up from my desk in my study, and… I—I walked over to her. As I told her that I would never let her go, I shoved her down to the ground. I don’t even know why I did it. I just did it. I shoved her so hard that she hit her head on the coffee table on her way down. The fear on her face sent shivers through me. I couldn’t believe I made her feel so afraid of me, so hurt. I tried to help her up. She wouldn’t let me help her. I kept apologizing, but she jumped up to her feet and ran out of the room, never saying another word to me. I thought she was going back to our bedroom to cool off. Instead, she grabbed her keys and ran out the door. She got in her car and drove frantically down my gravelly driveway and right into a tree, dying instantly. The reports weren’t able to tell if she died from the head injury against the coffee table or the impact of the accident to her ribcage. Either way, I killed her.”
“Wow, Van. You’ve been carrying around a lot of hurt, but you didn’t mean to hurt her,” I said.
“It’s just that, I believe in having order in my life. I don’t like changes. That’s why I didn’t like Raven to communicate with her family. They would pour these colorful ideas into her about what she should do. It was on those trips to the grocery store that she would get all these bright ideas because she would talk to her family on the phone when she was away from the house. She was my precious little flower. She wasn’t supposed to be covered in flour at a bakery all day long. I just wanted her home with me. To love me. To have our babies. I didn’t mean to hurt her. I didn’t mean it!”
Van looked to the far corner of the room at another picture.
“Raven, you’re here. You came back to me.” He walked across the room, holding his arms out to an invisible entity. From the look in his eyes, whatever it was he saw was real to him. “I’m so—so sorry about what I did to you. I love you so much,” he said and wept as he wrapped his arms around the air.
Standing there in awe, I thought I should take this moment to make a dash to the door, but I also was captivated by the sight in front of me. Van was hugging the air as if it was truly someone in his arms. While he was preoccupied with whatever he thought he saw in the corner of the room, I decided to take small steps toward the door. This would probably be my only chance to get out of this room alive.
“No, don’t say nevermore, Raven! We were meant to be evermore. Evermore, darling. Say it again.” Van was pleading with the air, but then he quickly turned to me. I was two steps away from the door when he rushed over to me and wrapped his arms around my waist, slowly hauling me into his arms. He tightened his grip, and I felt my heart beat faster than ever. I thought my heart would leap out of my chest. His touch made me so jittery. He meshed us closer together as if that was even possible.
When his sweaty hand stroked strands of my hair away from my face, I gasped. Who was this man in front of me? He didn’t appear to be the beast that just kidnapped me from a party but a gentle giant who had been deeply bruised from past love. The way he treated his wife was wrong, but having to live without her had been hell on earth for him. It was literally driving him insane. I just hoped I would survive his insanity.
Chapter Twelve
Bruiser
Restoration
I had my entire team on board in the search for Alise. We had located every piece of property owned by the Devereauxs in Alabama and the neighboring states. There were twenty-six massive estates and counting. These were some rich motherfuckers, and I couldn’t put anything past a man as wealthy as Van Devereaux. He could have his own cave built underground, for all we knew. We couldn’t leave one rock unturned. Alise was too important for that.
My research revealed Van had received over a hundred million dollars as the eldest living male Devereaux heir. But for as long as his money extended, my love for Alise extended further. I was going to bring her back home tonight. That, I would bet my life on.
My men were going location to location, searching for any sign of them. Limel searched the house in Beauregard, and now Dimir had joined him to scour the entire property, inch by inch. It was over three hundred acres, but I believed they would find her if she was there. Tameka was at my security office, screening phone calls and taking tips from the community. We put out an official request through social media and cable news for anyone who knew anything about Alise’s disappearance to call those tips into my office. The goofy-ass cops at the police station were upset about it, but I didn’t give one fuck about their feelings. I wasn’t about to leave the life of my baby in their hands when most of them couldn’t even bend over to tie their shoes.
Jeb, like every man on the search, was armed to the teeth and headed to a different Devereaux property. His wedding day had been ruined with Alise’s kidnapping, so he was ready to unleash the same amount of venom onto Van as I was. Xander had gone to check out Alise’s townhouse, just in case my guess was wrong, and Van had taken her there. Jayne demanded to be a part of the active search team with the men, so she rode along with Xander. She had her pistol in her purse and said she was ready for war.
Meanwhile, Channing was with Kemara, who had to be rushed to the hospital. The stress of the day had weighed on her, but their baby, who wasn’t a secret anymore, would be okay. Kemara just needed to rest.
One particular property of Van’s stood out to me. It was a secluded cabin in the middle of Alabaster. After a tip from Van’s dead wife’s mother, we knew that this cabin was where he often went when he wanted to be secluded from the world with Raven. According to her parents, he isolated her from them, wouldn’t let her work, and basically controlled her. So, the cabin seemed like just the location he would want to take Alise to isolate and control her. That thought alone caused the veins in the side of my neck to pulse. I had to get there. If he hurt her, I would never forgive myself.
By the time we gathered this information and pinpointed the location, Van had about a four hour lead on us. I drove at full speed to the cabin in Alabaster, knowing when I arrived he would wish he never touched my woman. Hell, he would wish he never touched any woman.
I drove down a long, makeshift driveway that led to a dimly lit cabin. I hopped out of the car and ran up to the door. I took out a piece of metal and started working the lock. It took me a minute to get in, but once I was inside, I pulled my gun from my waist and walked through the dark living area toward the back of the house. The smell of lavender heightened my senses. That was Alise’s favorite scent. She was here.
Just as I was about to touch the door handle, I heard Van yelling, “No, don’t say nevermore, Raven! We were meant to be evermore. Evermore, darling. Say it again.” Loud whimpers ensued, and he let out a high-pitched shriek like the bitch he was. “I just miss her so much. So much…”
“Let it out. Just let it all out. You’re going to be fine,” Alise said. She sounded unharmed, and that made me feel relieved.
“I won’t be fine! My heart is hurting, so bad. I want to be with her again! I have to be!” Van yelled. “Don’t run away from me, Raven! Please, come back!”
I entered the room and saw Van running toward the door with his arms wide.
Alise took a step back when she saw me as if she had seen a ghost.
“Raven, come back!” Van yelled, lunging at me as he reached out at the air.
One clean shot and I shot him in the center of his chest. He dropped to the ground, coughing up air until blood replaced the air and came out in splattering and gurgling sounds. His arms were still reaching out to the sky as if he were reaching for something invisible. He grabbed whatever it was and pulled it to him.
“Kiss— me— one— last— time— evermore,” were his last words before he gave up the fight for air and collapsed onto the ground.
✦
Alise
With his face only a beat away from mine, his hot and heavy breath made my heart pump faster. This nightmare was over. Bruiser’s piercing brown eyes were like heaven staring back at me. He inched closer to me, an
d I could feel my body light up with chills, tingling in response. He put his forehead to mine while looking into my eyes. He just stood there, staring into my soul for as long as he needed to, to know that I was alright. He placed a gentle kiss on my forehead.
“Bruiser…”
“Alise, baby. I thought I had lost you.”
“No, I was determined not to die in here.”
“That’s because you knew I wouldn’t make it if you did. I would have gone mad.”
“I’m just glad you’re here,” I said.
He captured my face into his big hands, and I was on fire as he kissed my lips. My eyes fluttered as his mouth opened to engulf mine into his. Bruiser was the first man to ever declare himself as my protector, then follow through with it when it mattered. He saved me, and I needed him, no matter what I’d told myself in the past. I needed this protection.
“Alise,” he called out to me again, causing me to shiver.
“Yes.”
“I love you,” he spoke the words with so much love that I knew they were real. He looked into my eyes, peering deep inside of me. His confession yet again made me freeze in that moment in time. I had gone from terrified over whether I would make it out of this cabin alive to covered by Bruiser’s strong energy that could power an entire community. And his eyes. I had never seen eyes so impassioned about anything in this world. Not even in my kidnapper, whose desire for me had led him to steal me from a wedding. “I said, I love you, Alise. Now and forever. I will never let anything happen to you, from this day forward.” He spoke the words with so much love that I knew they were real. He looked into my eyes, peering deep inside of me.
“I love you too, Bruiser. I love you so much,” I screamed to the high heavens, flinging myself into his arms. “I thought I would never see you again. The last thing I did before Van drove away from the reception was scream that I love you from the car. It had pissed Van off, but I meant every word.”
A Dangerous Way to Love (Dangerous Bonds Book 3) Page 11
