by Amber Bardan
I rub my hands on my dress. Try to focus, to take in everything around us and scan the yard. There’s one guy standing behind dad, another two at the wall with dad’s boys and Benjamin Carlisle. A glint catches my eye.
I glance up at the house.
It takes a moment to distinguish the figure all in black against the charcoal tiles on the roof. He lies flat on his belly, masked eye pressed to a telescopic lens—trained right on us.
A sniper.
The entire time I thought Julius faced down everyone alone, the sniper has been here. Could’ve picked us all off one by one before we knew which direction to look in.
Paper tears.
Julius opens the envelope and unfolds the paperwork inside. Dad makes noises against the gag. Julius scans the page, his features tightening as though someone cracked a vise on his head.
He flips the page. All I catch is a glimpse of my name. What could he possibly want that has my name on it? He stills, then his gaze skewers me from across the table. My heart clenches as though I’ve been punched in the ribs.
Dad’s will.
I’ve seen Dad’s will and exactly what he’s left to me.
My heart booms louder. I glance at Dad. Suddenly, I feel nauseous, like I-could-empty-my-stomach-on-the-table-in-front-of-everyone nauseous.
He takes the papers from the table, then stands and walks over to me. I scoot back as far as I can in my chair. “Do you have any idea why I’m here?”
To steal from my father? Settle a score?
“No.”
He places the papers next to my teacup, then crouches beside me, his face just below mine. He swallows up my vision. This isn’t the kind of face you can be close to and ignore.
“There’s something I need to tell you.” He takes my hands in his. My spine tingles. I get a sense of what’s coming. Maybe it’s the fact he dropped to one knee.
As hard as my heart pounds, it seems impossible that it could skip a beat and yet for one instant my chest goes still.
“If you’d opened that safe, or at least not destroyed it, I could’ve taken what was inside and this would all have been so much easier.” His fingers lock around mine. Heat seeps through his skin into my frozen digits. “But that’s not all I came here for.” He rubs my fingers as though he can thaw them. There’s no erasing the chill in my bones.
Blood rushes out of my head so fast the world spins.
“Do you know what else I came here for?”
I know. I do. The will makes it clear.
“You want me.” The words are like red-hot coals to spit out. “You want to marry me.”
His fingers clench around mine and everything goes earsplittingly silent before he speaks. “You understand why?”
I glance at the papers he laid upside down, but it’s hard to see, hard to think, with all the blood fleeing my brain. “Yes, you want my inheritance.”
The grip on my hands pulls me back to the madman in front of me.
“Would you do that?” The hoarseness to his voice drives a thousand questions into my heart. “Would you marry me to make everything okay?”
I tear my gaze from him, glance at Dad—he’s shaking his head. Mrs. Carlisle has gone stiff in her chair. She’s not going to help me. No one here can help me.
I look back at Julius on his knees.
Kneeling.
Holding my hands.
Asking.
Something clicks. He could be taking. He could be forcing. I’ve fucked him over. I broke my word. This could be going a very different way. For some reason, he wants or needs something from me. We’re playing a game now. One with rules. He’s not going to make me, I have to choose. This is a negotiation.
“How do you get my inheritance if my father is alive?”
He smiles, not really a smile, it’s more one side of his mouth turning up. “I don’t.”
“If you kill my father, I won’t do anything you want. You’ll get nothing.”
His smile widens, getting real and breathtaking. Bargaining has begun, and I have the feeling that, like the devil, he is in his zone. “Then I agree not to kill your father.”
“Not by your hand, and not by your doing?” I’ve sat by Dad’s side long enough to know negotiations should always be specific.
His smile becomes a neutral line. “His death won’t be on me.”
The words send dread plunging into my belly. I can’t believe I’m actually negotiating the terms of my marriage to this psychopath. “Not good enough. I want your word that nothing will happen to him.”
He leans up, bringing us nose to nose. “I can’t promise that. Your father has done things that not even I can protect him from.” He draws my hands up so that my knuckles scrape against his jacket and I have to lean closer. “But I can save you.” I taste his breath like a kiss. “You don’t have to pay for the mistakes of your family. You don’t have to be part of this world. You have a chance.” His words get softer, huskier, his lips closer to mine. “Give me what I ask, and I’ll give you something far greater than all of this.”
I can taste him, in my mouth and in my nose. As seductive as a drug. There’s more to his promise than his words reveal. I want to know all of it.
Muffled sounds come from across the table. I look at my father. If what Julius says is true, Dad is in trouble. Whatever trouble it is, I can only imagine it’s less than the trouble visited on us now. He can handle the rest—so long as we get through this.
I can save Dad today.
He’ll save me tomorrow.
I open one of the hands Julius holds, and press my palm between the lapels of his jacket, right against his shirt. He can’t hide the twitch of his muscle against my touch. “But you agree that you won’t do anything to hurt my dad?”
“I swear,” he says, eyes burning.
“Then I’ll do it, if you promise me one more thing.”
“What?”
“The terms of the will don’t come into effect until I’m twenty-one.”
He squints but doesn’t silence me, even though he must know what I’m asking for.
“Today is my eighteenth birthday. So give me the next three years.” My heart lurches into my throat at the same rate heat moves into my cheeks. “Promise me these next three years, safe and unmolested, then I promise to marry you.”
“Done.” The word carries across the yard.
My palm tingles against his chest. My face fills with heat. Done. Couldn’t be more final if he sliced our hands and fused our palms with blood.
I’ve given an oath I’ve no intention of honoring, and God help me if he makes me.
“Three years.” He smiles for real and I’m floored by how normal that expression makes him look. He presses his hand over mine and holds it there. “And my vow you’ll remain—” his smile twitches into a smirk “—unmolested, and entirely safe from uninvited advances.”
It’s the way he says uninvited that sends warning prickling my scalp. As though this deal could be blown over by the tiniest breeze.
As though I’d only have to gaze at him two heartbeats too long, and I’d be his for the taking.
He turns his attention to Mrs. Carlisle. “Who else knows?”
She moves like a statue coming to life, gesturing to Dad with a tilt of her chin. “Only the two of us.”
Knows what?
Julius looks at my father. “Anthony, she comes with me. Your knowledge goes no further.”
Dad’s brows hunch, beads of moisture coat his forehead, but he nods as though the movement is agonizing.
“Silvia, I hope you understand I’m going to have to extend my hospitality to Benjamin, to be sure.”
Mrs. Carlisle flies to her feet, her chair falling back with a clang against the paving. “Like hell you
will.”
She raises her hand, a small black gun in her grasp.
Where’d she pull that from?
She glances over her shoulder and holds the gun with an ease that makes me think maybe she’s done this before. Maybe she keeps a gun strapped to her thigh or in her knickers or wherever it is she keeps it, for good reason.
“Put that down. This is the only way the rest of us can leave here and you know it.” Julius’s fingers curl around mine like he’s holding on to me for balance. “No one else needs to die today.”
“Let my son go or I shoot your boss,” she calls out and inches around the table. Her movements are slinking, and controlled. There won’t be any sneaky wrestling of weapons out of her hands, I’d bet on that.
She won’t get close enough to let that happen.
As I thought, she stops just out of reach.
“Let the kid go,” Julius calls out.
The guy holding him releases Benjamin and he stumbles forward.
“Tell your thugs to give him their weapons.”
Julius doesn’t even glance over his shoulder, just keeps his attention on her. “Give the kid the guns.”
The men don’t hesitate, handing over weapons to Benjamin. He collects them and jogs unsteadily over to the table. He reaches us. His nose is purple and swollen and crusted over. He sets the weapons on the table close to his mother, but keeps a rifle, gripping it against his chest. Mrs. Carlisle puts her free hand in her pocket and pulls out keys, then tosses them in his direction. “Get out of here, Ben.”
The kid scrambles for the keys, then runs for the driveway.
The coward.
Mrs. Carlisle keeps her gun fixed on Julius.
“Last chance to walk away.” He lets my hands go, making a movement with two fingers toward her.
She smiles, there’s lipstick on her teeth now. “But I have no intention of all of us leaving here today.”
She takes a step closer. My gaze snaps to the flex of her finger on the trigger.
Wetness sprays my face and neck. I jerk. A haze of red clouds my vision. Something awful drips in my mouth.
My scream echoes through the yard and through my head.
Mrs. Carlisle drops like a stone beside us, blood spraying from her neck like some horrid special effect. My throat burns, but screams keep leaving my lips.
Julius grabs me and wraps his arms around me until I stop shouting.
I gulp lungfuls of air against his shirt. My teeth chatter and shake. He sets me back in the chair. He looks me over and for an instant he looks as stricken as I am. Then the expression is gone. The cold controlled mask molds his features.
He takes his place again at the table. “Well, I guess it’s not just my plans fucked today.”
He fingers a napkin on the table, but not before I see it—the slight shake of his fingertips. I was wrong, that look, it’s not controlled—it’s uncontrolled.
Julius is a hairbreadth from eruption and there’s still blood on both of us. He takes his handgun from his jacket and sets it on the table.
He’d almost fooled me.
Fooled me into thinking he isn’t as crazy as I’d thought, and that maybe there is a chance I’ll be okay. The bodies on the ground prove me wrong.
I glance at him, there’s no chance I’ve hidden the loathing in my eyes.
He returns my gaze.
“Drink your tea, baby. Don’t want it getting cold.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ringing sounds tug me out of sleep. At first I think it’s part of my dream. A memory of normal times when telephones would ring and I wasn’t imprisoned by my fiancé on his island, and fucked-up wasn’t the new normal. The sound rings again. I flop my arm out beside me and turn on the lamp, then squint at the phone embedded in the wall by Julius’s bed, in the room I’ve been confined to since I “misbehaved.”
I reach for the receiver slowly, and bring it to my ear. “Hello?”
“Baby, listen.” Julius’s words douse me like a bucket of water.
I snap up straight in bed. The sheets pool in my lap. “What is it?”
“We have uninvited guests.”
Adrenaline parts my fatigue, setting me crisply on edge.
“Lock the door and get yourself in the closet, I’m coming for you.” His low voice sends my follicles prickling.
“Who?” I ask.
“Lock the door,” he repeats. “Get in the closet.”
My tongue slides against my palate. Even with my pulse racing scared, I kind of want to tell him to get fucked for telling me what to do.
I glance around the room and flip the sheets off my legs. “Okay.”
“I’m coming for you.” He punctuates each word sharply, like he’s trying to drive them down the line.
I freeze for a moment. Harsh breaths fill my earpiece. My breaths speed up and match his.
“I believe you.”
The line clicks and turns silent.
I hang up the phone, roll out of bed and sprint to the bedroom door. My heart thuds heavier than the click of the bolt as it thunks into place.
Is this Ash making a final attempt to get me, this time with his crew?
I press my fist to my lips. Will they fight over me?
An aching heaviness expands my belly and spreads a horrific sensation like a nest of spiders crawling up my insides.
I don’t want either of them to be hurt because of me. I won’t let that happen. The fact is, I made my choice when I jumped out of the speedboat. I run to the armchair in the corner and push it to the center of the room, then stand on it and unscrew the lightbulb from the pendant in the center of the room. I put the chair back, go to the door and pace backward into the room and set the lightbulb down on the floor by the bed. Then I flick on the closet light, turn off the lamp, tug the cord right out of the outlet, take off the shade, then the bulb and finally remove the cord.
I set the bulb right outside the closet door, then turn off the light, but move around the corner into the alcove. The brass base of the lamp hangs heavy from my hand. The bedroom door rattles. My chest rattles too.
The rattle morphs into bangs.
I bring the lamp up to rest on my shoulder. The door explodes open with a crash. I hold my breath and force myself still. The light switch clicks uselessly. Footsteps enter the room.
I close my eyes and listen.
A crunch grates on the other side of the room. My muscles brace. The footsteps stop. I don’t twitch, don’t breathe. I’m still standing, but my heart seems to stop. The steps begin again, but this time they’re softer treads.
They draw closer.
My triceps strain.
The crunch of glass sounds two feet in front of me. I lunge from the corner and swing with a lethal burst of energy. The base of the lamp slams down from over my head. Impact shudders through my elbows. This crunch is sick and meaty. Someone drops to the ground with a thud.
I step around the body on boneless legs, then turn on the closet light. The masked figure on the floor is dressed all in black, head completely concealed. I’m kind of glad I don’t have to see a face. My lungs shudder. More footsteps pound toward the bedroom. I haul the lamp back onto my shoulder.
Julius’s familiar bulk bursts into the room. He reaches the slumped figure, then looks at me. “Looks like bludgeoning is your thing.”
I smirk and lower the lamp. “I work with what I’ve got.”
Thuds echo down the hall.
Julius backs away from me and rolls over the bed. I don’t even see the person who runs into the room before they drop under the impact of Julius’s fist.
I step over the unconscious, hopefully-not-dead person I bludgeoned, and walk around the room toward him. Julius’s cell phone release
s two short beeps. He pulls the phone from his pocket and answers, then listens. “Yeah, I’ve got two in the bedroom.”
I inch around the second body on the floor, dodging the jagged pieces of lightbulb. It’s really freaking bizarre how quickly my pulse has slowed down. How I’m already thinking, What needs to be done now? I stare at the faceless person on the ground. I’m way too easy with this. Maybe I’m like my family after all.
Maybe ruthlessness is in the blood...
“You sure that’s all of them?” Julius looks at me and winks. Winks like he had this from the get-go. Like nothing could touch him or us.
A shadow moves in the doorway behind Julius. All I see is the flash of silver directed at him and I lunge—palms out—knocking him to the side. A bang rips through the room and pain tears through my arm. I fall backward. Impact squeezes my ribs where I land bent over the person on the ground. I blink at the ceiling, a good sign that I’m alive. The roof tilts like I’m on a boat.
A howl unleashes through the room.
I clasp my arm and roll off the body and onto my uninjured side. A blur of motion fills my vision. Julius tears a weapon from another man’s hand, and slams his head into a wall. I blink. He doesn’t stop there; he grips the back of the ski mask and slams his head three more times.
The figure crumples.
Julius stumbles toward me. My arm burns—real fiery burning that radiates through my nervous system, making absolutely everywhere hurt. Blood wets my palm where I grip my flesh. It’s all right, though. I take a deep calming breath. I’m all right. I’ve come to know enough about mortal wounds to know that this isn’t so serious. The bleeding isn’t a deadly gush.
Pain, I can handle.
Julius hovers over me, his features contorted. “Sarah!”
There’s something funny about the way he pronounces my name. I can’t put my finger on it, my whole head has gone fuzzy.
“I’m okay.” I squeeze the words out.
He keeps on looking at me like the world is actually over, and scoops me up. I lean against his chest and take a few more breaths. “I swear I’m okay, Julius.”
