“Did you not hear what he said?” Jude asked, his voice rising in volume. “He said they’ll kill her if we don’t do what they want us to!”
I sighed. “Jude, I don’t think they’ll send her home after this. Think about it! We need to figure out.”
“Where would we even start?”
“With the person they’re trying to protect. Your mother,” I said grimly. “And while I have an idea, I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“What?” He shouted. “What idea? Brooklyn, this--.”
I didn’t get upset. He was wild with worry about Lila, and I understood that. But, one of us had to keep a level head, so I forced myself to see the reasoning behind this twisted plot. But, Jude needed to shut up so I could speak.
I interrupted patiently, “We need to follow the tracks to your mother. If they’re protecting her, then she will know who has Lila. And that’s how we find her.”
He closed his mouth with a snap. “Blackmail, or convince her to talk.”
“That’s what I have for now.”
We both went silent for a moment and I turned the idea around in my head. It really wasn’t a bad one, and one we could use to our advantage if we played our cards right.
I clicked my tongue. “Any chance she’d do it out of love for her daughter?”
Jude shot me a look.
“Yeah, that one was a long shot.” I brought my hand to my lips. “Or… what about Agent Martin? Get him on our side, he can maybe convince her to give it up for a reduced sentence?”
Jude considered that. “She’s already looking at so much time, and this is on a national level. I don’t know how much leeway they’ll be able to get. And I don’t want to get the cops or them involved until we’re close. For all we know, he tells someone in the police department, Aiden catches wind, and…” he winced.
“Okay, okay,” I said quickly. “Not that, then. Not yet.”
My phone started ringing, and at Jude’s flinch I shook my head. “It’s just Janey,” I said. “Keep thinking of how we could blackmail her.”
Then, I walked away and answered the call. “Janey?”
“Hey, Brooklyn. I can’t stop thinking about what you told me about Lila. Any news?”
“Wellll.” I hesitated. Could I trust Janey? I thought about our last few interactions. If you’d asked me this six months ago, my answer would have been a resounding hell no.
Now, however… I made a snap decision. “Yes, but it’s important it stays secret.”
“What are you doing?” Jude whispered.
I covered the bottom of the phone. “Trust me.”
Janey snickered. “What news? I don’t have anyone to tell. Lately, the only person I’ve talked to is Congresswoman Boozehound,” she cackled some at the joke. “Lots of overtime hours though. And I’ve been staying in a guest room, which is a plus.”
I smiled at that. I knew how nice their guest rooms were. Then, I settled back in for the conversation at hand. “Someone kidnapped Lila.”
I forged ahead despite Janey’s gasp. “They contacted us, saying if we don’t refuse to testify against the Congresswoman, they’ll kill her.”
“So, it’s someone working for the Congresswoman.”
I was glad she grasped the point immediately. “Exactly. What we’re doing now is trying to figure out a way to make her tell us who has her. We were considering blackmail, or using some sort of blackmail to convince her to give us the information we believe she has.”
“Those won’t work,” Janey said decisively. “I’ve worked for that woman for twelve years. I hear her voice in my sleep. No, it’ll have to be something else.”
“Like what?”
“Like revenge,” Janey said, sounding like something had dawned on her. I hoped it was an idea, and I hoped it was a good one. “What about this?”
I put it on speaker so Jude and I could listen as she explained what she had in mind. And after, I only had one question. “Will it work?”
“I’m sure of it,” she said, and I trusted her.
And as my eyes rose to Jude’s, he gave me a curt nod of his head before he spoke.
“Alright, Janey. What do we need to do first?”
23
Lila
I was sitting with my back against the grate, head in my hands, when Aiden came back.
“I don’t like to see you this way,” he said softly.
I got up to see him better and noticed the tray in his hands, and my stomach gave an almighty rumble at the sight so loud that he heard it.
“I thought you might be hungry.” Then, he lifted a bag at his side. “I brought my own dinner, thought we could eat down here together.”
He passed three rolled bundles of wax paper through the holes in the grate, and as I unwrapped them at the table, I could see how much work he had put into making my meal prisoner friendly. The first was sliced cheese paired with crackers, the second sliced salami, the third apple slices, all small and neat enough to fit through the holes of the grate.
I made myself take it a piece at a time, no matter how hungry I was. Outside the grate, he was eating a tuna salad on the chair, watching me.
“Since I’m going to be here for a while, why don’t you explain all this to me?” I said in a faux-casual voice, pretending to be focused on my cheese. It was plasticky and tasteless, about a step up from Velveeta. Ugh.
Nevertheless, I choked it down with an apathetic look on my face. Hoping, and praying, I could get Aiden to talk with me.
“Explain what?” he asked, his mouth full of tuna and Wonder-bread.
Looking at him now, I couldn’t believe I had ever been attracted to him. The way he slouched with what I thought was swagger was nothing more than laziness. The way his brow wrinkled whenever he chewed made me want to break his nose. And damn it, when he started digging in his cheeks with his finger before eating the congealed food off them made my stomach roll with sickness.
Did the man not have any class at all?
I couldn’t afford for that to show on my face though. I couldn’t show him how absolutely disgusting I found him now. What the hell kind of spell did he have me under?
Nevertheless, I tried to portray a more Bambi-esque look with the wide eyes and the innocent voice. Maybe a bit of stumbling around after my food was finished to signal to him that I ate so much I couldn’t even move.
Maybe if I put on a show, he’ll buy into it. “Did you just date me so you could do this?”
He blushed. “Okay, it’s not what it looks like.”
I looked up at him with big, round eyes. “That’s what they all say, and you know, Aiden? It almost always is exactly what it looks like. Please, tell me it’s not true.”
“No!” he said as he lunged for the bars, lowering his voice. “Look, I can’t get into everything because I’ll get in trouble, but trust me. That’s not how it was.”
The weakness already apparent in his voice told me how to play this out. So, I ratcheted things up a notch. I dropped the apple slice in my hand, even though every particle of my body was screaming at me to shove the whole package of apples into my mouth. I covered my eyes with my hands and tried to conjure tears while making my shoulders shake. And when I felt the first round of misty dew rise behind my eyes, I made my shoulders shake.
“All I wanted was someone who loved me,” I choked out.
“Lila, no no no no. Please, don’t cry. Please, I’m begging you. I can’t stand it when you’re upset.”
See, this is the thing about being hard the majority of the time. If you show weakness, people take notice. If you falter, everyone gives you their attention. But, if you start crying?
Game over, bitch.
I screwed up my eyes and forced a few tears out. It wasn’t that hard, either, since I wasn’t exactly in the best mental place at the moment.
“Lila?” he asked softly.
I waited until my voice was appropriately thick with tears before speaking. “I’m just so
hurt. I thought you liked me. Like, really really liked me. I had feelings for you that I’ve never felt for anyone before, and all I wanted was someone to love me back the way I wished Mother did.”
“What?” He moved along the grate until he was right across from where I was sitting, almost close enough to touch through the grate. “But--but you broke up with me!”
“I didn’t break up with you,” I whispered as I gave my shoulders another little heave. Then, I lifted my face and showed him the tears trickling against my skin. “You pushed me away, Aiden. And then I ran away because I was scared of the depth of my feelings for you.”
I gazed into his unwavering eyes and wondered if I had laid it on too thick. Maybe he saw right through me. Maybe he was about to whip out a gun and shoot me right between the eyes.
But instead, he stuck his fingers through the grate and brushed one of my tears away.
“Oh, Aiden,” I said breathlessly.
He cleared his throat. “It all makes so much sense now. I don’t know how the hell I didn’t see it before. I really, honestly thought you had decided you were too good for me and actually dumped me. But, you were scared of admitting your feelings in such a public setting, weren’t you?”
I peeked up at him and tried not to recoil at the way his blunt fingers stroked my skin. “I should have said something before. Something in the conversation. I was just so afraid you’d turn me away. Or leave me sitting there. I just—panicked. And I’m so sorry, Aiden. I wanted to tell you that before something else happened to me. In case, well, you know”
He shook his head. “I never would have allowed this to happen if I’d thought there was a chance for us.”
“A chance for what?” I said quietly. “For us to be together? Forever, maybe? Because that’s all I wanted, Aid. Only… I didn’t think I deserved you. You know, because of what my family’s going through. You’re going to get dragged through the mud dating someone like me. Loving someone like me…”
I hung my head low and felt the air change between us. “All of this going on with my mother, my background. You deserve better than that. A girl who wouldn’t bring that all crashing down on you all the time.”
Aiden rattled the grate with his grip. “No, Lila! No, I love you. I did, and I do. Don’t say those things, because it’s not your decision to make. I knew the risk I was taking with you. I knew, and I took it anyway because I love you, Lila Carlisle. Ever since I first laid eyes on you when we arrested your mother.”
I batted my eyelashes at him. “Do you think we could still have that? You know, a life together?”
As he gazed deeply into my eyes—making me want to vomit on them—my mind started going a thousand miles a second. The way I saw it, there were two reasons why he was falling for this bullshit. First, it was precisely what he wanted to hear. No one wanted to be dumped, and after they were, people justified it in their heads so they didn’t feel bad about themselves. Hell, I’d done it before. You tell yourself, ‘hey, he just wasn’t good enough for me,’ or, ‘he’ll regret it later,’ or, ‘maybe he was just afraid of commitment.’
“Lila, why didn’t you tell me?” His voice was thick and anguished now.
It was getting hard not to smile at his blatant stupidity.
The second reason, however, is that this was working so nicely was because of an aspect of Aiden’s character I’d figured out. I had an awful lot of time to think while being down here- like I said, it got boring be a captive- and so I had spent a good deal of it reflecting on my brief relationship with Detective Aiden McNamara.
He had always been happiest when I was on my back foot. Being in this very restaurant, I had walked through that evening we’d spent together. I hadn’t been showing off by asking if the place was Russian-owned, or by speaking a single word of Russian to our waitress. But, he had manipulated the situation until I was on my back foot and feeling unsure of myself. Then, when he knew I was feeling that way, he had walked away so I would have to chase him.
And all of this to inflate his ego and make him feel important.
That was his fatal flaw: his incessant need to be needed. This need he had deep down inside to be everything for everyone around him. To be the head of his own family, so to speak. He walked with an arrogance he didn’t deserve and spoke with a pompous attitude that had nothing to back it up. He wanted to be ‘that man’, when really he was nothing but a silly little pawn who would probably die like a dog the way his boss intended me to die.
Aiden was just another loose end like me.
And I knew I could exploit his fatal flaw to my advantage.
One thing I was sure of, though: if he had met me at any other time in my life but this one, we would never have made it past date one. But, he’d found me when I was at my most vulnerable. When the only people in my life had been my brother and his girlfriend, a chick I’d begun to really like but had also screwed over hardcore not all that long ago. It was also a time where I had been questioning everything from how I was raised to my social class to how I lived my life.
And as I looked at him now, all I felt was a rolling disgust and a desire to make him pay.
I felt my façade cracking and lost trust in myself. But, I felt it happening, so I dropped my face into my arms and started to shake my shoulders again. I heard Aiden cooing at me, trying to get me to calm down. However, all it did was make me bring things up yet another notch.
I sniffled hard and quickly wiped at my face before turning my back to him.
“You never loved me,” I whispered.
“Listen, it wasn’t like that! I had a plan for us, Lila. The perfect, best plan ever. But when you made it clear you didn’t want to be with me anymore, I figured that plan couldn’t work! It didn’t work without you at my side.”
I felt his breath on my neck and scooted back a bit until my back was against the grate. I pushed back on everything I wanted to do and forced myself to be closer to that sorry excuse of a man. We were a hair’s breadth away now from the story. The history of this situation that I needed to know in order to save my own life.
No matter what it did to Aiden’s.
I scoffed. “Really, Aiden? There was a plan? A plan for you to break my heart is the only one I see. You used me to make this happen. And you know what the worst part is?”
I heard him swallow. “What?”
I peered over my shoulder and narrowed my eyes before I shook my head. Time to lay it on him. “No. You don’t deserve to know.”
Then, I looked away and waited for him to take the bait.
“No! What’s the worst part? Please, baby. Tell me. I need to know if I’m going to fix this,” he pleaded.
I turned myself around and looked him straight in the eye, with my head high but tears still falling down my cheeks. “The worst part is I still love you, even though you’ve hurt me. And I’m not sure if I’ll ever stop hurting you, even if this gets me killed. I’ll go to my grave loving you, Aiden McNamara. No matter what anyone tells me.”
I could almost hear this revelation smack him. I sat there as he stood to his feet, shooting up like a fucking rocket. And for a split second, I thought I had cracked. I thought he had seen through my mask.
Until I heard the sweet, wondrous sound of keys scraping against metal.
Hook, line, and sinker.
Or something like that. That’s how it worked, right? The phrasing? I’d never gone fishing before, so I didn’t know. However, once the grated door opened on its silent hinges, none of it mattered anymore.
I was one step closer to my freedom.
I stood quickly to look and saw him standing at the top of the stairs. I watched him reach into a small cubbyhole in the stone just outside of the grated door and he placed the keys back where he had pulled them from. I committed that to memory as well, in case I needed it for the future.
Then, he wrapped me tightly into his arms and pulled me to a chest I wanted to stab with a butcher’s knife.
“Do you real
ly?” he asked. “You really love me?”
Come on, you’re almost there. “I wish I didn’t. I wish I could stop. But that’s not how it works. The heart wants what it wants, I guess.”
“It does,” he said, as if what I’d said was the key to the secrets of the universe and not one of the sappiest phrases in human existence. Then, he kissed the top of my head and I suddenly felt the urge to shave all of my hair off. “Lila, please believe me, I was actually falling in love with you.”
“I don’t,” I said flatly as I looked up at him. “How can I? You’re not telling me anything and you just expect me to believe you?”
“It was Gray!” He burst out, finally letting the dam go. And I listened as he rattled on. “Him, and that damn mother of yours. They suckered me into this after your mother caught wind of us dating. After I arrested her and booked her and all that shit, this Russian guy comes up to me and asks if I want to make some money on the side. And who doesn’t, you know? It seemed so simple at first, just get closer to you and tell them what you all were doing in the case. Because I swear, that’s all he wanted. All Gray literally wants is to know what’s happening with that case before it goes to trial.”
He took a deep breath and held me out by my shoulders, staring into my eyes. “Then it got more complicated. They asked me for more, and more, and if I didn’t agree, they would rat me out. They told me they would hurt you, and I was stuck. What could I do?”
He pulled me back to his chest and I didn’t resist, simply along for the ride as he poured out his soul to me. “I fell for you, though, through all the chaos. And I really didn’t expect to. At first, it was just like, ‘cool I’m getting paid to hang with this hot chick.’ But then I got to know you and I just fell for you. So, when they asked me to kidnap you, I knew I couldn’t do it.”
I blinked. “But you did.”
He held me back out again. “But at first I wasn’t going to! I changed the plan and I had decided that I’d move you into my house and keep you hidden. You know, protect you when they came looking for you. Remember? I asked you to live with me and you turned that down. You didn’t leave me with a choice.”
VENGEFUL ROYALS | A DARK COLLEGE BULLY ROMANCE: HEIRS OF HAVOC Page 15
