A Perfect Storm

by Dane, Cameron

  The words Royce yelled rang clear in Sophie’s ears, but they didn’t make sense. Royce knew Lucien? His tone held a definite sense of familiarity. Oh. Sophie stumbled again but picked herself up and kept moving. So this was why she was here. It had something to do with Royce. Lucien and Royce were nearly the same age, and they were both strong, unyielding men. Maybe they’d gone to college together? Oh. No. Sophie staggered. It couldn’t be. Royce worked out of Atlanta, and Lucien used to own a club in the same city. Once she’d seen where those clubs were located, Sophie should have put two and two together and figured out at least the beginnings of her presence at Ravenstoke. Only she never would have picked her uptight, overbearing brother for someone who frequented a sex club.

  Sophie shivered. A thousand new questions popped into her head, but she kept running toward her brother’s shouts anyway. She ran down the hall toward Lucien’s wing of the castle and turned just in time to see Magnus hold the study door open for Royce. Her tall, muscular brother paused at the door, swore, and uttered, “I should have known you’d still be at his side.” He shoved into the study, and Sophie heard him add, “I guess blindly worshipping one Cabot bastard wasn’t enough for you.”

  Magnus snarled, but Royce had already taken up yelling at Lucien again, so he surely didn’t see it. Just as Magnus moved to shut the door, Sophie shoved her way inside. “I have every right to be in this room too.”

  With only a rise of his brows, Magnus let Sophie into the study.

  Sophie shivered again. Where she’d been toasty only moments ago, nothing but icy cold swirled around her bare legs and arms now, creating goose bumps in its wake. Her stomach churned, and she knew with a sick certainty that whatever had her brother in such a rage had to do with her and Lucien. And what we’ve done since my arrival at Ravenstoke. Not an accident. She’d known from the start.

  From across the desk, Royce lunged for Lucien, but Magnus jumped in, grabbed Royce by the arms, and wrestled him into a chair. Royce was a big man, but Magnus was even bigger. After a mighty struggle, Royce stopped fighting, and Magnus stepped away.

  Royce bared his teeth at Lucien, and he had such a blunt, square jaw and face he looked like a brown-haired, brown-eyed grizzly. “I will kill you for what you’ve done to her, you sick bastard.” Venom coated each hissed word. “I will put you in prison for it, where you will rot away the rest of your miserable life.”

  For just a split second, Lucien glanced at Magnus. No more than a blink, but when he shifted his focus back to Royce, his stare changed to something full of familiar distance. “You’ll never prove I was behind it. My lawyer will make the claim that anyone at Ravenstoke could have done it, and you will not be able to successfully pin it on any single one of us.”

  Royce surged again. Once more Magnus shoved Royce back into his seat. Through clenched teeth, his mouth barely moving, Royce hissed, “I will make it my life’s mission to destroy you. I promise.”

  No fire, nothing but flat gold lived in Lucien’s eyes. “You can try. I don’t care. I did what needed to be done.” He steepled his hands and tapped his fingers against his chin. “You’re lucky I didn’t do worse, Emerson. A sibling for a sibling.” Finally a hint of something volatile sparked life in Lucien’s stare. As he softly added, “I did warn you,” fingers of icy cold danced down Sophie’s spine, and she went very still.

  “It was a baseless fucking warning almost eight fucking years ago!” Royce roared down the walls. “You weren’t in your right mind!”

  Lucien’s pupils flared just a hair. “I’ve learned a great deal about patience. You knew me well enough to understand that I never issue empty threats.”

  Feeling as if she watched a chess match without being privy to the rules, Sophie jumped between her brother and Lucien. She spun on Lucien first. “What is going on here?” Then she glared at Royce and flinched at the hurricane churning in his dark stare. “What are you accusing him of doing to me?” Her mind didn’t have to spin. It could only be one thing. The sex. “I’ve consented to everything that happened here, Royce. And how do you even know?” Before the thought Lucien told him in order to lure him here, because he was using me as some kind of revenge could fully process itself in Sophie’s mind, Magnus shot up and circled around to Lucien’s side of the desk.

  “Allow me,” Magnus murmured. After a few seconds of clicking, Magnus spun the monitor around to face Sophie and cranked up the volume.

  Oh. My. Lord. Sophie’s stomach fell straight out of her, and she stumbled to a chair. Before her, filling the screen, was a Web site with her name blazoned across the top. Box after box of videos playing filled the space, each one showing her in the throes of the sexual indiscretions she’d engaged in here at Ravenstoke. Not only video, but the cameras had captured sound too. Noises of her moaning and begging for various sexual acts mingled with the groans and shouts from the other people at Ravenstoke—Lucien included—and filled the study in a sexual symphony.

  Horrified, she flicked her gaze over the scenes, the air rushing from her lungs as she watched. First Lucien spanking her while she watched Jade and Emma through a lust-filled gaze as the women got off on each other on the conference table. Then she shifted to watch Lucien with his face in her pussy and his finger in her ass, with her back arched over the arm of the chair in the St. Andrew’s cross room, begging him to do more, with Magnus fucking Cale and Jade sucking his cock visible in the scene too. A full-color, high-def image of her chained to the table last night, with Cale whipping her and Jade and Emma worshipping her breasts filled her vision so vividly she could even see Lucien pacing in the background. In a different scene, a hoarse cry from Lucien tore her gaze farther down the screen just in time to watch herself rip the torpedo dildo from Lucien’s ass, only to shove it back in again and begin to fuck him, obvious sexual pleasure on her face as she did it. From just a few short hours ago, she saw herself bound spread eagle on Lucien’s huge bed, and the man, his beautiful nude body glistening with sweat, pounding away at her to her lust-filled groans of delight. And—oh my, please no—finally the sincere but awkward night where she’d ridden the dildo she’d attached to the bench was there to complete her humiliation.

  All of these moments now living on the World Wide Web. For anyone who searched her name to see.

  The sounds and images bombarded her brain, her heart, killing her. Pain ripped through Sophie’s gut and chest. She suddenly dived forward and shut off the monitor, unable to see and hear it anymore, and threw the room into silence.

  Wetness burned behind her eyes, but she stiffened her back and looked right into Lucien’s dead stare. “This was what you were doing all along?” She couldn’t help it, her voice cracked. “Seducing me and filming me so you could put me on the Internet?”

  Lucien raised one of those goddamned arrogant brows. “You had good instincts right from the start, Miss Emerson.” His mouth, no longer appearing kind in the slightest, twisted with cruelty. “You should have listened to them.”

  Still breaking inside, Sophie whispered, “But why?”

  Royce shoved out of his chair and yanked Sophie to her feet too. “Because he’s crazy,” he shared while pulling her to the door. “He thinks I killed his brother, and he refuses to believe the evidence and complete lack of facts that proved to every sane person that I didn’t.”

  “You poisoned him!” Lucien shot to stand too, and he jabbed his finger at Royce as if it had a dagger attached to the end. “You gave him the drugs and told him to take them! You knew he was upset that you’d left him. You might as well have killed him with your own bare hands.”

  Unable to process the vile hatred Lucien was spewing, Sophie tugged against her brother’s attempts to get her out of the study. Not only had Lucien and Royce known each other, but Royce and Josh had been romantically involved? And Lucien held Royce responsible for his brother’s death? Not possible. Sophie looked up at Royce, into eyes that had always only held love and kindness for her. She opened her mouth, but nothing came ou
t. He couldn’t have. He’s not capable. She didn’t understand.

  As if sensing her turmoil, Royce parted his lips as all the color fled from his face. “Sophie. No—”

  “Yes!” Lucien’s righteous rage exploded within the room and crackled against every surface and person in his vicinity. “You no longer get to shield her from this or, worse, fucking outright lie to her. You fucking look at me, and you listen to every word I speak, you goddamn murderer.” As Sophie stared and listened, she could envision Lucien as an animal, snarling while all of his hackles stood straight up on end.

  Lucien narrowed his stare to amber slits in Royce’s direction and viciously said, “You count yourself lucky that I chose this method of payback for your precious sister, because I could have done much worse. I thought about killing her, you son of a bitch. I thought about it more than once. For eight years, I fucking considered it and could even see myself doing it. But I didn’t. I devised a different plan, one that will kill her soul over and over again by degrees.” Lucien finally sat back down, but not a hint of the flames burning around him ebbed. “I do not kill Sophie’s body, as you did to Josh,” he said, his voice dangerously soft, “but I have killed her career and any chance of a relationship with a man who won’t secretly or even openly consider her a whore. Every time a boss or a boyfriend hears the name Sophie Emerson, some colleague in the field or a buddy will have visited this Web site and direct that person to take a look, and they will know everything she did here. So now you learn to live with this version of your sibling’s murderer getting away with the crime”—he looked straight at Royce and didn’t flinch—“the way I’ve had to learn to live with Josh’s.”

  With a step back into the office, Royce spoke through lips that barely moved. “I didn’t kill Josh.”

  “You might not have stabbed him with a knife or put a bullet in his brain,” Lucien replied, “but you killed him. He was heartbroken when you ended the relationship and—”

  Royce rushed the rest of the way into the room and slammed his fists against the top of Lucien’s desk. “He fucked with my head, asshole, just like he did with everyone he knew.” With a push off the desk, Royce shook his head and dropped back into his seat. “Christ, man, you were always such a fool when it came to Josh. He drained me in every way possible. When he still thought he had the right to somehow suck even more blood out of me, I told him it was over. He left to manipulate someone else.”

  “Whom you told to dump him before it even started.”

  “No, man.” Royce, his face flush with color now, shook his head again. “I told the woman the truth. I told her that Josh was a chameleon who would be what you wanted him to be until you started asking questions about the loss of money and the insidious lies. He would be one hundred percent straight for her just like he was only into men to get close to me. If a person stopped giving him what he wanted, he would become nasty and ugly and try to ruin that per—”

  “Don’t you talk about my brother like that!”

  “It’s the truth!” Royce shouted right back. “Josh was a narcissist, and behind those pretty eyes and beautiful body, he had no soul.”

  Lucien went very still except for the death grip he visibly had on the arms of his chair. “He called you and told you he was going to take all those drugs you’d given him, and that he would kill himself if you didn’t take him back. He was begging you for help.”

  After scrubbing his face, Royce pushed his fingers through his hair and once more settled his focus on Lucien. “Josh was pissed because the woman he’d latched himself on to cut him loose when she understood the truth. He was angry, and he wanted me to suffer for it.”

  Sophie didn’t think anyone but she could see it, but Lucien lost a bit of his jutting chin. The sight of it, wobbling just a fraction, tore through Sophie’s heart.

  Lucien said, “You told him you hoped he took every drug in the apartment and choked on his vomit until he died. He told you he would kill himself, and you told him to do it. You encouraged him to. He jumped off that balcony because of you.”

  The color drained from Royce’s face, and he suddenly looked more haggard than the day he’d told Sophie their parents had died. “And that is the one thing in my life I can never take back or make right, and that I live with every day.” He put his head in his hand as if he could not bear to carry the burden. “I did not believe he would do it. He was trying to manipulate me and get me to come to him. I refused, and I’ll forever regret that I did. But I didn’t even know what drugs he really had, because I didn’t give him anything.”

  “He was in that ER bed dying”—an audible rumble pushed through Lucien, and his eyes flashed fire—“and he swore with his last breaths that you loaded him up with the good stuff, and when he said he was going to take it all, you told him to, and to jump.”

  Royce flinched, but he did not drop his head or break his stare. “I didn’t tell him to kill himself. I swear it. I just ignored it when he made the threat. It wasn’t the first time he’d made it, and I didn’t think it would be the last.”

  Still standing at the desk, Magnus nodded slightly, his jaw clenched tighter than Sophie had ever seen it.

  Royce added, “I swear I never gave Josh so much as a joint. Ever. I don’t do drugs. Fuck, I don’t even drink. I don’t like the way it makes people lose control.”

  With another nod, Magnus gently said, “I did tell you that, Lucien. Royce never once bought drinks for himself at the club.”

  Lucien shot Magnus a scathing glare. “You were not there twenty-four-seven. You can’t know for sure. And it doesn’t matter anyway”—his voice rose in volume with each word—“he can be clean as a whistle and still supply Josh with bad shit!”

  “But he didn’t.” Magnus’s tone remained calm but sure. “And in the end, he didn’t force Josh to take whatever drugs and alcohol he had on him. He didn’t force that needle into Josh’s arm, and he didn’t make him walk out on that balcony and jump either.”

  Lucien’s entire frame became tauter and tauter. “He had an emotional hold over Josh, and he taunted him to take his life. He killed him.”

  “You are wrong. Nobody had an emotional hold over Josh.” As Magnus spoke with such certainty, Lucien looked as if Magnus had stabbed him. “Josh wanted to play a prank and gain sympathy, and it backfired on him. And on his deathbed, he used his last moments on this earth to manipulate you into destroying the one person who had successfully brought down his fragile house of cards. Royce. You continue to be insistent about foul play, but the police found no evidence to warrant an investigation.”

  “He works as an investigator for the district attorney’s office,” Lucien exclaimed, pointing at Royce. “All law enforcement is a brotherhood that protects itself.”

  Magnus jerked Lucien’s chair around and braced his hands on the arms. “No, Lucien. It’s time to stop. It’s time to remember that your brother was not a saint. He was the farthest thing from it.” The other half of Magnus’s face blotted with as much color as the wine-stained portion. “For a moment there, before he died, you knew it too.”

  Surging with life, Lucien shoved Magnus with such force he pushed the man halfway across the room. “Get out.” His face twisted into something horrific Sophie didn’t recognize. “Get the fuck out now.” He swung around and encompassed the whole area with a sweep of his arm. “All of you.”

  Royce got up and propelled Sophie toward the hallway. Magnus, from the doorway, said, “You don’t want to destroy Sophie, Lucien. At your core, that’s not who you are.”

  “Get out.” Lucien strode toward them with menace. “Don’t fucking forget the others either. I want everyone out of my goddamn house right now.” As he slammed the door to his study, he roared, “Go!”

  Still reeling from everything revealed in Lucien’s study, Sophie let herself be dragged away.

  Once alone, Lucien started shaking, and he could scarcely catch a breath.

  It is done. Josh’s death has been avenged.
>
  The shivering only got worse, and he could not get the image of Sophie, broken when she’d finally understood what he’d done to her sank into her consciousness, out of his mind.

  Lucien headed for the side bar and started to drink.

  * * * *

  In a daze, Sophie let Royce gather her things for her, put some shoes and a coat on her, and guide her outside to the dock. Lucien had lured her here, filmed her as she’d learned to explore her sexuality, and then put it on the Internet for everyone to see. He brought me here to ruin me. This harsh, cold-blooded reality was so different from the sweet note she’d woken up to such a short while ago. A knifing pain ripped through Sophie’s gut, and she doubled over where she stood.

  Royce made a grab to keep her upright, but so did Magnus and Cale. Owen stood in the background with Emma and Jade, his face full of confusion as his mother whispered words to him Sophie could not hear. Sophie’s mind spun with so many conflicting pictures and comments, so much so she couldn’t balance her thoughts and also make sense of what she’d heard. It’s not right. She jerked up and swung her focus to the castle. Her mind swam, and her heart ached with Lucien’s betrayal, but again and again, the words it’s not right rang in her head.

  Royce nudged her to step onto the boat, but Sophie said, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” The part of her mind that enjoyed analysis and puzzles wouldn’t be satisfied. She glanced up at her brother. “How did you find out about that Web site? When?”

  “Early this morning. Very.” Royce’s jaw ticked wildly, and his already deep brown gaze inked with black. “Once your reporter friend mentioned the name Lucien Cabot as being part of your story yesterday, I cleared my schedule as fast as I could. I booked the first flight I could get, which put me down in New Hampshire. I was already driving in from Manchester when I got a text with a link to the Web site. Once I saw what was on it, I didn’t even stop to eat or stretch my legs. I just kept driving and then found someone willing to take my money for use of his boat to get here.”