Maybe he knew Owen and Addy’s relationship was turning a corner this weekend. She was fully an adult. Not only that, but she’d graduated college. She was ready to take her place in the world and in his heart.
That had to be it. Owen supposed he’d feel the same way if he had a sister and knew what his friend was planning for her. It had to be hard letting go of Jax’s vision of her as a baby sister, switching it out for one of an adult.
For his part, Owen had been dreaming of this night since before her eighteenth birthday. Long years of torturous denial. His chest tightened as they walked into the house. She was there. He couldn’t see her, but he heard her voice, felt her joy filling the big place. His lungs stopped then jumped, shocking him as she stepped from the family room into the foyer. She only had eyes for him. And she was glowing, fucking alive with light.
He didn’t seem to have control of his faculties; he was just glad that Jax moved deeper into the house, leaving them alone. All he could do was drop his bag and open his arms. She ran into them, filling them, completing him. He lifted her off her feet as he straightened, his face buried in the crook of her shoulder.
“Now, Addy.” He leaned back to look at her. “From this moment forward, we are together, my Laidy.”
Laughter rippled throughout her body. Her eyes were shining. “I love you.”
A shiver passed through him. How long had he yearned to hear those words? And she said them now, here, at her family’s house, where he could do nothing about it but whisper, “I love you. Always have, always will.”
She caught his face as he set her on her feet. She pulled him close so they could kiss. She was his. All his. Only his. His mouth crushed hers. Her lips parted, opening for him.
He smiled as he leaned back to look at her. “My sweet Laidy, I’m so proud of you, graduating a year early.” It was as if she couldn’t wait to tackle the world and wrestle it into the beautiful vision she had for it. Seeing life through her eyes always gave him hope. “What are you going to do now?”
Her smile was slow and dirty and meant only for him. His eyes widened as he took her meaning even before she leaned forward to whisper against his lips, “You.”
His body surged to life, turning his dick to stone and robbing him of words. He grinned as he leaned forward to kiss her. “Soon.”
“When?” she asked.
“As soon as we can get through all the festivities.”
“There’s only one thing I want.”
His forehead was against hers. She had to be standing on tiptoes. “Then let’s go. Damn everything else.”
Jax cleared his throat, giving warning before leading his parents into the foyer.
Owen looked up, regretting his seconds with Addy were over already. Owen straightened and smiled at her, catching her hand, trying to play it cool by starting over. “Hi. I’ve missed you.”
Her laugh was like bells shivering. “I missed you, too.”
She separated from him to give her brother a hug. “Hi, Wendelly. I missed you, too.”
Jax returned the hug, giving Owen a black look over her shoulder. “Sure you did.”
“We aren’t going out tonight,” she said.
“No?” Jax frowned.
She reached for Owen’s hand. “No, I just want a quiet night here at home.”
Owen grinned at Jax, figuring he knew what that was code for.
Her dad didn’t look any happier than Jax when he shook hands with Owen. The senator wrapped an arm around Addy’s shoulders and led her back to the family room. She looked back at Owen, smiling, catching him checking out her ass and slim legs in her skintight jeans. Their eyes met for a flash, tightening the bond between them.
He was left in the huge foyer with Addy’s fuming older brother. Owen grinned, feeling like he was standing on top of the world.
Jax stepped into his path. “Maybe you need a cold shower before you go in there?”
Owen gave a quick shake of his head. “Nope. That’s not it. More like an entire night with your sister. I’m going to marry her, Jax. She’s my heart and holds my soul. And she loves me. Did you hear her?”
Jax didn’t look happy for them. What was his deal? Owen’s joy slowly dimmed. As it did, Jax turned and went into the family room ahead of him. Fuck the bastard. Owen had waited years for this day. So had Addy. They were going to be together tonight, her family be damned.
Addy had just turned off her light when she heard a small knock on her door. She never locked it because she wanted Troy to be able to come in if he had a bad dream. That was happening less and less often, which she hoped meant his spirit was healing from their time with Cecil. He’d seen the beatings she’d endured, though he was very young at the time. She’d tried to shield him from everything, but some stuff still got through. Like her illness. Like losing his older brother.
Troy would not have knocked. Wendell was gone. The butler would have announced himself directly after his knock. No. There was only one person on the other side of her double doors.
Owen.
Her heart jumped, and not in a good way. She fisted the covers she’d just pulled up over herself.
“Addy? Are you awake?” Owen quietly called through the door.
“No.”
“Come talk to me.”
“No.”
“Laidy. Please. We have so much to talk about.”
How she wished things, lots of things, were different. Most of all, she wished Owen was just Owen, the boy she’d grown up with, the man she’d fallen in love with. She knew that no matter what evidence she presented to the contrary, he would stick with his false persona, insisting he was just the boy who was so familiar to her.
But she knew differently…knew him for the monster he was, despite what Jax now claimed. The fact that Wendell had brought him here even made her doubt her brother’s innocence. It was hard to know where one evil ended and another began. Maybe it didn’t matter. She’d been working on a plan for her own disappearance—but that was something she couldn’t execute until she had Augie back.
“May I come in?” Owen asked from the hallway.
“No.”
“Then come out and talk to me. Answer my questions. Tell me what’s going on. After that, I’ll leave you alone.”
How she’d ached for Owen in the beginning, before learning what she did. Knowing he was out there was the only thing that helped her through the early years. She’d dreamed he’d find her. Then she’d dreamed he’d never find her. And finally, she’d learned everything that had happened to her had been at his command.
Even knowing that, some part of her still wanted him, wanted to pretend his truth had never been revealed to her.
She went over to her door, dragging the coverlet from the foot of her bed. She heard a sound against the door, as if Owen had slid down it to sit on the floor. She knelt on her side of the double door and held her hands to the wooden panels. All he had to do to invade her sanctuary was turn the knob and come in. That he didn’t just meant he was playing some game with her.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come for you,” he said. “Jesus, Laidy, I never even looked for you.”
Addy leaned her face against the same wooden panel as Owen. She closed her eyes, wishing she didn’t know what she did about him. You couldn’t walk back that kind of knowledge. For someone who was all-knowing, Owen should have accepted the fact that she knew who he was. They were well beyond innocence…so why did he keep pretending things were pretty much as they’d left them ten years ago? Did he think her a fool?
“I went to my grave,” she said. She didn’t bother speaking up, as she really didn’t care whether he heard her.
“God. I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”
“It was like I didn’t exist. Like I’d never existed.” It was laughable that she thought to make him feel guilt. Him, of all people.
“Addy, tell me about your toe. How is it that it could heal so quickly?”
Of course that w
as what he was most interested in…the experiments his people did on her. Had they sent anyone else from the Omni world, she would have had them physically removed without delay. “I have no idea.”
“Please come out and talk to me.”
She considered it. They would wake Troy if they continued talking through the closed door. She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and opened the half of the door that Owen wasn’t leaning against. She closed it behind her. He was not welcome in her room. He moved aside to lean against the far doorjamb, making room for her. Her feet and legs were covered by the blanket. She was glad it was too dark for him to see her very well, though the darkness wasn’t an issue for her. That was another of the changes she’d noticed about herself. Her vision was changing.
She tucked her knees up close to her body, then waited for him to make the next move.
“I hope that, one day, you’ll tell me everything that happened to you when we were apart.”
And that didn’t surprise her in the least. Of course, he’d had his minions report back to him on everything at the time. They probably still did. He’d been there for her initiation, coward that he was, dressed head to toe in a robe and hood. How arrogant was he to want to hear all of that again? Addy began to shake. She’d been wrong when she thought she could be his equal in manipulation. She never had been and she never would be. She wasn’t a psychopath.
“But until that time,” Owen continued, “perhaps we should focus on getting Augie back. What can you tell me about the circumstances surrounding his abduction?”
Addy tightened her hold on the blanket. Augie had been gone three years now. Three long years. It was her own fault they’d taken him. Her husband had used him as an incentive for her good behavior…and participation. But when she’d gotten pregnant a second time, she started to fight back. That had only made things worse.
Thinking of those dark days made her physically ill. “It’s my fault they took him. I wasn’t a fit mother.”
“What happened?”
“I can’t—I can’t talk about it.”
“I haven’t known you long as a mother, but the little I’ve seen tells me you’re a wonderful parent.” He paused. “It isn’t because you were unfit that they took our son away.”
“Yes, it is.”
Her fear, her fight, her resistance, her tears, her screaming, her bruises…all of those things had fed her bastard husband’s sick appetites. Even her threats against him had had their own reward for him. But her complete cessation of any sort of participation, no matter what, had cost her Augie.
At her continued silence, Owen reached for her hand, twining his fingers with hers. She should feel revulsion at his touch, but she didn’t. It felt like sunlight filling her, a warmth that seeped into her cold body from their joined hands. She pulled free. She knew who he was. What he was. He was no friend to her, nor had he ever been.
Her seven years of hell at the hands of her husband had brought other surprises. Allies she’d never expected to make. They’d tried to help her, though it was her own fear that kept her from accepting their assistance. They were enemies of her husband, incentivized by different objectives than he, but even they had confirmed what Cecil had been telling her: Tremaine is King.
That was why she’d never reached out to her brother. He and Owen were friends. Brothers, really. And since she already suspected her father was in collusion with the Omnis for the way he let them take her and keep her, having her husband’s jeers confirmed by his enemies reinforced her need to stay separate from her family.
It wasn’t until her husband had begun threatening Troy that she had reconnected with her brother. He said their father sent him. She doubted that, but better the enemy you know… Her brother had helped her. He’d negotiated her divorce and settlement. He’d gotten the bastard she’d married out of her life, but that didn’t mean he’d gotten her out of the Omni world.
Owen shifted, bringing her back to the present. “It wasn’t your fault.”
No, it wasn’t. It was his, but she wasn’t going to antagonize him by stating that. She had to play the game. She had to keep her emotions calm. “Where did they take him?” she asked, switching his focus from reliving her son’s abduction to what happened to him.
“They put him with a group of watchers that lived not far from my team’s headquarters. That group went missing, so I don’t know where they are now.”
Addy studied him. She doubted he’d had the same testing done on him that she had. Why would he? It was risky. She wasn’t yet certain she would survive it. Many of those in the clinical trials died. Her brother had told her that was why he was already looking for the prides; he didn’t want them to be Omni lab rats. He’d negotiated her ownership of this property because he wanted a location where he could build the barracks for the watchers and give them a safe place to be…and where he could observe them in case they had been subjected to the same experiments she’d undergone.
She’d survived what they’d done to her. So far. Though sometimes she wondered if hers would just be a slow death. For now, those tests meant some significant changes were occurring in her physiology. Some of the changes she appreciated. For instance, not only did she heal quickly, but her night vision was enhanced. That heightened capability now let her see Owen’s face clearly, even in the dark hallway where they sat. And what she saw was infuriating. He was so thorough in his acting, that even in the dark, when nothing was clear to normal eyes, the concern on his face looked genuine. It was all part of his act. He couldn’t sound genuinely concerned without his face reflecting the same emotion.
“You mentioned your team…what team is this?” she asked. She’d learned the hard way to tuck away little kernels of info for future use.
“Guys who were in my same unit in the Army. Some from my group, some from later groups.”
“The same unit that Wendell was in with you?”
“The same. That unit is shutting down. I’ve opened a private security company, and I’m hiring many of them as they separate from active duty. I’ve mentioned my cousin, Val Parker? He’s working for me now. As are a few dozen others.”
“I see. And what is it that your security company does?”
“A lot of things, most of which I can’t discuss. However, our main objective at the moment is to uncover—and destroy—the Omni infrastructure.”
Addy huffed a disbelieving laugh. “Why would you do that?”
“Because the Omnis are involved in international and domestic terrorism. We’re working with the FBI. We’re afraid they’re perfecting some sort of biological weapon. We’ve recovered one group of people on whom they were testing a new variant of smallpox.”
Addy lowered her gaze and held her silence. Did he think she was stupid? Or just so gullible that she would feast on his every word, believing his act, believing he wasn’t secretly leading the very group he was professing a desire to destroy?
“Do you remember a girl named Ace?” Owen asked.
Ace? Yes, she did. How could she forget her? Addy had heard they’d forced her to do terrible things too. She always wondered what had become of her.
“She works for me now.”
“I don’t remember her.”
“Don’t you? She shot a video of her preparing you for your initiation.”
Addy shut her eyes and swallowed hard. God. She’d said she turned it off. Had Owen seen that tape? She remembered begging Ace to help her get out. All she could think of at the time was finding her way back to Owen.
“Your brother was in the tunnels looking for you at that same time. He kept all of this from me until just recently. Ace was giving him the videos of the women she helped prepare, of other people and places she saw. He was collecting it all as evidence. He never got your video. Ace didn’t give it to him.”
“I asked her not to record me.”
“I saw that. For some reason, she didn’t turn it off. Jax said he never got the video.” Owen paused. “Addy—what h
appened that day?”
“You know what happened.”
“I know some of the ceremony. I’m not asking you to rehash that. Troy said you were married to Edwards.”
“Do you know him?”
“Yes.” Owen pointed to the bruises on his face. “He’s who did this to me and Jax.” He went silent for a bit. “How did you survive him?”
“I don’t know what that means, Owen. I don’t think I did survive him. I just lived longer than the hell he put me through. Shall we talk about it now? Do you want to hear all the terrible ways he tortured me? Do you enjoy that sort of thing? Is this some sort of an exit interview? Do you interrogate all the women who get out like I did?”
“Addy, I don’t understand. You behave as if I’m in charge of the Omnis.”
“Don’t act like you aren’t. I know the truth.”
“The truth according to whom?”
“The truth as corroborated by friends as well as enemies.”
As soon as those words were out of her mouth, she wished she could yank them back. She’d just revealed that she had secret allies. God, he was good at this fishing game. She was way out of her league. She should leave. Now, before even more of her secrets spilled out.
She stood. So did Owen. She reached for the door, but he grabbed her wrist. “Addy, are you safe here?”
“Safe? In what way?” Locked in this house through the invisible threads of fear? How could she go anywhere without both of her sons with her?
Forsaken Duty, The Red Team Series, Book 9 Page 7
