“Step brother.”
“No, Harlow. There's something I never thought to tell you but the way you're acting is out of control.”
“What? How am I out of control?” Whenever I wasn't doing just what she told me, somehow that translated into me being unruly.
“You think you understand the world and know better than your own parents.”
“Stop saying that. Your husband is not my father.”
“Yes. He is.”
“One signature on a piece of paper doesn't make a family,” I stated, paraphrasing exactly what Cole had said in trying to convince me.
“Sometimes it does,” she snapped with a look of pure contempt.
“What's this? I don't need to see your marriage certificate.” She pushed a sheet of ancient paper across the table.
“Just read it.”
“This is DNA test certificate.” The paper is old, the ink of the type fading. “Baby boy, blood type A. Baby girl blood type O. DNA match. Relationship – direct siblings. I don't understand.”
“Baby boy is your Cole.”
“How? I'm an only child. I don’t have an older brother.”
“You do. Cole is your real blood brother. Michael and I knew each other long ago. We had an affair then we separated shortly after you were born and I stayed with your father a little longer. When I told Michael I'd had his child, he demanded I get a test done. So you see, now that your father and I found each other again, we're a real family.”
“No.” I screamed so that the tables around us turned to stare. “You’re lying. I don't believe you.”
“Excuse me young lady, I am not a liar. Why would I lie about something so important?”
“Because you -” I couldn't finish my sentence.
Why was she lying me? Had Michael gotten to her so deeply that she'd sell out her only child to keep him? I didn't want her to see any tears rising in my eyes. Because if she was telling the truth, it was an even more heinous crisis.
“I have to go. I'm sorry mom but I can't come to your house, not now, perhaps not ever. Right now, I have to get out of here.” I threw down money on the table, more than enough for breakfast and her cab fare home. And then I ran out of the diner smack into my brother's security hood loitering on the sidewalk beside his car.
“Argh,” he howled, more shocked and humiliated than really in pain from the swift kick to the shin I landed on him. I was down the street, around the corner and into Lily's apartment before he gathered himself to give pursuit.
Lily had already showered and left to go to her job. She must have the strength of a bull or else a vaguely normal and functioning family that didn't keep dumping her with piles upon piles of emotional garbage.
I threw myself onto her bed and passed out from total exhaustion. I knew that when I woke up I was going to have a whole ton of heartache and worse to deal with, but right then I couldn't have kept my eyes open for anything. I needed to rest up for what was coming tonight and I had to be out of Lil's apartment before she got back. Because when she found out what I was planning, she was bound to insist on coming along. This time I had to go it alone without a sidekick.
Chapter SEVEN
Cole
“She kicked you? Are you fucking kidding me, you pussy? That little girl kicked you and that's your excuse for letting her get away?”
“She had those brick platform shoes they're all wearing now. Women can't walk now but they can take a man down. And these ones had studs,” Bronson squeals.
Strike flicks his head sideways towards the door, indicating to Bronson that he should take that exit before I totally lost it.
“The guy had been up all night. She surprised him with her sudden aggression.”
Strike and I cracked into whaling laughter at the image of Harley booting a personal security guy.
“You're going soft in your old age, Strikey.” I growl.
But he's right and I am being an asshole again. Stressing about Harley sends me over the edge every single time.
“She's safe. She's at the friend's apartment, no doubt sleeping off the effects of too many cocktails. No one's taken her.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay, I get it. I'm being like a paranoid over-protective mother goose.”
“I believe the analogy is Mother Hen but yeah you're stressing too much and you need your focus for tonight.”
I could only go through with this if Harlow never finds out. I can still see the word curling from her soft sweet lips – Killer. She hates what I've turned into, she said. She has no idea who I was or what I'd become but she knew she didn't like it. Could I blame her?
Sometimes I wondered what I'd turned into myself. None of that matters now. My personal mission is to keep her safe and away from him. I would die rather than let anything happen to her. Maybe if it all goes south tonight, I'd see that come to be.
I have to get in the zone before we go out. It's like a meditative state, going out to a job. I can't be distracted by the smallest speck on the horizon. Strike knows this and his task is to make sure I get to that zone and stay there.
The muddy construction site in Brooklyn has three towers going up. One is almost complete, another is a shell but the cement structure is poured. It's a good work out for the quads walking up to the seventeenth floor with Strike panting all the way behind me. From there we have the view I need of the drop that will happen in the unfinished parking lot of the opposite tower.
The envelope of dollar has already been left and the Senator and his men are watching from the rooftop of a building on the other side of the construction fence. They're keen to ensure that they get value for money. That the blackmailer shows up and mostly, that I take him out. But they're not keen to be discovered in the zone. Two thousand yards – he's still well within range.
A tiny green light blinks in a window opening of the third building. A door slides open and a figure steps out onto the concrete terrace. No one else will have noticed. The building is empty still and there are no lights on. You'd have to have been looking for it and Strike and I were, eyes peeled like bald oranges.
Everything's in place and in a few minutes this fucking nightmare will be over. We can get back to our normal crazy business and I can focus on the one thing that's got me waking up at dawn every morning ready to pummel bricks. Until I get Harlow back nothing else matters.
My eyes are a pair of radar beams, scanning back and forth across the arc of my environment, avid on alert for the tiniest movement. If so much as a cat purrs or a twig is blown by a breeze, I wanna know about it. Except there are no cats and no green life in this mud-bath site. Makes it easier to see anything that moves but it reminds me of the desert and I really don't wanna be taken back there.
A truck pulls up along the service road and my old man gets out. The money was placed in position by a flunky over an hour ago and the senator's been waiting, unusually patient, since then. The air seems to prickle with shards of expectation.
I lift the finder to my eye and bear down on the tiny range of the target. From here on out my eyes and ears are Strike. I count silently in my mind, in time with the heartbeat pounding in my temples. He should exit the service elevator in three, two, one -
“He's out,” Strike murmurs.
We timed it out. Thirty five seconds to walk from the elevator to the drop point. Eleven seconds to bend and loosen the package from its place in an unboarded service channel. Despite what you see in the movies, a hundred grand makes a surprisingly small bundle. Not that there's real dollar in the parcel. But the equivalent amount of paper was packaged up just in case the old man smells a rat. Although he's hardly likely to smell anything foul when he's living each day with his own stench.
Ten seconds.
“Ooohh shit,” Strike maintains calm while dread rattles through his voice.
I steel every tendon in my arms, chest and all the way down my back. I'm an unstoppable machine at this stage. Unless Strike gives me the stand down, nothing's gonna to prevent
me going ahead with the shot. I pull the trigger as lovingly as I tug a woman's nipple. This Barrett has been sweeter than any woman I've known over the years.
The crack of the chamber exploding, a second shot. Then a third. What the fuck? Strike and me on the run. We've got more than ten fucking floors to get down. Too dangerous to use the elevator. Someone might see machinery moving or lights.
“Talk to me.” I'm already wrapping the baby back into her case as we exit the location, demanding to know what the man whose job is to be my eyes saw.
“The target was compromised. A mis-fire.”
“The shooter?” Was I going to be able to forgive myself this?
“Interrupted.”
“Interrupted by fucking who?” Who the hell could have discovered our plan, let alone known exactly what floor, what unit the second shooter was located in?
“Boss, stay calm.”
“Do I not appear as fucking calm as a bar load of crushed ice? Who?”
The police sirens converging on the building site are like a pack of screaming wolves. The high-pitched squeal echoes around the empty shell buildings and kinda shatters my brain. Our advantage is that we scouted the terrain thoroughly and can cross every clod of earth in the dark like a pair of rats. Meanwhile the law pull up in a swerving mess, barely avoiding a pile up and scuttle around trying to find something to point their guns at.
I've stashed the Barrett in its secret safe spot built into the cab of the truck and we're backing silently up the side road, securely outside the chain link fence surrounding the site. Then we roll past the metal storage unit, our lights out, the unmarked vehicle a gliding stealth bomber when I see the police pulling their shooter from the gray cement lobby.
“You asshole,” I grit out at the long-time spotter, always at my side.
“There was nothing you could have done to reach her in time.”
Strike drives, his eyes stoically fixed on the road but still taking in the scene of judicial carnage on the other side of the fence.
The only woman I've ever loved, will ever love, is being handcuffed, bent forward over the hood of the police cruiser. Her perfect body looks so tiny and vulnerable beside all the flabby beat cops it makes my breath hitch deep in my throat.
“We'll get her back, boss. It's what we do. We'll get her back.”
“This isn't some fucking hellhole country people have to search out on a map. We aren't a law unto ourselves here.”
“We'll get her back.”
Strikey knows a few things about me. If it's the last fucking thing I do on this earth, I'm gonna get her back and make all this shit right.
Chapter EIGHT
Harlow
There are things you never think could ever possibly happen to you, so you never plan for them in your mind. Being surrounded by what seem like hundreds of guns pointing at you, unsure because of the searchlights blinding your vision, voices from every side yelling at you to get on the ground. That's one of them.
My hands were in the air but it took a ton of physical effort to keep them there, they seemed to suddenly be as heavy as pair of solid lead pipes attached to my shoulders.
“On the ground. Get to the ground now.”
“I'm trying.” A tiny little voice called out deep inside my head.
Everything was moving so slowly. My body was like an astronaut's, refusing to conform to movement commands. My brain could not compute holding my hands in the air and dropping to the floor at the same time. I was trying to work it out. In the end, my knees buckled and I sank to the floor, barely registering the resounding crack of my knees on the solid concrete.
It's strange how when something goes out of control in your life, then suddenly three things get crazy, then everything is haywire all at once. Like a roller coaster cart. Once it starts rolling, there's no choice but to negotiate all the ripping pinnacles and precarious drops until it reaches the end.
I was pushed into the back of a cruiser, the top of my head shoved down brutally but I barely registered the pain. Every cell was gone from the present moment, refusing to believe this was happening to me. As we lurched away into the dark, surrounded by ten other screeching cars, only one thought occurred to me.
“Please let Cole be alive.”
Because if he wasn't I didn't care one jot what happened to me now. I went to the hit to keep him safe, not for my step father like I told myself. Cole was the only one I was terrified for. Without him in my world, I couldn't imagine how life would continue.
The only thing that prevented me from curling up in a ball like a cat was how brutally I was pushed around and yelled at. You'd have thought that a person would be treated like a human being, at least until they were proven to have done something terrible. But no.
It was as though my humanity had been eradicated the moment they discovered me beside the body. I was shoved around from here to there with more brutality than seemed necessary. Although I was no way allowed to lie down and rest for a second, inside I curled up, tiny and afraid as a solitary kitten.
But I couldn't give up. As the questions kept firing at me, I had to get my thoughts together and tell them something they needed to hear.
“What were you doing at an empty building site in the middle of the night?”
“I got a call to meet my father there.”
“A call from who?”
“I don't know.”
“”You don't know? Come along Ms Sanderson don't be coy. You're in a lot of trouble here. It will go better for you if you tell us.”
The heavy metal door to the cell swung back on its hinges with a clang, followed by a clack of expensive heeled-pumps across the bar floor.
“Okay, ladies and gentlemen, that will be enough of that. Haranguing the suspect without counsel present is in breach of Miranda as you are well aware. So I'll take the room and confer with my client if you don't mind.”
For an instant I thought Rowan had stormed the interrogation cell. Cole had sent her in on a mission to retrieve me. Same long aggressive stride, same tall, slender power and dominating presence. The voice was similar but this woman was somehow more effectively terrifying.
“She didn't request her lawyer.”
Even the detectives found her intimidating.
“Come, come. It's obvious the young woman is traumatized. The judge won't look kindly on you taking advantage of her when she just witnessed her father almost die at her feet.”
“The victim was her father?'
“Hmm. You guys get to checking your crime scene because right now you're lacking evidence. Just leave me the room.”
The three burly detectives shuttled resentfully from the cell.
“What have you told them so far?' The woman dropped to the chair opposite me, not bothering with introductions.
“Um, I don't remember, they kept going in circles.”
“They're trying to confuse you, catch you lying. Come on, think.”
“Just that I got a call to meet my father there at that construction site. Um, I couldn't remember who from. And I couldn't remember who else I'd seen.”
“Good girl. Not remembering is the only way to deal with this system.”
“Um, who are you? The public defender?'
“Good god no. Do you want to spend your entire life behind bars? I'm Michaela Wright, lead attorney to Mr Winter.”
“Cole's okay?” I whispered.
“Last I heard, when he got me out of bed at 5am. Sounding rather more irate than his usual zen attitude.” She smiled. “You must be very important to him.”
“Cole's okay.” I repeated like it was my personal mantra.
“Let's start to focus on you, shall we? What were you doing there anyways? Don't worry I'm not the cops, you can tell me anything under attorney client privilege. What happens in this cell stays in this cell.”
“Cole sent me an attorney.” He hadn't abandoned me. He must be okay.
“Harlow, I know you're in shock, you're demonstrating all the
signs but I need you to stay with me.”
“I had to warn Cole.”
“Warn Cole? Warn him about what?”
“They were setting him up. They want his club. They want him out.”
“Listen to me. The cops have your phone so they know you didn't receive any phone calls from someone telling you to come to the site. But you did see your mother yesterday.”
“How do you know that?”
“Your mother told you to meet your father there, that he needed your help and would explain everything.”
“But I can't get my mom into this, I don't want her to be in trouble.”
“Your mom helped your stepfather try to frame you for the kill.”
“Michael's dead?”
“Not even close. The police said he lay on the ground with a skin wound, playing dead so you'd take the blame for two homicides.”
“Rowan was there. Rowan shot Michael.”
“Rowan was not there. Only your father was there, hired to kill a State senator. The money was there in his pocket. The gun was there in his hand.”
“Rowan was going to kill Cole.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I heard her. I heard her talking to Michael on the phone.”
“Forget what you think you heard. Remember what I told you. And don't worry, even if this goes awry, Cole will get you out of here. He never loses, but then I never lose in court.”
Cole
The thought of that perfect pure angel in an infernal jail cell is blowing my goddam brains. When I saw those asshole cops manhandling her beautiful fragile body like she was some low life pig, Strike had to literally restrain me from leaping out of the truck to go get her. The chain link fence was scalable for me. I didn't even care that they'd have gunned me down faster than Prison Break. I made a promise no one was ever going to hurt Harley again and instead I had to sit helplessly and witness her slammed into a black and white because of my idiocy.
“What the fuck happened out there?”
Of course I take my rage out on Rowan. But then she can bear up to it. And her clients will be thrilled with her later, when she dispels her submission to me back onto them at maximum force.
Club ILLICIT 3: Billionaire Bonded Romance Page 4
