“What do I want? I want you as dead as my brother, that’s what I want.”
“Caine killed my brother.”
“So you killed him...now I’m going to kill you.”
“Nice and then Damien will kill you.”
“Fuck you! Damien wouldn’t hurt me.”
Paige snorted. “Right. You keep thinking that. Damien is a Paine. His anger doesn’t discriminate between male and female. He will kill you and then your father will probably kill him and then Alex will kill your father...it will just go on and on. But, you and I won’t care because we’ll be dead.”
“You’re a pathetic cunt! Get in the living room! You too!” she screamed at Crystal who was barely conscious. Paige went to her mother. “I said the living room!” Paige ignored her and helped her mother up off the floor. Crystal held onto her daughter and limped into the living room. Paige sat her down on the couch and looked at Kelsey.
“Now what?” Before Kelsey could answer her, they heard the front door open. Kelsey swung around to see who it was and Paige lunged at her. She got her hands wrapped up in Kelsey’s long hair. As she took her to the ground, the gun went off. The two women rolled around in the floor until Paige felt Kelsey being lifted off of her. She looked up to see Jake holding onto a struggling Kelsey with one arm. The other arm was bleeding.
“Oh shit! Jake, you’re shot!”
“It’s a scratch,” he said. “Who the hell is this?” Kelsey was kicking and scratching, trying to get loose. Jake kept a tight grip on her.
“That’s Kelsey Kramer. Caine was her brother.”
“Oh...so she was here to...?”
“Get revenge on her brother’s killer, she thought,” Paige said. She went to her mother and when she sat down next to Crystal she realized her mother was shaking all over. “It’s okay Mom.” Crystal buried her face into her daughter’s shoulder and cried. Jake was sitting on Kelsey now and he had his phone out. “Jim this is Jake. I need a couple of you to come up to the house and I need the police called. Tell them we stopped a robbery in progress...” he stopped and listened and then he said, “I don’t know the details Jim, but I’m bleeding a little bit here so I have to go. Just call them...and tell them the assailant is subdued and no one is armed, okay? Thanks.” He pushed end and tossed the phone over to the nearest chair. Kelsey had stopped moving underneath him. “Are you going to behave if I let you up?”
“Fuck you!” she spat in a breathless voice. Jake looked at Paige again and said,
“She has a potty mouth.”
“That she does,” Paige said. “I’m going to get a towel for your arm.” As Paige left the room she heard Kelsey say,
“Get the fuck off of me!”
“Are you going to play nice?”
“Kiss my ass!” Jake stayed where he was. When Paige got back with the towels and first aid kit, she could hear sirens approaching.
“Here, let me see your arm,” She told Jake.
He grunted as he held it up. Paige cleaned and dressed it with a bandage. Jake was right, it was just a flesh wound.
*****
Jake was in the back of the ambulance, but refusing to go to the hospital. Crystal was patched up, but doing the same. Kelsey was in the back of the police car in handcuffs, kicking and screaming like a wild animal. The men at the front gates told Damien that a group of men with guns had tried to access the property but had changed their minds when the cops showed up. The whole fucking family has lost their mind.
“Where is Paige?” was Damien’s only question when he made it up to the house.
“Miss Acosta is in the house making a statement...Sir! You can’t go in there.”
Damien made it to the entryway of the living room before the officer pulled out his gun. Paige saw him and stood up off the couch. “Put the gun away. Oh Damien! What happened to your face?” Paige went into his arms and Damien just held her there. The detective looked annoyed and the uniformed officer looked unsure of what to do next. After a few minutes, Paige pulled back and gently touched the side of Damien’s face. He winced. “Who did this to you?”
Damien’s eyes went to the detective and the mess in the living room. “What happened here?”
“Kelsey Kramer showed up.”
“Fuck! How the hell did she get on the grounds?”
“She hijacked my mother.”
“Oh shit! Is she okay?”
“She will be she’s just shaken up...”
“Miss Acosta, we need to get back to this, please. Kelsey Kramer is alleging that you killed her brother...”
“Her brother died of a heroin overdose. He was a junkie!”
“Damien, have a seat and calm down.” Jake came in the room with a bulky bandage around his arm. “You too Paige. Nobody says anything else until I find out what’s going on.”
“And you are?” the detective asked.
“I’m their attorney, Jake Stark.”
“They’re not under arrest. I’m just trying to get an idea of what happened here.”
“That woman you have in the back of your police car abducted Crystal Acosta at gunpoint and took her across state lines. She then broke into a private residence and held the occupants at gunpoint. Had I not come in when I did, you’d have a multiple murder here. Now, I think my client’s need some private time. You can call me and we’ll set up a time for them to come in and make a formal statement.”
The detective looked at Damien. “You weren’t here when I got here.”
“No, I was out when all of this happened. Otherwise you’d have...”
“Damien,” Jake said in a warning tone. Damien stopped talking but he looked like he was about to explode. The detective was still glaring at him.
Jake took out his wallet and handed the detective one of his cards. “I represent Crystal Acosta as well,” he said. The detective smirked, but he jerked his head sideways at the uniformed officer and they headed for the door. The technician was just finishing up collecting the gun and digging the bullet that grazed Jake out of the wall. He’d already taken photos of everything including Crystal and Jake’s injuries. He packed his things up and left as well. One of the medics walked Crystal into the house and asked once more if anyone wanted to go to the hospital. They all declined. When everyone was finally gone Jake said,
“All of you sit down and start from the beginning. If I’m going to represent any of you I have to know what’s going on...all of it.”
Chapter 8
When Roxi arrived home from the club the first thing she did was spend a half an hour lecturing Jake about refusing to go to the hospital. Roxi was a lot like her family. She kept her emotions in check and seemed to rarely lose control. Everything about what she said to Jake was calm and controlled...the only thing that gave her away were her eyes. Paige was sure that she wasn’t imagining it. Her beautiful blue eyes held both fear and love when she looked at Jake and she saw a similar look in them when she looked at her cousin Damien. Damien had told Paige how Roxi ordered five big men with guns out of her club without even breaking a sweat. Roxi definitely had an advantage since she was related to most of them, but Paige still admired the guts it would take to do something like that.
After Roxi finally accepted from Paige who was practically finished with medical school, that Jake’s injury was little more than a scratch, they all sat down in the dining room to resume discussing the events of the day and where to go from here. Before Roxi came home he had each of the three give him a few dollars to “retain” him as their attorney. That gave them an attorney/client privilege and made them more willing to tell him everything. Damien and Paige opened up and told him their whole story. Paige even told him about Caine. They both knew that they were going to need as much help in this as they would be able to get. Now that Kelsey had been arrested, Lucas was sure to come after them with both barrels blazing. Crystal sat and listened in horror and when Paige was finished talking her mother was drowning in a torrent of tears.
“Oh my Go
d...Greg is dead because I married Jackson Paine. Oh my God! It’s my fault...” This was the first Paige had allowed Crystal to hear about what Greg was doing...or even the fact that he was murdered. As far as Crystal knew all of this time, Greg had overdosed. As hard as that was to take, Paige knew from her own experience that knowing he was murdered made it that much harder.
“You didn’t know what he was,” Paige told her. She had her issues with her mother but Greg was dead because of a bunch of high-class thugs that thought they ruled the world. Crystal made a lot of mistakes, but deep in her heart Paige knew that her mother had done the best that she was capable of doing.
Crystal sobbed again and said, “Greg tried to tell me. He tried over and over again when he was just a boy. If I had listened to him...”
“No one knows how changing the past would have affected the future,” Paige told her. “Greg did what he thought he had to do and knowing my brother, he would have still gone after them if he knew the consequences up front.”
“Crystal,” Jake said in a soft tone, “The police are going to be counting on you to tell them what happened when Kelsey showed up at your home. When you’re ready, we need to talk about what you’re going to tell them. Can you tell me exactly what happened from the time that Kelsey showed up at your home, and exactly what she said and did?” Crystal wiped her eyes with a tissue that Paige handed her and nodded.
“She knocked on the front door. When I answered it she said that she was a friend of Paige’s and she needed to talk to me about her. Crystal looked at Paige. “She asked me if anyone was home with me because she had some terrible news about Paige and she didn’t want to tell me if I was alone...”
“She wanted to make sure no one else was there,” Jake said.
Crystal nodded. “Yes. As soon as I told her I was alone she pulled out her gun. I wasn’t thinking clearly, I tried to slam the door on her. She hit me in the face with the butt of the gun and once she was inside the house she told me who she really was. She said that Paige killed her brother. She said she knew where Paige was but she needed me to get her on the grounds. She put the gun to my head and said she would kill me if I said no...” Crystal broke down again and dissolved into a torrent of tears. She sobbed out, “I told her she was wrong. Greg wasn’t murdered and Paige wasn’t in New York...”
Seeing her mother like this was physically painful for Paige. “Jake, can I take her to lay down for a bit and we do this later?” Paige asked. The fact that Crystal wasn’t a strong person affected Paige and Greg in more ways than one. She had fallen apart after their father died, leaving them to fend for themselves for the most part, and she had clung to Jackson for years after Greg told her what he was. They’d both lost respect for her...but as angry as Paige felt towards her sometimes, she couldn’t turn her back on her. She was still her mother.
“Of course,” Jake told her. Paige stood up and Roxi said,
“The first guestroom on the right is stocked and ready. You can put her there.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry for all of this intrusion into your life,” Paige told her. Roxi looked at Damien and said,
“This is what you do for family.”
Paige took her mother down the hall and guided her to sit down on the bed. “You need to rest Mom, okay?” Crystal nodded like a zombie. Paige started to leave the room but when she reached the door she heard Crystal say,
“Paige...”
She turned back around and Crystal had new tears running down her cheeks. “Yeah Mom?”
“I’m sorry.”
Paige sighed. She went back over and sat down next to her mother. “This isn’t your fault. Kelsey would have found a way to get to me one way or the other.”
“Not that,” she said. “Well, that too...I’m just sorry for everything. This all started with me. Thank God you and your brother were so self-sufficient. Your father was the love of my life. When I lost him...I think I just went a little crazy.”
Paige was old enough when her father died to remember how her mother used to be. Her Dad was the rock of the family and it was easy to see that was where Crystal had drawn her strength from. “I know Mom. It’s all in the past now. We just need to make it through this rough spot and move forward from here, okay?” Crystal nodded. Paige put her arm around her and pulled Crystal into her side. “I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too baby.”
Paige left her to rest then and went back out to the dining room. When she got there Jake said, “We can put all of that to rest for now. We’ll talk about it again before they have you all go in and give your statements. I wanted to talk to you about the other evidence you gave me. I had my father consult on this. As far as the audio goes, it will be difficult to prove who is doing the talking there...not impossible, but difficult. Besides, if you use that, it directly implicates Jackson and I understand you don’t want to do that, correct?”
Damien looked at Paige. She nodded. She wasn’t going to force him to bring down his entire family. She did what she needed to do, now she wanted what Damien did...to be left alone to live their own life. “Yes, that’ correct,” Damien said. “Trust me when I say that he deserves more than anyone to be brought to his knees. But when we talk about bringing Jackson down, were also talking about taking down the rest of my family. I don’t want to do that to my uncles and my aunt and my brother. They’re caught in this, the same way that I have been. They don’t belong in prison.” Paige had differing opinions about Alex. From what she’d witnessed of him, he was as comfortable with his role in all of this as Jackson was. She wasn’t going to argue that point with Damien however. She knew from personal experience that sibling bonds are often tighter than any other.
“The USB drive implicates Kramer, but there are also a lot of things on there that implicates Jackson and people in his organization...if you alter that, then it pretty much negates the evidence completely.”
“So you’re saying that there’s no way we can take Kramer down without taking Damien’s family down with him?”
“With the evidence you have, I’m afraid so. But you do have access to something that you might be able to use.”
“What is that?” Damien asked.
“I want you to take this with a grain of salt, okay? What I’m proposing could be very dangerous so I don’t want you to take this as a concrete suggestion on my part. I want it to be an abstract thought to begin with...something for you to talk about and consider.”
“Sounds kind of ominous, Jake,” Paige said with a nervous laugh.
He smiled at her but then looked at Damien and said, “You want out of the organization and you’ve already let Jackson know that, right?”
“Yes.”
“And he knows that you have evidence that can ruin him, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then maybe that’s your bargaining chip. Maybe you tell him that in exchange for something that will put Kramer away...which you know he already has at his disposal...you don’t use the evidence against him.”
Paige looked at Damien. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking by the look on his face. He was silent for a long time and then he said, “I’ll give it some thought. Thank you, Jake.” He looked up at Roxi then and said, “Tomorrow, we’ll start looking for another place...”
“Why?” She asked, sharply.
“Because today is proof that we’re putting you at risk by being here.”
“Bullshit. You’d be at much greater risk somewhere else. My security screwed up today by not checking that car. It won’t happen again.”
“That was my fault,” Paige said. She didn’t want anyone in trouble or losing their job because of her.
“No,” Roxi said. “They know better. You’re not a security expert, they are. None of that is the point though. The point is that you’re family and you’ll stay here as long as you need to.”
“Thank you,” Damien said, “We’ll do our best to get this all straightened out as soon as possible. And thank you
too, Jake.”
“Not a problem. I will do whatever I can to help you both. No one should have to live in a life they don’t want to be in.”
“Damien...there’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” Roxi said. She looked at Jake and said, “Give us about ten minutes and then I’ll be ready to go.”
“Sure, no hurry,” Jake said, “Our reservations aren’t until seven.”
“Excuse us for a few minutes Paige?”
“Of course,” Paige said. She was curious, but she assumed whatever Roxi wanted to talk to her cousin about privately had to do with family. “I think I’ll make us something to eat if you don’t mind. My mother probably needs to eat.”
“Help yourself,” Roxi told her. “Damien, come with me.”
Chapter 9
Damien was curious about what Roxi wanted to talk to him about that couldn’t be done in front of Jake and Paige. He followed her into an office and she said, “Have a seat.”
He sat down in one of the office chairs and she said, “When your mom first got sick she sent a letter to me. There was a sealed envelope inside of it and in the letter to me; she asked that I give it to my father. My best guess is that she worried your father would somehow intercept it if she sent it directly to my dad. Dad didn’t tell me what the details of his letter were, but apparently there was another envelope inside of his that was addressed to you. He left it with me for safe keeping. It’s been in my safe since I moved in here. Dad called me earlier after your meeting with Jackson to see how things went. I gave him a blow by blow,” she giggled at her own joke and then said, “Anyways, for some reason he suddenly wants me to give you this letter. He told me to tell you that after you read it you can call him and he’ll come meet with you if you have any questions.”
“My curiosity is really peaked now,” Damien said. “My mother and I talked a lot during the time that she was sick...about everything, I thought. I wonder what it is that she couldn’t tell me and she had to put in a letter.”
House of Paine - (A Romantic Suspense - Book 2) Page 4
