by Lana Grayson
“Christ, Sarah, you are an Atwood! You can’t just disappear like this!” Anthony’s voice seared through the phone. “It was bad enough when you were lost in the Bennett Estate. And don’t tell me you were there to recover from an asthma attack.” He interrupted me with a grunt. “No one’s heard from you in two months. That includes the Bennetts.”
“I said I was fine.”
Anthony swore. “Don’t feed me that bullshit. You dropped off the grid the instant the Bennett stock passed into your possession. That doesn’t make sense. You are the largest shareholder outside their family. You practically own the company.”
And the shares weren’t worth the sorrow. I stayed quiet.
“Nicholas Bennett stormed into my office two weeks ago.”
My chest instantly tightened.
“He demanded information about you. Where you were. The last time we spoke. Where you were staying. He nearly had a coronary when I said I had no goddamned idea where you went.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t know what he’s planning, but Nicholas will burn your fields to find you, Sarah.”
I believed him, but not for the reasons Anthony feared. “I had an agreement with Nicholas, but…the circumstances changed. I’ll deal with him.”
“What the hell are you doing, Sarah? Just talk to me. Something is wrong.”
“It’s under control.”
“You hate Darius Bennett. You’d let your lungs collapse before accepting his help, but you move to his estate because of an asthma attack?”
“I said it was fine!”
“Did they hurt you?”
Silence.
How was I supposed to answer that?
Yes. Constantly. Every moment of every day?
Every second I spent with Nicholas shredded my soul and blinded me with a deceptive peace. I trapped myself within his control. But did he hurt me? Was that abuse?
His devotion wasn’t anything like the sadism that hardened Darius’s heart and other more repulsive parts of him.
Nicholas hadn’t hurt me, but, because of him, I now understood pain. I experienced it in more ways than just heartbreak, stolen futures, and submissions forced from an unwilling body.
“Sarah.”
“I have a plan,” I said.
“That wasn’t my question.”
“I control enough of the Bennett Corporation to influence Darius. I can either use that power to get more money, or we can end this once and for all.”
“End what?”
I swallowed. “The feud between our families.”
“And how will you do that?”
“Tell my acting CEO to get me a quote on how much it would cost to use all Bennett agrochemicals on my fields. Fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, everything.”
“What?”
“Have them email the proposal. Absolutely anything the Bennett Corporation provides on an agrochemical level, I want to use on my fields.”
“Sarah, this doesn’t make any sense.”
“And don’t tell them I requested the information.”
Anthony sighed. “What are you doing? This isn’t a peace offering. You’d rather those crops withered and died than ever spray with Bennett products.”
“You said it yourself. I’m a shareholder in the Bennett Corporation—so powerful I practically own the company. Shouldn’t I use the products of my investment? What better spokesperson could the Bennetts find?”
“What’s your plan?”
“Get me the quote. We’ll move on it once I have the information.”
“Your board won’t like this.”
“Unlike the Bennetts, my father kept control of his investors. They’ll do as I say, and, if they don’t, they can’t overrule my decision.” I swallowed. “Nor will they want to…once they see what I plan to do.”
“You need to talk to me. Really talk to me. You aren’t well, I can hear it. Tell me what happened.”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m doing what I always meant to do.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m tearing apart the Bennett Empire, beginning with their Board of Directors.”
“But—”
“And once they’re gone, Darius Bennet will pay for the sins he committed.”
“Darius Bennett didn’t kill your father.”
“No.” My voice faded. “He’s done worse than that.”
“Sarah—”
“Get me those quotes. I’ll explain it all later.”
Anthony didn’t take the order well, but I hung up and turned off the phone to prevent him from calling again. Instead, I focused on the reports with their unfamiliar chemical compounds and reactions. I took enough chemistry and chemical engineering classes to be dangerous, but I specialized in genetics. I wanted to work in genetics.
The Bennett stole that dream. And, as a result, they’d lose everything. A few un-sprouted seeds and ruined fields would destroy Darius Bennett’s reputation.
One of the reports bore Nicholas’s signature.
This would harm him too.
But he knew it was a possibility. He knew what would happen when he promised his love, but still tried every night to breed me.
He succeeded, and it wasn’t a beautiful creation made by a loving couple. It was a complete disaster with consequences that would endanger us all.
It couldn’t be Darius’s baby.
But if it was?
I’d hide Darius’s crime. I’d bury the truth. I had no choice.
Twenty year old Sarah Atwood, raped and impregnated by her step-father? The baby was the heir to two multi-billion dollar empires. He would be important, influential, and nothing would be denied to him. If the truth were revealed, the entire world would realize what happened.
Nicholas would know.
The reports blurred, but it wasn’t tears. My breath sharpened, stinging as it caught within my uncooperative lungs.
Not again.
The clinic said the inhaler was safe for both me and the baby, but I hated taking the puff, especially when it wasn’t allergies or exercise that caused the attack.
It was frustration. Anger.
The tightness in my chest still felt like Darius’s weight crushing me. Weeks had passed, and that wheezing pain hadn’t healed. And it wouldn’t. Not while I ran. Not while I hid. Not while I cowered and Darius walked free, content with his crime and unaffected by the trauma it caused.
It was the second bad attack that week. The breathless cough scared me, but my heaving sickness made it worse. I collapsed on the bathroom floor, gagging and choking and hating everything about my shuddering, silent cry.
I threw up. I couldn’t breathe. I choked. My stomach lurched.
I gagged and wheezed until my vision darkened and the agonized headache split my skull.
Minutes passed as I lay crumpled on the cold, damp floor of an unrated motel. Mold grew in the corners. The radiator smelled of burnt dust. Hamlet whined next to me, thumping a tail against my thigh as he waited for me to peel myself from the tile.
Was this how I wanted to be found? Dead from an asthma attack, covered in my own sickness, hiding a pregnancy from the men who might have helped me survive everything?
From the one man who deserved to know?
The squeezing in my chest faded as I made the decision.
I refused to let the fear or the rage or the blistering helplessness control me.
The only way I’d ever heal was if Darius Bennett was punished for what he did. The only way I’d survive a pregnancy with severe asthma was if I had help.
I needed my step-brothers.
I cleaned myself and crawled to the bed, resting within the stiff sheets and clutching the phone to my breast. I once meant for Darius to endure the same torment he forced on me. Now I just wanted him dead. Cold and buried and gone forever.
I dialed Nicholas…but I didn’t press send.
I longed to hear his voice. I wanted to slap his face and blame him for ev
erything that happened to me. I planned to bury myself in his embrace.
But I knew I had to keep the baby as far from the Bennetts and their evils as possible.
My heart didn’t just break—visions of an unrealized future, a lost and perfect love, and the memories of a gentle passion shattered with every beat. If I was to survive, if I meant to protect my child, I had only one option.
Rid the world of Darius Bennett and shield my baby from any of his influences. They owed me that much.
I cleared the phone and called Reed. He picked up, but I spoke before I heard his voice and lost all composure, all courage.
“I need your help.”
“Did you fucking kill her?”
My father’s office door crashed against the wall. Chunks of wood from the frame shattered, striking the ceiling, the windows. They tumbled still before his desk.
I stared the monster in the eye.
He didn’t blink.
I repeated myself. My words echoed in fierce accusation, layering in the freezing hiss of a desperate man without patience, without hope.
Without answers.
Without her.
“Did you kill her?”
My father’s thin lips peeled into a smile. He folded his hands into his lap, just waiting, hesitating as the silence tightened my fists.
“Kill who, son?”
I wasn’t a man who lost his temper. My father was a man who didn’t deserve the air he breathed.
I swore, ripping the laptop and papers from his desk. The computer crashed in a disappointing fizzle, but the roaring blood in my ears promised a greater calamity once his bones cracked and skin ripped.
“You seem tense,” my father said.
I grunted as I hauled him from his chair. He wasn’t feeble, but he didn’t fight as I slammed him against the window and weighed my failing patience against his uncompromising stare. His head smacked against the glass. It wasn’t enough.
Outside, San Jose glimmered in the twilight. The cracking glass would have shattered the quiet, but I longed for every murderous second of Heaven as his body careened to the pavement below.
I gripped his suit. His eyebrow arched.
I should have driven his head through the window.
But I had to know.
For two months, I lived in ignorance, pessimism, and a denied mourning. She vanished, completely. Emails unanswered and phones disconnected. A private investigator revealed nothing.
Max warned we’d need to hire a coroner.
It was the first time I struck my brother. He lost a tooth. I thought I lost my mind.
Either the grief would break me, shadow me in crimson regret and endless solitude, or that failing slice of hope would cut through the insanity.
If she were safe, we’d all survive.
The only force more powerful than greed was hate. Money didn’t transfer into the afterlife. Hate did. Vengeance did. If he murdered her, I’d follow him to hell and become his own personal devil.
“Did you kill Sarah Atwood?”
“You think I would kill my own daughter?”
“Don’t fuck with me. Is she dead?”
My father grinned. “Why do you ask, Nicholas? Has your little sister gone missing?”
If he dared to take that perverted tone about Sarah once more, he’d pray to land in a puddle of glass forty stories below.
“Answer the question. Did you have her killed?”
My father declined to respond. His attention drifted over my shoulder. I dropped him and ducked, avoiding the fist of one of his newly hired bodyguards. He stepped aside as the second guard imbedded his foot in my gut.
I swung. My punch caught one in the chin as the other slammed my ear. I fell to my knee, but not before gripping a pair of scissors cast from the desk. I jammed the blade into the thigh of the bastard gripping my neck.
The monsters my father hired were as emotionless and cruel as he. If they bled, it was black and putrid. The stain spread over his thigh, but he didn’t swear. His grip tightened, and the other bodyguard struck me in the chest. The air hissed from my lungs.
I didn’t give my father the satisfaction of groaning. Not like I had the air to make the sound anyway.
“Don’t bruise his face.” My father readjusted his suit before claiming his seat. “But teach him this lesson.”
As with everything my father expected, his guards were ruthless, efficient, and obeyed his every order. A kick to the chest was nothing. The jab to the kidney drove me to my knees. My stomach heaved. I didn’t vomit.
Yet.
The funeral guests left when the ambulance arrived for my hysterical step-mother. My father grunted, wiping the blood from his hands with a handkerchief.
“Bethany sliced her wrists in the bathtub. I’m going with her to the hospital. You stay at the farm until what whatever remains of those bastards are buried.”
As if I had a choice. Two men were dead, lost souls in a feud with no visible end. The least they deserved was an acknowledgement of our guilt.
The crowds paid their respects, and the caskets lowered into the farmland, beside the wretched body of their father. A murderer didn’t deserve a grave as beautiful as the landscape surrounding the Atwood farms.
The guests tucked away their tissues and paraded to their cars.
But she stayed.
The beautiful blonde with hair as pale as her corn’s silk and blue eyes faded with tears. She sat in the dirt and wept for her brothers. For her life. For everything that was now hers.
Sarah Atwood’s sorrow broke my heart.
I wished we weren’t the cause.
A rib cracked. The sharp slice echoed over the room. I gasped, but my escaping words didn’t beg for pity. My father loathed mercy and begging excited him. My brothers and I shared enough scars to understand his sadism.
And now so did Sarah.
If she were still alive.
I left her at the chalet, but I promised her I’d return. We’d planned to sell her shares of the company, appease the board, and find a way to shield her from my father.
But maybe she didn’t believe me? Maybe she ran before the bastard had a chance to locate her.
Or maybe she was dead.
And then my father would need more than two Russian mutes with bloodied fists to protect him.
“Where is she?” I rasped through the pain. “Answer me.”
My father nodded. The monster on my right struck where the rib already shattered.
“First, you steal my daughter and hide her far from where her daddy can find her.” My father’s voice was far too calm for the filth he spoke. “And now you storm into my office fussing like a toddler. Why? Is it because she’s run from you too? Tell me, Nicholas. What’s happened to this family? To you?”
“Nothing you didn’t cause.”
“Me?” he actually laughed. “How is this disaster my fault? Be honest, son. You fell in love with your sister. You bargained with everyone’s lives to save hers. You gave her the stock, and you were the one to threaten Roman Wescott into giving you every last share.”
He nodded to his guard. I braced for it, but the fist to my gut roiled every pain with my simmering disgust. I grunted and spat. The second guard backhanded me for the insolence of making a mess in my father’s office.
That would bruise. He didn’t care.
“That little Atwood slut climbed into your bed, gave you a ride, and then ran away with the entirety of the Josmik Trust. Didn’t she tell the love of her life where she went? Are you really surprised?”
“Sarah was selling the stock to the board. She didn’t want to keep it.”
His eyebrow arched. “She fucked you good, Nicholas. At least you got off while it lasted.”
I tasted blood. It wasn’t from the beating. “You killed her. You found her and murdered her.”
“Son, I assure you. The last time I saw Sarah Atwood was the last time you did.”
He didn’t know about the chalet. He did
n’t know I’d confessed my love to her, begged her forgiveness for the horrible pain my brothers and I caused, and ordered her to stay and wait for my return.
My father gestured for his men to strike me again. The punch bent me in two. The hit to my chest popped me upright in the chair.
“I should have killed her, but I didn’t think the little whore would ever bolt.” My father sighed, unflinching, as he observed my beating. “To be perfectly honest, my daughter charmed me. I let her off easy, but I’ve always had a soft heart.”
My breathing hurt, but I deserved the ragged drag of air through my lungs. Sarah suffered through worse for us—her own broken ribs and injuries, terrors and captivity.
Of course she’d leave.
Of course she’d run.
What promises of mine would ever comfort a woman so mistreated? I never saw her body without bruises. I vowed to keep her safe, but my word hadn’t prevented any injury or sacrifice. And the day I freed her from my possession, the instant the collar unclipped from her neck, the devil rose from hell to recover the innocent soul he nearly lost.
What my brothers and I did to her was unforgiveable. And even in the dark and quiet, when I returned to fall back within her, as I offered her my heart with every passionate thrust, she made her choice.
Sarah ran to save herself. And she took the only leverage she had to ensure her safety—the very fate of the company she vowed to destroy.
My father dismissed the guards he had hired specifically to defend him from our retaliation. Not a day went by that Max and Reed didn’t demand some form of satisfaction. For them, it had been three months since the night he put the gun to her head and forced us to ruin her.
They weren’t the same men I remembered.
Neither was I.
The bodyguards wouldn’t protect my father. The only reason he breathed was because I couldn’t take the chance that he’d found Sarah and imprisoned her without our knowledge.
“I asked for one thing, son.” He dabbed his handkerchief over the blood that smudged his desk. “Sarah Atwood’s heir. We were in agreement. You all fucked the girl, and yet here we are. Months later, and our company is still in jeopardy. I’m disappointed with this turn of events.”
