by Lili Valente
It was those precious, everyday moments that were locked away in her heart, filling her with joy, hope, and the determination to keep fighting to eradicate the shadows from her life one by one.
Which made her wonder what the hell she was going to do about Dom.
She needed him to do the legwork she couldn’t, but him showing up here unannounced was a clear violation of their working arrangement. They’d only met a few times in the past year and had always planned their meetings at least a week in advance.
Not to mention the fact that no one, not even Clay’s parents, had known where they were headed this summer. They had deliberately kept their travel plans secret, which inspired a host of other unsettling questions.
Had Dom been tracking her movements? Had he installed that spyware he was so leery of on her cell phone so he would know where she was at all times? And if he had—why?
A few minutes ago, Harley would have sworn that any romantic feelings or regrets were in the past for her and Dom. She knew he’d been hurt when she’d called things off, but she had never pretended that she felt anything more than friendship and physical attraction for him. And she suspected his broken heart had more to do with losing a standin for Hannah than any deep and abiding feelings for her.
Dom had always had a thing for her sister, but Harley understood. Most people with any sense would choose sweet and sunny over sarcastic and complicated—and those were some of Harley’s better traits.
But maybe she’d been wrong about Dom letting go and moving on…
The thought made her pause at the edge of the kiddie pool, where a map of the resort was illuminated by flickering tiki torches on either side. She didn’t need to look at the map—she could see the restrooms where she was supposed to meet Dom from where she stood—but she couldn’t ignore the unease prickling across her skin, raising the hairs on the back of her neck. No matter how much she trusted Dom, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be alone with him right now.
At least not until she knew what this was really about.
Trusting her gut, she slipped her phone from her clutch and pulled up his contact information. The kiddie pool was deserted this time of night—the plastic pirate ship’s water cannons were turned off and the slides shut down—so there was no one around to overhear her conversation.
He answered on the second ring. “So I guess you got the email.”
Harley blinked. “No, I didn’t. I’ve been traveling with Clay and the kids all day. I haven’t had a chance to check my private messages.”
“Fine, well, to sum it up, we’re screwed. Again. I got to the compound in Georgia a day too late. It might have only been a few hours. There were still dirty dishes in the sink with food on them that hadn’t had time to get crusty yet.” Dom let out a ragged sigh. “I threw a few of them across the room before I left.”
“I’m sorry, I know it’s frustrating.” Harley leaned back against the map, keeping an eye on the path, lowering her voice as a couple who’d clearly had a few too many mai tais wove their way through the darkness toward her. “But we can’t give up, Dom.”
“Oh, I’m not giving up,” he said. “I’m just getting pissed. What the fuck is wrong with your father? Why is making an innocent girl suffer so fucking important to him that he’ll exert this much time, energy, and money to keep her his prisoner?”
“Because that’s the way Stewart Mason operates. It’s all about winning and losing with him. Mallory isn’t a person; she’s a chess piece. I guarantee my father hasn’t spent a single second thinking about her feelings or her pain or the human consequences of his actions. It’s the same way with Hannah and me. He just wants different things from us.”
“You’re queens and Mallory is a pawn,” Dom said bitterly.
Harley ran a hand through her hair. “Yeah. I guess. Something like that. I don’t know. But he’s going to lose eventually. As long as we don’t give up.”
“You think?”
“I know,” Harley said, hating to hear him sounding so defeated. Maybe that’s why he’d come to meet her here. Maybe he was desperately in need of a face-to-face pep talk. It was still a little weird, but if anyone could understand how demoralizing her father could be, it was Harley. “He’s pushing seventy. If nothing else, he’ll be dead soon.”
Dom grunted. “No, he won’t. The monsters always live forever. It’s the good people who love their kids and take in foster children who get stage four colon cancer and die before their time.”
Harley frowned. “That’s a pretty specific example.”
“Yeah, well.” Dom sniffed. “I lost a friend last week. Cancer fucking sucks.”
“It does. I’m so sorry, Dom.” Harley spun on her heel, starting across the quiet pool deck near the abandoned kiddie pool. “I’m coming to give you a hug right now. It sounds like you need one.”
“Thanks, but that’s probably a little impractical.”
“Why?” Harley asked. “A hug is a hug. Friends hug all the time.”
“I’m still in Georgia,” he said. “Aren’t you somewhere halfway across the world by now? I’m assuming the Hart family doesn’t summer somewhere normal like Florida or Myrtle Beach.”
Harley’s footsteps faltered. “What about the bathrooms by the kiddie pool? The text you sent said to you meet you there.”
“I didn’t send you a text, Harley,” he said, his words sending a shiver of apprehension dancing up her spine. “Get out of there. Wherever you are. Get out, get to a crowded place, and call Clay.”
“I am,” Harley whispered as she reversed direction, hustling back across the pool, keenly aware that there could be someone behind the bathrooms listening to her every word. “I’ll call you in five minutes. If I don’t—”
Her words became a gasp as a man stepped out of the bushes to her left, blocking her way. She recognized his face immediately.
It was Eli, Cutter’s thug, one of the men who had intended to drag her into Marlowe’s maze last Midsummer Eve and take turns with her before he killed her for Marlowe’s amusement. Marlowe was dead, Cutter was, too, but Eli was alive and well, and if the hypodermic needle in his hand was any clue, clearly ready to finish what he’d started this time last year.
Harley turned to run, planning to cut through the foliage on the other side of the pool and make a break for the lobby, but Eli was too fast. She barely had time to register the sound of heavy footsteps on the concrete behind her before she felt the jab of the needle shoving into the place where her shoulder met her neck.
She cried out, her phone falling from her hand as her knees buckled. The world went black before her body hit the ground.
Chapter Nine
Clay
It would normally have taken fifteen minutes for Clay to get worried about Harley, but tonight wasn’t a normal night.
Tonight was a night with Stewart Mason missing in action. The longer Clay had to mull over the problem of the AWOL Senator, the more certain he became that Stewart’s vanishing act was no coincidence.
Jackson’s people were days, maybe hours, away from having everything they would need for Clay to get a warrant for Stewart’s arrest. A man didn’t become as powerful as Mason without having big ears in important places. There was a significant chance that someone had tipped Stewart off that it was time for him to run.
And if that were true, Stewart wouldn’t just be furious, he would be dangerous. A cornered monster is bad enough. A cornered monster on the verge of losing everything could be deadly.
Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
But what about when your freedom was threatened, too? That was when you truly had nothing. No more time, no more leverage, no way out except with your finger wrapped around the trigger of a gun.
Some people would choose to put that gun to their own head, but Clay wasn’t naïve enough to think that Stewart Mason would spare his family by choosing suicide. No, he would want to cause a little more suffering on his
way out, and his estranged daughter was near the top of a short list of people Stewart loved to torment the most.
Clay pushed his chair back, preparing to go look for Harley and stay glued to her side until she finished her phone call.
But before he could stand, an older man in a blue-and-white flowered Aloha shirt, holding a swaddled baby, slipped by the hostess with a smile and a nod in Clay’s direction and started across the crowded restaurant toward him.
Clay’s mouth went dry and his brain squirmed in his skull, rejecting the information being telegraphed from his eyes. Monsters didn’t appear out of thin air simply because you were thinking too hard about them.
This couldn’t be happening. That couldn’t be Stewart Mason walking toward him holding a baby.
Oh God. A baby. Will.
Clay vaulted from his seat, ready to snatch Will out of Stewart’s arms and ask questions about how the hell the man had gotten his hands on his son later. But as Stewart stopped across the table, Clay noticed two very important things—
One: the baby wasn’t Will. The infant had chubbier cheeks, darker eyebrows, and bow-shaped lips that made Clay think she was probably a girl, not a boy.
Two: Stewart had a gun in his left hand, pressed lightly to the baby’s chest. It was mostly concealed beneath the white blanket wrapped around the child. But as Stewart faced Clay down across the table, he allowed the barrel of the gun to emerge into the night air.
“Good evening, Agent Hart,” Stewart said, his blue eyes dancing with something a shade too manic to be victory. “I trust you’re enjoying your stay at the Malolo.”
“Put the baby down,” Clay said softly, scanning the crowd behind Stewart, willing someone to look up and notice what was going on in this dark corner of the restaurant. But the other patrons were too busy enjoying themselves to sense that a predator had slunk into the center of the herd.
“You’re not giving the orders, agent.” The wrinkles on Stewart’s lightly creased face deepened as he smiled. “This is what we’re going to do. You’re going to lead the way out of the restaurant, down the path past the pools, and through the gardens toward the lighthouse.”
“I’ll go with you, but you need to leave the baby here,” Clay said. “I’ll set her down by my chair. She’s asleep, so she won’t start crying right away. We’ll have plenty of time to get out of the restaurant before—”
“You will walk at a leisurely pace,” Stewart continued as if Clay hadn’t spoken. “You will smile at anyone we might pass by, but you will not stop to chat. Most importantly, you will give no impression that anything is wrong. If you fail to obey my orders at any time between now and the moment our business is concluded, I will put my gun under this beautiful little girl’s chin and pull the trigger.”
The words connected like a fist to the gut.
Clay didn’t know if it was the utter lack of human emotion in Stewart’s voice or the fact that Clay had a baby exactly the same age as the one in Stewart’s arms at home, but it was all he could do not to bend over and lose the bread he’d eaten all over the patio.
“Start moving,” Stewart added pleasantly. “Or I will end the child’s life right now. Thanks to you, Agent Hart, I no longer have any reason to pretend to be anything but what I am.”
“A monster?” Clay moved around the table, swallowing hard against the bile rising in his throat.
“A realist,” Stewart corrected, falling in behind Clay as he started for the exit. “And a pragmatist. Results are all that have ever mattered to me. Methodology should only come into question if the methods used have failed to deliver the desired results.”
Clay nodded to the hostess as he passed by but didn’t stop to explain where he was going. He had dealt with enough hostage situations to know when someone was bluffing. Stewart wasn’t. If Clay stopped to speak to anyone between here and the lighthouse, Stewart would put a bullet through an innocent child.
And if he didn’t try to signal for help or fight back, Stewart was going to kill him. If Clay let his mind flip and tumble, he could come up with other logical reasons for Stewart to have come all the way to Samoa to threaten him at gunpoint, but in his gut, he knew this wasn’t about Stewart wanting to cut a deal or avoid extradition to the U.S.
This was Stewart finishing what he’d failed to do last January.
“If your desired results are reconciliation with Harley, this sure as hell isn’t the way to do it.” Clay slipped his hands into his pockets, keeping his gait relaxed even as he scanned the clusters of people around him for his wife. If she saw him walking anywhere with Stewart, she would know to go for help.
But so far there was no sign of her. She wasn’t near the entrance to the restaurant or the path leading to the adult pool, where several other people were taking advantage of the relative silence to place a call.
“My daughter is a more complicated creature than you give her credit for,” Stewart said. “Did she ever tell you about our hunting trips when she was small? She wasn’t much of a shot, of course, at that age, but she loved it when it came time to skin the animals. Loved to get up to her elbows in the blood and gore and see what was hiding beneath the surface.”
“No, she didn’t mention that,” Clay said. “But she has mentioned the times you made her stand in a corner until she wet her pants in order to humiliate her for crying when you thought she shouldn’t. What was she, five years old when you started that shit?”
Stewart laughed softly. “She needed that kind of discipline. She’s my child, that one. Always has been, from the moment she was born. And once I explain to her that you’ve ruined our family name and destroyed the empire I built for her and her sister, she’ll see that you’re an acceptable loss.”
“You’re wrong,” Clay said though he knew there was no point trying to use logic with someone who found it acceptable to threaten an infant’s life. “She loves our family. And me. When she learns what you’ve done, it will tear her apart. She will never be the same, and she won’t let you anywhere near her or the kids again.”
“She won’t have a choice,” Stewart said, a smug note in his voice Clay didn’t understand until he added, “I’ve got enough evidence to prove she framed Jackson Hawke and tampered with evidence in a felony case, which carries a sizeable prison sentence on its own without lying under oath and all the rest of it.”
“Bullshit,” Clay said, fighting to keep his volume low. “I destroyed anything that could lead to a conviction in that case.”
“You can’t destroy what you don’t know is there, agent. I’ve had everything I needed to prove my daughter was lying about her rape since the summer you both went over the guardrail in that car. I knew there would come a time when I would need leverage to keep my wild child in line.”
Clay bit down hard on his bottom lip, silently cursing the sick bastard.
“If she doesn’t agree to my demands,” Stewart continued, “she won’t see her children until they’re too old to care about the woman who used to be their mother. She will spend the next fifteen to twenty years behind bars and the children will go to your parents.”
Stewart fell silent as they passed two men talking too loudly about a woman in a white bikini they both apparently considered “theirs” for the night. Even if the men hadn’t been wasted, they were too caught up in their own pointless drama to pay attention to anyone else’s, and Harley was still nowhere in sight.
“They seem like such trusting people,” Stewart added as Clay took the turn toward the lighthouse, moving through the gardens where there were even fewer people to observe his abduction. “They’ll be unprepared for a visitor in the dead of night, come to pull Jasper and Will from their beds.”
“You’re never going to touch my kids. You’re going to jail.” Clay’s hands balled into fists at his sides. “There’s already a warrant out for your arrest.”
“Not yet, but there will be soon enough,” Stewart said. “Why do you think I’m here? On the lovely island of Samoa, where
there is no extradition treaty in place with the United States. That’s why Ian Hawke’s son chose the location, isn’t it? Because of his troubles with the law?”
“The extradition treaty won’t mean shit if you commit murder on the island.” Clay searched the darkness on either side of the trail for anything he could use as a weapon. But the grounds were meticulously maintained. “They have their own justice system here and they prosecute killers the same way we do in the U.S.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to hope I’m clever enough not to get caught,” Stewart said, before adding in a softer voice. “I meant what I said, agent. If you don’t keep walking straight toward that lighthouse, where you will kneel down and take a bullet to your head like a man, I will kill this child. This baby whose only crime was having a mother who fell asleep in the hammock outside her hotel room, leaving the door open for me to duck inside.”
Clay swallowed hard, his thoughts racing. But for the first time in a long time, he couldn’t see any way out. He couldn’t be responsible for the death of an infant. He couldn’t choose his own life over that baby’s, no matter how loudly a voice in his head insisted that he couldn’t give up without a fight.
But sometimes fighting isn’t an option.
Sometimes there is nothing left to do but make what peace you can in the time you have left.
A moment later, the lighthouse came into view in the bright blue moonlight, a lonely relic of another age, slowly decomposing on a cliff above the ocean. A cliff where the waves smashed against the jagged shore beneath, creating enough noise to cover the sound of a gunshot and ensure a body left there might not be found for weeks, long after Stewart Mason and his gun were gone.
Chapter Ten
Hannah
It was the perfect ending to a perfect night.
Hannah was snuggled on the cushy outdoor couch watching the last fifteen minutes of her favorite cartoon of all time projected on the stucco wall of her home, her beautiful, brilliant nephew was asleep on what was left of her lap, and the girls had finally stopped cartwheeling around in her belly and settled in for a nap of their own. Her entire pregnancy had passed in a warm, foggy haze of well-being and tonight she had more reason than ever to be feeling blessed and grateful.
