She studied my expression. “You’re still worried, aren’t you? That Fox is out there waiting?”
I checked around us for eavesdroppers, but the other partygoers were all ensconced in lighter conversations with each other. “I’m not naive enough to think that he’s moved on,” I told Mac. “Just because we got Holly back doesn’t mean we’ve won the game. He’s biding his time. I’d bet anything on it.”
“Why do we have to play his stupid game again?” Mac asked. “Scott knows about what happened in Paris. Fox can’t blackmail you anymore for it.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “Fox likes to play with people. He’ll try to hurt anyone that’s close to me, and I can’t protect all of you at once.”
“Is that why you’ve been stalking Holly at school?” She took another sip of beer, catching the guilty look on my face. “Don’t deny it. I’ve seen you out there, checking in at the front office to make sure she’s still there.”
I swiped the bottle back from her. “If there was a chance some psychopath was after your sister, wouldn’t you do the same?”
Mac shrugged, turned around, and propped her bad leg up on an unoccupied porch chair. “My sister and I never really got along.”
“I just feel like it’s not over yet,” I told her. “Not until Fox is behind bars.”
“Understandable,” Mac said. “But you can’t live your life in fear, waiting for him to jump out of the shadows. Let yourself enjoy the little victories, and when Fox shows up, we’ll be ready for him.”
A loud crack echoed through the dusky night as one of Holly’s teammates sent a line drive toward first base. Holly dove to make the catch, the ball thwacking against her glove. A cheer went up from both teams in appreciation for Holly’s talent. Holly stood, her dress now stained green from the freshly-cut grass, and lifted her glove in triumph.
I hung my head. “Autumn’s going to kill me.”
“New dress?”
“You got it.”
Emily stepped out onto the porch, smiling at the sight of the game on her front lawn. “Bridget, honey? Will you do me a favor? We’re out of ice. Do you mind going to the garage and getting another bag from the spare freezer?”
I gave Mac the beer and pushed away from the porch railing. “Yup. Be right back.”
“Need help?” Mac asked.
“No, I got this. Keep that leg elevated.”
I hopped off the porch and rounded the side of the house, squinting through the darkness. The lights from the house didn’t reach this far, so I carefully picked my way through the yard and found the handle of the garage door through memory rather than sight. I hefted it up from the ground, but when the last of the fading daylight found its way into the garage, it illuminated a face and figure that had haunted my nightmares for three and a half years.
“Hello, Brigitte,” Fox said, his lips curling upward in that perfect smile of his. He held up a small remote. “Come in quietly and shut the door. Otherwise, I’ll send your friends and family from this life to the next.”
8
Rehired
A light flickered on as I stepped into the garage and let the door roll shut behind me. The bluish white glow of the LED on his phone highlighted the symmetrical cheekbones, the icy blue eyes, and the white blond hair that made up Fox’s cold elegance. In the three years since I’d left him to bleed out in the underground passageways beneath a hotel in Paris, he had not changed aside from the added lines at the corners of his eyes. It was the only thing that gave away his mortality. Otherwise, I would’ve begun to wonder if Fox had been sent to Earth as an avenging angel by some omnipotent, otherworldly essence. With his ethereal beauty, he gave off the impression of having known this world for eternity.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I hissed, making a grab for the remote. “What is that?”
He waggled a finger like a mother at a petulant child. “Ah, ah, ah. I wouldn’t do that if I were you. See, if I press this button, your entire life goes up in flames.” When he read the confusion off of my face, he nodded toward the Millers’ house. “I wired a few well-placed homemade explosives. You blew up my life, I’ll blow up yours. Poetic, isn’t it?”
“You sick son of a bitch,” I spat, lunging for the remote once more. Fox raised it above his head, and I collided with his chest instead. For a moment, we were pressed together in a way far from impersonal, but I shoved him off just as quickly. “How are you even alive? If I remember correctly, I shot you. Twice. And then I left you to burn in the basement of a crumbling building. Did you sell your soul for another shot at torturing me?”
Fox smirked, and the tendons in his neck flexed in response. “Not quite. You see, I was lucky enough to have a friend nearby. You might know him. Christian Santini? He had arrived from Marseilles shortly before you set your plan in motion. Thankfully, his train was running late. He made it to the hotel just as the explosions began. He caught your little friend fleeing the scene. What did you call that scab of a human? Ghost?”
“Phantom,” I breathed. “What did you do to him?”
“I didn’t do anything to him,” Fox replied, clutching his heart in a gesture of faux innocence. “Christian simply needed a way to get to me, and your friend—what was it again?—was particularly gifted in his knowledge of the underground. I must admit I lost sight of the little goon as Christian dragged me to safety. You can’t blame me, of course. I was barely conscious. Multiple bullet wounds will do that to you.”
“I should’ve shot you in the head,” I growled. There was a tire iron in the corner of the garage. If I could get to it before Fox pushed the button on his remote…
But he noticed the flicker of my gaze and turned around to see what I was looking at. “Oh, baby. You haven’t changed at all, have you?”
“Don’t call me that.”
He stepped toward me, looming in the moonlit shadows. “But that’s what you are. My baby. Just do me a favor? Don’t do anything stupid. I don’t want to have to hurt the people you love.”
“Aren’t you a little late for that?” I asked. “Or have you forgotten that you ordered your pathetic sycophants to kidnap and torture my little sister? I just got her back, Fox. I won’t let you take her away again.”
“It was never your sister I was interested in,” Fox said. Another step forward. God, he was so tall. “She was merely a pawn, like that Marks idiot.” He rolled his eyes. “I was so relieved to watch them carry his body out of that warehouse in Wolfwater. Great decision, by the way, getting rid of him. He was such a whiny, privileged brat—”
“I didn’t kill Emmett,” I hissed. Without thinking, I planted my hands on Fox’s chest with the intention of shoving him away, but he seemed to be waiting for this. He pinned me there, his fingers snaking around my wrist.
“I know,” he said, caressing my skin with his long fingers. “Your CIA friend did. Yet another mistake on your part, ma chérie. That’s one of the reasons I’m here. I require your assistance.”
I wrenched out of his grasp, his manicured fingernails scraping against my wrist. “Go to hell.”
He played with the remote, tossing it nonchalantly from one hand to the other. “I wouldn’t be so quick to decline my offer. You haven’t even heard my terms yet.”
“Your terms don’t mean anything to me,” I snarled. “It’s all empty promises and broken souls with you, Fox. The only terms you ever set were ones that directly benefited you.”
“I politely oppose that statement,” he said. “If you agree to my terms, I don’t kill your family and friends. That seems relatively beneficial to you, does it not?”
I ached to wrap my hands around his throat, to squeeze until the bewitching man before me no longer had the breath to cast his spell over anyone else. Prison seemed a small price to pay for keeping my family safe. Their faces flashed before my eyes. Holly and Autumn and Mac. Bill and Emily and all their foster kids. Even Officer Scott and the other cops who had shown up at the house that night to celebr
ate the end of their involvement with Holly’s case. But I couldn’t risk jumping Fox as long as he held that remote.
“That’s it,” Fox crooned as I lowered my trembling fists to my side. “Good girl. Now would you care to listen to my proposition, and we can talk about this like adults?”
I bit down on my bottom lip to keep myself from replying to his patronizing tone and gave one curt nod.
“Excellent.”
He sat on the lid of the freezer that I was supposed to be fetching ice from. How long had it been since I’d left Mac on the porch? Two minutes? Three? Would she come out and look for me if she noticed the minutes passing her by without my return? I could only hope that she’d brought her Glock to the party with her.
“Here’s what I want from you, Brigitte,” Fox began, twirling the remote in the palm of his hand. “You may have already gathered that I intend to restart my business here in North Carolina. It’s not ideal. As I mentioned earlier, I’m partial to New York City or possibly Los Angeles, but I’m willing to make an exception for you. Raleigh isn’t a bad place to start though. There’s a university nearby. Can you imagine the amount of beautiful, naive freshman girls in the area?”
My stomach churned at the thought. “You’re disgusting.”
“I prefer business savvy,” he contradicted. “I think you’ll like my new place. It’s a beautiful estate house. Lots of land. I even have horses. You like horses, right? I recall one or two inane conversations about your background in equestrian activities.” When I didn’t reply, he shrugged and went on. “You must be wondering why I need your help. It’s simple really. You know this world better than I do, the cows and the fields and the truly abhorrent accents. And the music! Merde, what is that absolute trash they play on the radio here? It’s all ‘my tractor this, my tractor that.’ I swear, if these American men are more obsessed with their tractors than their own pleasure, we might run into a problem.” A sudden epiphany lit up his expression. “Or is ‘tractor’ a euphemism?”
“Whatever you want, I’m not helping you to do it,” I told him.
A muted cheer rose from the front yard, permeating the concrete walls of the garage. Fox licked his lips. “I think you’ll find you will if it means allowing your sister and her friends to continue their fun. Now listen closely.” He tucked his hands into the pocket of his jean jacket, something I never thought I’d seen him wear, but he was apparently determined to fit in with the locals of Belle Dame. “The CIA has been on my tail ever since I arrived in this terrible country. Somehow, they managed to track a few of my business transactions. They worked backward, I would guess, starting with your sister.” His hidden grip on the remote control worried me. If he wanted, he could blow the house to smithereens without warning. “The trail of dead bodies isn’t helping either. First Christian then Marks. If it continues like this, I’ll have to relocate yet again, which is not something that you nor I should want.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do about it?” I asked. “It’s not my fault the CIA caught on to your ‘business.’ Clearly, you aren’t as cautious as you used to be.”
“Through no fault of mine,” Fox countered. “And on the contrary, there is something you can do about it. After all, of the two of us, you’re the one with a friend for a federal agent.”
“Taylor and I were never friends,” I told him. Maybe if I could keep him talking long enough, someone would come out to the garage to check on me. “We teamed up in Wolfwater because it benefitted both of us, but I haven’t seen her since then. I have no idea what she’s been up to in the last few weeks.”
“Ah, but I have.”
“You have?”
“Of course. How could I not notice her snooping around every corner in Raleigh? She followed me there.”
My brow lifted in surprise. So Taylor had managed to find a lead on Fox without me or Holly to spur her on. I wondered if she was still working under the table and ignoring her superior’s orders, or if Lucado had suddenly changed her mind about Taylor’s suspension.
“Come to Raleigh with me,” Fox offered, as if he was proposing a romantic, magical getaway rather than forcing me to engage in illegal activities again. “You can take care of my little CIA problem for me, and then we’ll watch the sunset and take a historical tour of the city. I know how you like those things.”
“How do you expect me to take care of Taylor?”
“My sweet girl,” he simpered, stepping down from the freezer to approach me once again. A shiver radiated through my chest as his cold fingers grazed my cheek. “Don’t sell yourself short. If there was one thing I learned about you all those years ago, it was that you were always an accomplished liar, so sweet and charismatic that no one dared to question the words you insisted were the truth. I need that again now.” He toyed with a strand of my hair before tucking it behind my ear. “Track down the CIA agent. I’ve already laid a trail of receipts away from Raleigh and Belle Dame. All you have to do is show them to her. She’ll be across the country in no time, chasing a ghost, while you and I build an empire right here at home.”
“You want me to feed false information to a highly-trained CIA operative?” I scoffed and dodged his probing fingers. “What happens when she reaches the end of the line and realizes that she’s been duped?”
“By that time, she’ll have already reported the rest of it to her superiors,” Fox explained. “And we can dispatch her before she leads them back to us.”
“Dispatch her.”
“One must make sacrifices to get ahead,” he said, and the remote appeared once more from his jacket pocket to taunt me. “Or did you not learn that in your quest to return your sister to safety?”
It seemed impossible that a small square of plastic could incite so much fear within me. It rose like bile in the back of my throat, but I swallowed it down again. “If I do this, if I go with you and trick the operative, you’ll leave my family alone? You’ll deactivate whatever explosives you have lying around?”
Fox extracted a phone from his tightly-fitted jeans and offered it to me. “I’ll even let you call your little cop friend so that she can ring the bomb squad. How’s that sound?”
I stared at the phone, contemplating my options. “They can’t know.”
“Pardon?”
I looked my aggressor square in the eye. “Holly, Mac, Autumn. Anyone in Belle Dame. They can’t know I’ve agreed to work with you again. Ever.”
“As you wish.”
I shivered, even though the barn was warm with the summer wind. Fox shrugged off his jacket and draped it around my shoulders. It smelled of elderflower and toffee, a sickly sweet combination. He had left the remote in the pocket, a small token of faith. I closed my hand around it, careful not to jostle the buttons, as Fox led me through the small side door of the garage. The party at the house wore on, laughter and music and content conversation emanating from the open windows, but the warm comforting lights that spilled across the lawn did not illuminate our shadowy route. We climbed over the wooden fence that separated the pastures from the backyard and started across the wide expanse of grass and hay. I followed Fox’s lead, unsurprised by his knowledge of Bill and Emily’s property. He’d been watching us for weeks—ever since Holly got out of the hospital, I’d bet—waiting for the perfect time to do this.
Acres away, a sleek silver sedan was parked on the dirt road at the backside of the Millers’ land. Fox opened the passenger door and locked me in before getting in on the driver’s side. The car purred to life without a key. When Fox punched an address into the GPS, it pulled off of the grass on its own.
“Self-driving car,” Fox said with a grin as he fiddled with the air conditioning settings. The car accelerated, zooming up the hill toward the county line. “Nice, isn’t it?”
“Give me the phone,” I said. “You promised that I could call Mac to warn her about the explosives.”
“Baby,” Fox cooed, caressing my outstretched palm rather than handing over what I’d aske
d for. “Did you really think I’d wired your house to explode? I’m not a savage. Besides, explosions in a small town are messy. I’m trying to stay under the radar, and that would not be ideal.”
I closed my eyes in disbelief. The remote was a prop. He’d used it to manipulate me into agreeing to go with him, and I’d fallen for it. I found the handle on the door of the car. It would be so easy to pull it open, to roll out of the sedan and run back to my family. But I could never outrun Fox.
He leaned across me to pull my fingers away from the door and press them to his lips instead. “Don’t try it, Brigitte. Make no mistake. If you don’t perform what is asked of you, I will kill your family.”
I snapped. In a flash, I seized his fingers and bent them backward, threatening to tear them off. Lunging across the center console, I took him by the throat. With his head pressed to the window, his perfect hair off-kilter, and my knee pinned to his groin in the driver’s seat, it was the first time I’d ever seen a glint of hesitation in his pretty blue eyes.
“You shouldn’t be mistaken either,” I snarled in his face. “I’m not the same girl you picked up in Paris three years ago. I’ll play your game. I’ll go along with your insanity. I’ll even throw Taylor off your tracks for you. But I will not sleep with you, and you will not touch me. If you so much as try, I’ll break off the part of you that you think is most important. Is that understood?”
To drive my point home, I leaned into my knee. He groaned in discomfort.
“Fine,” he spat, shaking his head free and pushing me into the passenger seat again. “Have it your way, but when we arrive in Raleigh, I would sleep with your eyes open.”
I glared at him as I buckled my seatbelt and propped my feet up on the dashboard. “Don’t threaten me. You just admitted that you need me. You’re the one that needs to lock your door at night. I killed you once, Fox. I’m not afraid to try it again.”
He didn’t have a reply at the ready, which was a new experience for me. It was not customary for him to be struck silent, but all he did was smooth his hair out in the mirror, adjust his seat to recline back, and close his eyes. When his breathing evened out, I knew better than to think he was asleep, so I turned on the radio and settled in for the long drive to Raleigh, wondering how all of this would play out.
Little Girl Lost [Book 2] Page 12
