by Lana Grayson
Because that’s exactly the chance I took. The outcome I demanded.
The greed and hunger in my blood was gifted from his. I understood him too well.
Which meant we didn’t have much time.
My motorcycle roared with every untested rage burning through me. I didn’t wait for either of my brothers. I jammed the throttle and tore from the parking garage. Reed followed close. Our bikes surged through downtown San Jose toward the Santa Cruz Mountains lurking in the distance.
The night cloaked us in speed, chasing the shuddering terror that coiled within my heart. I damned my thoughts to images of pain—the same tortures we inflicted on a woman I supposedly loved.
At least it had been at my hand.
The excuse did nothing to sate my demand for blood or the guilty, horrid, hormonal release. I hated myself. I hated what I did. I hated how it felt. I hated how I felt. Sarah had endured the worst, and yet the disgust and shame which assaulted me shadowed my thoughts in grief.
I’d never look at myself in the mirror again.
Not without knowing what I did.
What he made me do to her.
How badly I betrayed her.
The city lights faded into the early morning curtain of solitude that blanketed the mountains. Dangerous roads during the day were made perilous at night, especially for bikers blinding themselves in evil to prevent the unthinkable from happening once more. Each mile tore at my heart and wore the bike, the throttle nearly ripped from the handlebars in my crushing grip.
She’d be okay.
Sarah spent every minute of every day fighting every insult against her.
She’d be okay.
But would I?
How much blood would spill to sate my wrath? My soul craved to inflict every pain she felt upon the man who demanded obedience over rationality and submission over humanity.
What would I find when I stormed the mansion?
Thirty minutes rent through me as though the gun had fired into my skull. We blasted into the estate, but I didn’t have to order them to move. The same animalistic instinct for blood surged through them.
I led them in a charge, each of us blasting through a locked entrance to our childhood home and sprinting through the halls, kicking in doors and launching up stairs.
Stillness greeted us.
I didn’t know if I wished to hear her screams. Silence meant he was either finished or…
Or she was dead.
Reed bounded along the foyer. “Not in the basement.”
Max shouted from upstairs. “Not in my side or Reed’s.”
Reed swore, running to check the study and parlors, shouting as the rooms remained empty and undisturbed.
I stalked my wing. My bed hadn’t been touched.
That left only one mess of sheets.
We met in the hall outside my father’s bedroom, guns drawn. My brothers waited for my nod.
The door shattered under my foot.
Darkness.
Empty.
Still.
They weren’t there.
“Son of a bitch.” Reed leaned down, cradling his head. “Where the fuck did he take her?”
My gun hadn’t fired. The relentless agony of unfulfilled revenge rampaged through me as if I had never breathed, as if my heart failed to pump my blood, as if I had kissed Sarah Atwood but was unable to speak the words I longed to say.
I’m sorry.
I’ll save you.
I’ll hide you.
I’ll never let him hurt you.
The words turned to graveyard dust in my mouth. They wouldn’t be unsaid for long.
I’d find a way to make my promises and protect the girl like she deserved to be protected.
I just had to think.
I had to imagine what a man like my father would do if presented with the opportunity to seize everything he ever wanted by punishing the one he hated most.
I didn’t have to guess.
My cell vibrated in my pocket, and I knew exactly who it’d be. I ripped it from my jacket and answered, the sinister rumble thick with enough rage to reveal my intent without a weapon in my hand or the scattered remnants of his door at my feet.
“Where is she?”
The trembled answer wasn’t a gateway to hell. The whisper echoed only of Heaven and light and invaded paradise.
“Nick.”
I clutched the phone. “Sarah? Are you okay? Where are you?”
“Daddy warns you not to follow.” The edge in her voice wasn’t meant for me, even if my cruelty deserved every last barbed threat within her words. “Or he said he’ll kill me before we have any fun.”
Fuck.
“Tell me where you are.”
“If I do that, he will kill me, and I’ve already had a rough enough night.”
“What does he want?”
Sarah didn’t answer, and the muffled exchange ended with her sharpened cough. “Daddy says to just be grateful you got to fuck me. He says even if you disgrace the Bennett name, at least the three of you got off one last time.”
Another cough. I recognized that sound. The wheeze ached in my own lungs.
“Sarah, are you okay?”
“No, but it’s asthma. I’ll be fine if I get my inhaler.” She hardened. “You couldn’t afford the liability if I drop dead here, and I doubt Daddy wants to lose me when you might have bred me like a good little whore.”
Sarah’s voice shaded with wild, breathless rage, but she was smart enough to drop a hint even coiled in sickening threat. I stared at my brothers.
“I’m coming for you.”
“Nick, don’t. If you do, you’ll all die. Just stay away.” The sorrow in her words would end me. “He says he has no sons.”
The call dropped.
My blood laced with a perverted confidence.
He had no sons?
That wasn’t true.
It wasn’t true at all.
If only because I finally saw the truth. I understood, for once in my life, exactly what it meant to be a Bennett.
The gun disgusted me.
The metal hadn’t fired, and yet it burned my flesh.
Since when did I rely on violence to achieve my means? Blood and pain and rape? It was barbarism, not the composed dominance of the world I crushed within my hand and used to further my own ends.
And he knew it.
All this time, all the lessons, all the moments where I wielded contracts as if wealth were every bullet I needed—he wasn’t training me to be like him.
He made me better at being myself.
Teaching me to become a proper Bennett.
I wasted my life pulling away from his shadow and reinventing myself as a man who didn’t rely on deceit and corruption to manage my empire and grow my power.
I was a fool.
I wasn’t meant to oppose Darius Bennett.
The only way to stop him, the only way to ensure his reign ended and our lives were saved and Sarah’s life was spared was to embrace what had always been, what was always meant to be, and what I had already learned to do.
Innocent blood spoiled when used for revenge.
And so I wouldn’t be innocent. I wouldn’t struggle against the forces my father created.
To save Sarah Atwood, I had to become the leader he wished, even if that meant becoming the man I swore I’d forever reject.
“Is he going to hurt her?” Reed asked, the words as dark as the images swirling in my head.
“No.” Confidence returned. I understood now. “He wants her heir. The fertility drugs take a few hours to work. He’ll try later, when he thinks he has the best chance.”
“What the hell do we do?”
“We do what we should have done long ago.” I studied my brothers, no longer disgusted by my actions but strengthened by the clarity such violence offered. “We rescue her.”
“How?”
“I know where she is.”
Reed frowned. “But she couldn’t tell us.”
Max followed closely, holstering his gun to his side. “Why?”
“Because I don’t plan on killing our father.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Because that’s what he expects. I don’t have to touch him. I’ll ruin him from the inside.”
“How?” Max blocked my path. “How the hell do you think you’re going to save your ass and hers?”
“If we want to survive, we will submit to Sarah Atwood.” I met my brother’s challenge and promised nothing but victory. “I’m surrendering my control of the Bennett Corporation.”
19
Sarah
Darius Bennett would have preferred to chain me to the conference table. He waited for me to serve him on my knees like a proper whore.
It would happen.
I knew it. I felt it.
My skin bruised and broke at the hands of my step-brothers, but it wouldn’t be enough for him.
“Twenty-four to thirty-six hours,” he had whispered, eagerly. He savored the thought of taking, hurting, claiming. “The doctor said that’s when the drug is…most effective.”
I hadn’t counted the hours, but when dawn broke, my time slipped away. Darius wouldn’t wait a full day before ruining me. He hid in the Bennett Corporation headquarters like a coward. I’d be safe until the moment he decided running from his son wasn’t as enjoyable as raping his step-daughter.
He forced me into an executive chair poised at the carved redwood table. My lungs ached. It was a trap. He lured me into the very core of the Bennett Corporation, where my family had attempted to strike for generations.
I had the stake to drive through its heart.
But Darius had the needle, gun, and motivation to destroy me.
It wasn’t a stalemate. His restraint was a miracle.
Darius hadn’t touched me. Hadn’t beaten me. Hadn’t hurt me.
Instead, he forced his sons to do it for him.
My step-brothers.
My friends.
My lovers.
The men I trusted, and the ones I left stranded and devastated on the balcony.
I survived the ordeal, but I wasn’t sure they did.
My step-brothers couldn’t look at me. They didn’t speak. They didn’t even see the piece of sharpened glass I kicked toward Reed’s hand, something they might have used to slice through the bindings Darius forced me to tie.
I was the one raped. They were the ones broken. My heart didn’t just shatter—it burned to ash and flaked away. Reed’s whispered apologies. Max’s collapse.
And Nicholas?
I ached for the words I spoke to him and the bruises he left on my hips. The gold in his eyes faded completely, lost and flared into a hardness I didn’t recognize. A hatred. He embraced violence and breathed only vengeance.
He did his part with a ruthlessness I remembered only once before.
Darius possessed the same brutality.
I refused to let it scare me.
Darius might have led me around his office in a leash or simply hauled me over his desk to finish what he started weeks ago.
Once it was done, once the tortures were over and the lecherous monsters waited for a Bennett that would never be born, I’d sit at the head of their table, steal their fortunes, and hold the fate of the company in my curling fist. If I so chose, I’d dismantle the entire goddamned empire and let it drown in the poisons it manufactured.
No more corporation.
No more Bennetts.
No more pain.
And Darius would be left cowering with nothing as I stole his fortune, sons, and pride with a flick of a pen over the corporate ledger.
But, that would also punish Nicholas.
His company would be mine. His stock, mine. His empire, mine.
He expected me to return it to him, but he never believed it would truly happen.
Nicholas Bennett was far wiser than me. He understood the complications from the beginning. It wasn’t hatred or vengeance that would betray him, but business—the only language the Bennetts spoke and the scripture they worshiped.
Nicholas would understand.
He had to understand.
I couldn’t surrender now, and I couldn’t protect his interests.
That trust was the only strength that remained.
Darius settled in the chair beside me. With a gentle hand that promised only cruelty, he brushed a lock of hair behind my ear.
I hadn’t the time to wash the tears from my face or cleanse the ordeal from my body. He didn’t care. He forced a school-girl pink sundress over my shame, slipped the delicate sandals on my feet, and kissed my forehead in every fatherly manner I came to fear more than the strike of his hand.
He wanted me presentable for the meeting.
I wondered how long it would take for me to soak the dress in his blood.
“Cheer up, my dear.” He patted my hand. “We’ll be done quickly, then we’re off to make a baby.”
I thought I’d eventually get used to his intentions.
I didn’t.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said.
“You don’t have a choice.”
“You aren’t pointing a gun at your sons anymore. What makes you think I’ll listen?”
It’d have sounded stronger without the gasp, wheeze, and cough imbedded in my words.
Darius wasn’t concerned. He spoke as though he judged the courage in my blood.
Very little remained.
“I never needed to threaten my sons. You’re an Atwood, and the only thing an Atwood lives for is their own selfish interests.”
“And revenge.”
“Revenge won’t taste as sweet as you, Sarah.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“No,” he said. “You won’t have any.”
I shuddered in furious silence as the first of the Bennett Board of Directors entered.
Bryant was a sleaze bag and far more dangerous than I originally believed. He shook Darius’s hand and sat opposite me at the table, entirely too interested in the waistline of my dress, as though he expected me to waddle into the room and visibly swell with a child.
“Awfully early to celebrate, Darius,” he warned.
“Say what you will about the family, but the Atwoods do grow a reliable product.”
“Think it’ll stick?”
Darius smiled. “I’d bet the company on it.”
I said nothing. Though no music, laughter, or scream would have sounded more beautiful than the secret I longed to reveal, my infertility was the only bullet in a gun I forgot to load. I already acted recklessly enough. If I wanted to survive, I had to think like Nicholas. I had to be patient. Practical.
I couldn’t let them frighten me.
Five investors total joined the table, but the Bennetts had ten on their board. At least, a board in name only, until the amendment passed and my presence would rival the majority Darius commanded. I stayed still, though the asthma clouded my head and closed my throat. I wouldn’t let it beat me. Not now. Not while Darius welcomed his partners to the exhibition of my living hell.
I remained silent.
They preferred that.
Bryant surveyed me, his gaze focused purely on profit. I didn’t dare to guess where the others looked. Every part of me had already been more exposed and hurt than anything I suffered in my nightmares, and it wouldn’t end with a board meeting.
I was nothing to them.
Not a woman. Hardly an Atwood. They didn’t view me as a rival, only a body to fill and a slave who had
yet to perform her only immediate function.
Darius didn’t see it, but I felt it.
The resentment. The anxiety.
Three months into my captivity, and they hadn’t seen their results. Time passed, and every second that left me barren put the pressure on their wallets.
They wanted the child as badly as the Bennetts, but the investors didn’t have the patience of even my step-father. The safety of the company outweighed a family’s revenge. Darius meant to breed me for more than the corporation’s benefit—with my body’s surrender, he’d steal my pride, my potential, and my future.
I clenched my teeth. He didn’t realize the danger in his selfishness.
His board spent the last years watching as profits trickled and quarterly reports were gamed with layoffs and restructuring, all courtesy of the man they now depended on to secure their ultimate plan. They trusted him to seed me with an heir, and the months lost to nature’s refusal damned their chances.
Every business weighted risk against venture.
I was, most assuredly, their greatest capital risk.
“Were the drugs administered?” Bryant didn’t even wait for the coffee to brew before asking the important questions. “Was she bedded?”
“Oh, yes.” Darius took my hand, pressing my fingers to his lips. “I should say so.”
I jerked, but he didn’t release my palm. The betraying flush amused the board. Six men circled me, their chuckles exposing the tatters of my decimated pride.
“All three of them?” Bryant asked.
Darius’s voice slithered over my skin. “Go on, Sarah. Don’t be modest. You have a controlling interest in this company. The least you can do is answer your fellow board members.”
He’d regret this.
All of this.
I braved their stares. “I don’t have a controlling interest. I am the controlling interest. Remember it. One day, I’ll have Darius’s seat, and then I’ll ask each of you how it feels to get fucked.”
Again, they laughed, as if they had nothing to fear from my threat or they thought I’d never carry through with it.
They made a terrible mistake. I longed for the moment to prove how dangerous it was to cross me.
“We’re all friends here, Ms. Atwood.” Peter Hannigan, the man who turned on Nicholas only to leer at the woman he loved, motioned for a time out. “No need for such hostility.”
