DRAGON SECURITY: Volume 2: The Complete 6 Books Series
Page 61
“It’ll be a while before the drugs leave your system. He apparently filled you up with ketamine.”
“Keta ... what?”
“It’s a tranquillizer. You’ll sleep well for the next couple of days.”
She laughed softly. “Well, it could be worse, I suppose.”
She had no idea. The drug in the hypodermic needle we found was a lethal combination of potassium and ketamine, a cocktail not unlike the stuff they used in lethal injections at prisons when they put someone to death. He was going to execute her with medication.
I sat back and kissed the palm of her hand.
“You’re safe now.”
“It was karma, you know.”
“Was it?”
“I was enjoying the luxury too much.”
I shook my head. “That’s not it.”
“Of course it is. Luxury is what ruined my family. Enjoying it is what nearly led to my death.”
“No. It was an asshole who was being blackmailed by some unknown killer.”
“Rosalie’s brother-in-law.”
“You knew him?”
“Never met him. But Rosalie showed me pictures once. I recognized him.”
I kissed the palm of her hand. “There’s something I should probably tell you.”
She peeked at me, that smile coming back. “You missed me?”
“Horribly. But that’s not it.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but I’d never know what she’d been about to say because the door opened in that moment and a man I’d never seen before strode in. Like the lawyer back in Coronado, this man was dressed very well, his suit screaming money. He was an older man in his early fifties, if I had to guess. But he still had all his hair and lacked a lot of wrinkles on his face. He was the kind of man who looked as though he was timeless, never aging.
“Who are you?” I asked.
He ignored me and came straight to the bed, resting a hand on Karma’s blanket covered knee.
“I saw on the news that you’d been kidnapped and I had to come right down.”
“Why?” Karma asked.
“Because we’re family!”
The man seemed utterly surprised that she would question him. Karma stared at him, just as surprised, but for other reasons. She seemed perplexed, unable to wrap her mind around the fact that he was even there.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded.
“This is Alexander Fuller,” Karma explained. “He’s my uncle.”
Once again, I knew the name. Alexander Fuller was a name that had become a daily utterance in my household, one of those names that was always said in a whisper and followed by the sign of the cross.
This was Randolph Myers-King’s illegitimate son and his sole heir.
The man smiled, clearly pleased by her words.
“I’m glad you think of me that way. I wasn’t sure what your response would be to my visit.”
“Yet you came.”
“I did. I’ve been trying to find you for many years. And then I turn on my television and there you are, though your name is not the same.”
“I changed it.”
“It fits you.”
Karma smiled, clearly pleased with his declaration.
They stared at each other for a long moment, as though assessing each other. And then Karma’s smile slowly began to fade.
“We did some awful things,” she said slowly. “Your businesses, the people who work for you—”
“That’s in the past,” Alexander assured her, resting his hand on her leg again. “When I became aware of who it was that was targeting all of RMK’s subsidiaries, I made restitution out of the trust fund I’d set aside for you and Rudolph ... do you call him Rudolph, or Randy? I believe I heard someone say he went by Randy.”
“He does.”
Alexander nodded. “Well, when Father made me his heir and gave me access to the family fortune, I insisted that trust funds be set aside for you and Randy. And when the thefts began and I realized it was the two of you, I made restitution with those funds and made sure the cops knew we didn’t wish to press charges.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. We’re family. If you’d simply come to me—”
“Mother tried.”
“Your mother sued Father. That wasn’t really the best way to go about things.”
Karma nodded. “I couldn’t agree more.”
Alexander seemed to beam with pleasure. “I’m so glad we’ve finally had a chance to meet. I’m sorry it’s under these circumstances—you are going to recover, yes?”
“I am.”
“Great. And where will you be making your home? I would love to offer you a job with RMK. It would be a low level job, starting out in the basics the same way I did. But you’d move up quickly if you’re anything like I think you are.”
Karma smiled even bigger. “I’d like that.”
“Good. Call my office on Monday and we’ll work out the details.” He bent close and kissed her forehead, basically shoving me out of the way. “And your trust fund is just waiting there for you.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“No. But I wanted to.”
He turned and left as suddenly as he’d appeared, leaving Karma watching after him like she was trying to decide if it was a hallucination or not. I took the card from her fingers that he’d given her and saw the figure written on the back before she did.
Oh, my God!
“I think you should get used to luxury.”
“Why do you say that?”
I held the card up where she could see it. On the back, Alexander had written the current balance of her trust fund. I thought Karma’s eyes might pop out of her head.
“There goes my news.”
“What was your news?”
“I was just going to tell you that my family has money, but it seems that you just came into more money than my mom, grandmother, aunts, and I have combined.”
Karma began to laugh, like I’d just told the funniest joke in the world. And, after a minute, I began to see the humor in the situation, too.
“Move in with me,” I whispered against her temple a few hours later as we reclined on the bed together, watching some stupid reality show on television.
“Okay.”
“Yeah? You’ll stay here in Houston with me?”
“I just got a job offer, didn’t I?”
I kissed the top of her head. “Or maybe I should be asking to move in with you. You could buy a house twice as nice as the one I have.”
“Yeah, but I’m not quite ready to live in that kind of luxury yet. You know, karma and all that.”
“How could I forget about karma?”
She leaned back and kissed me softly, her lips lingering against mine.
“I hope you never forget about me.”
Chapter 25
A month later
Karma
I had never really liked change. Every time there was change in my life, it usually wasn’t for the good. But the things that had been happening in my life recently were so incredible that I was afraid they would all come to a screeching halt. These changes ... they were beautiful.
I sat on the floor in the bedroom, a paint brush in my hand. He was out, something about a female CEO who was getting threatening messages from an ex-boyfriend. He didn’t know that I’d decided to paint this room alone.
Wouldn’t he be surprised when he came home and the white walls were now suddenly a pale blue?
I was just about done, just touching up the areas above the floorboards, when the phone rang. I struggled to my feet and crossed to the bedroom line, not bothering to look at the caller ID before I answered.
“Myers-Thomasson residence.”
There was silence for a long moment, then a woman’s voice said, “I’m sorry. I’m looking for my son. Kasey?”
“This is the right number.”
“Oh. I ... I didn’t know he had a new girlfriend.”
“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “Kasey tends to be a little private sometimes.”
“He’s ashamed of us. And I can’t say I blame him.”
“I don’t think shame is the word. Maybe overprotective.”
The woman on the other end of the line laughed at that thought. “Overprotective. That would be us, not him. If anything, he’d probably rather if we just disappeared from his life. We drive him ragged, the poor boy.”
“But he loves you. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t live a block away.”
“Perhaps.” His mother was quiet for a moment. And then she asked, “What’s your name?”
We talked for over an hour, getting to know each other and talking about Kasey. It was a mother’s job to spill the dirt on her son and I had to say that it was quite fascinating hearing stories about Kasey’s childhood. It made him seem vulnerable in a way I couldn’t quite describe. I liked it. I liked that it sort of brought him down to my level.
“Why don’t you come to dinner tonight?” she asked. “We could surprise Kasey and force him to come out of the closet on your relationship.”
I smiled. It sounded like a brilliant idea to me.
I arrived at the house a few minutes before the appointed time, a bottle of wine in hand. Mrs. Thomasson opened the door—call me Raina—greeting me with a warm hug and a smile.
“He’s on his way. I’d give him about fifteen minutes.”
She led the way inside the beautiful old house. It was a Victorian that had stood on this land for more than a hundred years. The ceilings were ornate, covered in lovely carvings, the floors the original pine. The rooms were huge, spacious, the porches designed to allow as much air in as possible. It felt like stepping onto a working southern plantation as I moved through the rooms, like I’d slipped back in time to a different era, to a time when things were more congenial and less politically correct.
“You must be Karma,” an older woman, tall, with bright white hair and a sophisticated carriage, said to me from the center of the sitting room where she stood, leaning on a beautifully carve cane.
“Grandmother, this is indeed Karma. Karma, this is Kasey’s grandmother, Elizabeth Thomasson.”
“It’s an honor to meet you,” I said, smiling brightly as I approached her.
Elizabeth looked me over, her stance off-putting, as though she didn’t want to greet me properly until she’d fully assessed me. I felt like an unwanted guest, like a bug under a microscope when the scientist meant to look at a germ. I was convinced she wasn’t going to approve of me. But then the transformation came over her. She smiled widely and held out her hand, the grace in her movements unforgettable.
“It’s a joy to meet you,” she said.
And then the other two ladies of the house came bounding into the room, both old enough to be my grandmothers, but both bouncing around like they were toddler set free from the confines of their playpens. We were all great friends in a matter of moments, smiling and laughing, sharing my bottle of wine and wondering how Kasey would react when he arrived to find me there.
His reaction was not what I expected. He came through the front door, calling out to his mother.
“All right, I’m here! What’s the big emergency?”
When he saw me, he stopped for a moment and the room grew intensely silent. But then he held out his hand, lifted me to my feet, and kissed me ever so gently.
“Hello, darling,” he said softly against my lips.
His aunts applauded and his mother sighed. But it was his grandmother he looked to for her reaction.
“I guess we know now why you’ve been so happy,” she said. “Welcome to the family, Karma.”
And that was all there was to it.
***
“Are you sure you want this?” he asked me later.
“I want you.”
“But I come with all this baggage.”
“I don’t care.”
“They aren’t always as reasonable as they were tonight.”
“I don’t care.”
“They can be downright frustrating.”
“I don’t care.”
He brushed the hair out of my face. “They can be intrusive.”
“Kasey,” I said softly, “you are the one who doesn’t get it. You don’t believe in aliens or spirituality, but you accept my beliefs. You don’t care that my brother is a thieving asshole who likes to beat the shit out of me from time to time. You don’t care that my family is about as messed up as a family can get. And you don’t seem to mind that I was once a professional thief. So why should I care about your charming Southern family?”
“Charming? That’s a new word for it.”
I slid my hand along his jawline and pushed his hair back behind his ear.
“They are charming. And quaint. And they love you very, very much.”
“Maybe.”
“There’s no maybe about it. That’s why they’re so crazy when it comes to you, you know.”
“And what about you? How do you feel about me?”
I shrugged. “You’re okay.”
“Okay?”
He was shocked, surprise dancing in his eyes. But then he began to laugh as he lifted me up and threw me onto the bed we shared.
“I’ll show you okay.”
We wrestled a little there on the bed, and then he trapped me, his eyes filled with amusement that made them shine even in the dim light of night.
“I love you,” he said as he studied my face. “I don’t care about your past; I don’t care about your brother. All I care about is that every day when it’s time to come home, I look forward to seeing you. I look forward to going to bed beside you and waking up beside you. And I want to do it for the rest of my life.”
I touched his face, my fingers lingering on his jaw.
“I love you, too.”
He kissed me and, despite the fact that it was not the first time and it was far from being the last, it felt like both. This was the end of something for us, but it was also a beginning. And I was more than excited to see where it would take us.
Change wasn’t all that bad, really. It was actually kind of nice.
Chapter 26
Hayden
The nightmares ended when I was in high school. I thought I’d gotten past all past the memories and the insecurities and the pain of what had happened to my parents when I was a kid. But now they were back.
I hadn’t talked about it with anyone in a very long time. My grandmother wasn’t interested in talking about it. And we were a Southern family. We didn’t believe in therapy or anything like that. As a child, I was told to move on, to let the past go and look toward the future. But how do you do that when you were only six and you witnessed your parents dying?
I talked to Sam about it once. I told her the whole story, told her how I’d always felt as though I’d let them down, that I hadn’t done anything to stop it and I should have. I told her how I felt that that one failure had led to a series of failures throughout my life. And Sam understood.
But Sam was gone and I had no one left to talk to about these things.
And now the nightmares had come back. In them, I was six again, reliving the whole thing as if it were all happening again:
He was watching from behind the couch, watching his father whisper something in his mother’s ear as he held her close to him and ran his hand slowly down the length of her bare back. He couldn’t hear what his father said, but it must have been funny because his mother threw her head back, her long blonde hair flowing down her back, covering his hand, laughter flowing from her lips like music. They were beautiful, his parents. He found himsel
f wishing he was older so that he could go to the play with them and dance with his mother like that.
The boy didn’t even realize what was happening at first. The beep of the door should have alerted him. It alerted his father. He had already pulled Mother behind him by the time the two men came around the corner.
“What are you doing in here?”
The men paused, clearly surprised to find them there. The boy recognized him. He was the creepy man who’d brought their bags to their room the day before.
“We came to check out what you left in the safe. It’s a pity you didn’t leave when you said you would.”
“Get out!”
The man just laughed. “We were hoping to find the nanny up here. Maybe the boy.” He gestured to his companion. “Willard here likes little boys. But I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see your missus still here. And all dressed up for me, too.”
The boy saw the panic on his mother’s face, on his father’s. He saw his father turn and whisper something to his mother that didn’t make her laugh. That made her whisper no in a voice that frightened the boy. Then he saw his father spin on his heel, but he hadn’t seen the man come up behind him. The bad man. And he had a gun.
The bad man hit the boy’s father over the head with the butt of the gun. The father fell hard to the floor, his eyes closed and blood seeping from his hair onto his forehead. His mother screamed as the bad man grabbed her arms and slammed her down onto the couch right in front of the boy.
She saw him, her eyes widening in fear. She nodded subtly, gesturing with her head toward the cupboard behind him that he’d played in yesterday, where he’d hidden during a riotous game of hide and seek the day before. His father had taken a long time to find him there. The boy thought it was hilarious that he’d fooled his father so easily.
He slipped in there then while the bad man ripped at his mother’s clothes, ruining her pretty new dress. The boy didn’t understand what was happening or the noises he was hearing, but he hid, his head buried against his knees.
He heard the bad man asking about him, about the boy. And he heard the lie leave his mother’s lips. She’d told him it was important to always tell the truth, so he didn’t understand. But he was afraid to call her out on it, to come out of the cupboard and prove her a liar.