Before I could say another word, he continued. “Don’t call the cops. I’ll know if you do. Just come here alone.”
“Fine.”
“And bring thirty thousand quid in cash with you.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said. Surely he was just drunk and this was all some kind of sick joke, because what he was saying was utterly absurd. “This isn’t a fucking Liam Neeson gangster movie, Roy, this is real life, and what you’re claiming to be doing is kidnapping for ransom. Besides, do you think I have thirty grand just sitting around?”
“You’ve got it in your bank account, I know that for sure.”
“Yeah, but I can’t just go to an ATM and withdraw that much. There’s a limit, you fucking idiot.”
“I don’t care. You’ll figure something out, I’m sure…if you want Rayna to be okay, that is. She looks like she’s got a nice little body under this stupid costume of hers. Anyway, you’ve got four hours.”
He was actually serious. The threat in his voice was clear, and before I could say anything else, he’d hung up. I stared into space for a moment as a horrifying sickness swirled around within me, knowing that this was all my fault. My shitty past had come back to haunt me, as it always did, and now Rayna could get hurt, all because of me.
I quickly dialed the number for the car service to come and get me again, and I told them if they hurried the hell up and got me home as quick as possible, there’d be a hefty tip in it for them. Fuck, I should’ve just driven tonight, so I’d be able to get to my car right away, but either way, it didn’t matter, because I needed to get back to the manor before I could try to get Rayna back anyway. There was only person I knew who had piles of cash as big as thirty grand sitting around in safes, and that was my father. I hated to ask him for help in a situation I’d created through my own stupidity, but this was a possible life or death situation, and I had no other choice.
I’d do anything to get Rayna back and hold her safe in my arms.
***
“Dad?”
I was sprinting down the hallway of the third floor, towards the western end where my father and Elena’s master bedroom was. I’d just arrived home, and while all the lights downstairs were off, I’d seen a yellow glow from the third floor, so I knew someone was home. I knocked on the door, and just was I was about to go ahead and open it, I heard low, panicked voices from inside. I guess I’d caught Elena and Dad doing the nasty, but I didn’t give a shit. Rayna was in trouble, so being forced to see my father caught with his pants down really didn’t register as anything too bad right now.
“Dad, I don’t care what you guys are doing, we need to talk, and it’s important,” I said before pushing the door open. I figured Elena being there would make this conversation even easier, because there was no way Dad could refuse to help Rayna with her mother lying right there.
Only the pale-skinned, dark-haired woman lying on the king-sized bed wasn’t Elena.
“Oh, shit. Seriously, Dad…again?” I said, narrowing my eyes as he struggled into a shirt and pants, guilt etched into his features.
Of course this wasn’t the first time he’d cheated on someone, but given his usual behavior around Elena and the way he’d made such a big deal about being a ‘good father and family man’ lately, I’d thought he might have been able to keep his dick to himself for once. But no, the lithe brunette lying on the bed was proof that he’d never change. He was still the same old lying, cheating asshole.
“Jace…outside!” he snapped, as if I was the one who’d done something wrong here.
I stalked from the room, knowing he would follow.
“What on earth is so important you had to disturb me with my…er…friend?” he asked, crossing his arms.
“Dad, I realize this will sound like total bullshit, but it’s not. It’s serious.”
“Well, out with it,” he said, waving his hand impatiently.
“Rayna’s been kidnapped.”
He stared at me with nothing but a blank expression on his face, and I repeated myself in case he simply hadn’t heard me properly. “Dad, Rayna’s been kidnapped!”
“Go on,” he said, still seemingly not understanding the seriousness of the situation.
“This drug-fucked guy I went to school with took her from the party we were at. She’s in a lot of trouble, and I need to help her.”
“Right,” he replied, affecting a bored tone. “What has all this got to do with me?”
I stared at him, unable to believe that he could be so callous. Although this was the side of him that I was far more used to seeing, I’d actually gotten used to the fake nice display that he’d been putting on for the benefit of everyone else recently.
“Are you kidding me? She’s your stepdaughter and she’s been kidnapped by some psycho guy, that’s what it has to do with you. Where the hell is Elena, anyway? We need to tell her!”
“She’s at dinner with some friends. I really don’t think she wants her evening ruined with your silly little shenanigans, so please just go back to whatever party you were at and play your pranks on someone else,” he said, looking at my Halloween costume with disdain.
“These aren’t ‘silly shenanigans’ or pranks; Rayna is seriously in trouble. The guy wants a load of cold hard cash, which I don’t have. He’s demanding thirty grand from me.”
He sneered at me. “How do I know this isn’t just money for one of your little dealer friends? You think I don’t know what you’ve been spending that trust fund of yours on for the last two years? Your mother and I do speak occasionally, you know.”
“It’s not that, I swear. I’ll pay you back; take it directly out of my trust fund account. I just need real cash now, that’s all.”
He rolled his eyes, still clearly not believing me. “Fine. We actually do have kidnapping insurance, but I don’t believe for a second that anything’s really happened to Rayna, so I’ll just take it out of my safe, and I’ll have my accountants withdraw it back out of your trust fund for myself later. So I’m getting that money back either way, no matter what you do with it tonight.”
My shoulders sagged with relief. “Okay. Thank you.”
He held up one hand, and a smirk crossed his face. “I have one condition.”
I’d agree to anything right now, even though he really shouldn’t have been putting conditions on saving the daughter of his brand new wife.
“What?”
He indicated towards the bedroom. “I need you to keep quiet about what you saw in there.”
I stared at him in shock. Was he fucking serious? Whether he believed it or not, Rayna’s life was seriously in danger, and all he cared about was not getting caught for his seedy little affair?
That’s when something finally hit me.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. That mistress of yours…it’s been going on for a while, hasn’t it? She’s Rayna’s ‘ghost’, isn’t she?
He chuckled, and the fact that he wasn’t fazed at all about being an absolute prick made me want to throttle him. “Yes. She was here with me that night and went to get a drink, then came back up the stairs and almost bumped into Rayna. She didn’t know who Rayna was, so she got scared and ran up to the fourth floor to hide for a while.”
“So you let Rayna be terrified and think she was either sleepwalking or losing her mind,” I said through gritted teeth. “You even told her she was just seeing things and lied about calling security. Way to go, Dad. And what about Elena? How did she fail to notice you had another fucking woman here in her house while she slept?”
“It’s not her house. It’s my house; she just lives in it with me. And she was away that night, at her friend’s B&B. I took the opportunity to have some…well, let’s just say some extracurricular fun.”
I shook my head. “How the fuck can you keep doing this to all these women? Elena doesn’t deserve this shit.”
He snorted. “Elena was nothing back in America. Now, because of me, she has everything a woman could ever want—m
oney, a big house, a name in the social circles. So what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”
“Fuck, whatever,” I said, my voice tinged with disgust. His attitude was appalling; he seriously believed that all women wanted was money and a mansion, and love wasn’t important at all. He was like a relic from some misogynistic film from the 1940’s. “I don’t want to hear any more of this bullshit. Just help me get Rayna back.”
“So you agree to keep this quiet?” he said, gesturing to the bedroom again.
“Sure,” I said with a curt nod, although I was lying through my teeth.
I was gonna tell Elena about all of this at the first opportunity, and I was also going to tell her how coldly Dad had acted upon hearing that Rayna was in trouble, whether he’d believed it or not. He wasn’t going to get away with screwing up another woman’s life, not this time. Elena didn’t deserve to fall for his bullshit. She’d given up so much for him—even moved halfway across the world to be here—and I wouldn’t let him stay married to her, knowing what a fucking scumbag he was. My father didn’t deserve any woman, really, but he especially didn’t deserve one as nice as her.
He briskly led me into one of his home offices and fiddled with a safe in the back, and a moment later, he handed me a briefcase. “Here,” he said. “I trust this will be enough. It’ll come out of your account first thing on Monday.”
“Thanks,” I muttered. Giving me what I needed to save Rayna was probably one of the only decent things he’d ever done, despite the bullshit ‘condition’ he’d put on it. Then again, thirty grand in cash wasn’t exactly a big deal to him—it was all in a day’s work to him, really.
I hopped into my car and took off, not even caring that I was slightly over the speed limit. Now that I’d had a few minutes to think things through, I knew I needed to do something more than just show up at the warehouse with the money. Roy was unstable, and I had no idea what could happen if it was just me there tonight.
As I drove, a new idea slowly formed in my head, and I pulled my phone out of my pocket before taking a deep breath and dialing as I hit a red light.
This call could make or break everything.
Chapter 17
Rayna
“Jace? Liana?” I mumbled.
I forced my eyes open, wondering why Tom’s house was suddenly so cold. What happened to all the party people, and why was the music off? My head felt sluggish, my eyes were blurry, and every inch of me ached as I turned my head and took a proper look around. Shit, this wasn’t Tom’s house, or even my house. I had no idea where I was, and no idea how I got here. None at all.
I forced my head upright, wanting to get a better look at my surroundings. I didn’t feel like I was lying down, so it was pretty safe to assume that I wasn’t in my bed, but I had no idea where that left me. So what was the last thing I could clearly remember?
The party at Tom’s house.
Talking to Liana.
My phone call with Mom.
Going to find Jace to tell him how I felt…
That was about it.
As I glanced around, I quickly realized I was in some sort of factory. It didn’t look like it had been used in quite some time; there were dust-coated workbenches, some rusty broken-down machinery to the left of me, and a ratty old sign nearly falling off a big corrugated sliding door ahead of me. Jeez….how the hell did I get here? Was this some sort of Halloween prank everyone had decided to play on me? If so, it wasn’t funny.
Small sparks of memory began to flash in my mind, but there was nothing solid I could run with. A taste of cinnamon. A Halloween monster mask. Stepping outside and breathing in the cool air before…before what?
As proper feeling started to return to my body, I noticed that my wrists were stinging, and as I tried to move them to find out what was wrong, it became abundantly clear that they were stuck. I twisted my body around and looked down to see that I was tied to a pole in the middle of the room I was in.
Who the hell would do this?
“Hey!” I called out, my voice weak as I tried to cling onto the desperate fantasy that this was all some sort of sick prank, and the perpetrators were right here filming me and laughing. “This isn’t funny!”
I started trying to move, kicking my legs out and pulling my back away from the pole in the hopes that the rope on my arms would break or come loose, but it achieved nothing. I was stuck. Then a shadow appeared in my peripheral vision, telling me that I definitely wasn’t alone, and my heart pounded painfully in my chest as I tried to turn my head further around to see who it was.
“I think it’s pretty funny,” a soft masculine voice said from somewhere in the darkness.
“What?” I managed to choke out as I gulped down my fear.
“You said it’s not funny. But I think it is.”
The speaker stepped out of the darkness and into the moonlight where I could finally get a good look at his face.
It was Roy, Jace’s friend.
I suddenly remembered our conversation at the party, the strong drink, and the promise of help when I started to feel sleepy, but after that, it was all blank. Roy must’ve slipped something in my drink to make me pass out. I thought back and realized I’d turned my back on him for a few seconds when he’d pointed across the room and said he could see Jace, and I mentally kicked myself for being such an idiot. I should’ve never kept my eyes off my drink; not even for a second. Then again, it hadn’t occurred to me that one of Jace’s old school friends might be some sort of date-rapist.
“Please don’t touch me,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper now. “I’ll do anything.”
He grinned. “Relax, sweetheart. Jace’s cast-offs aren’t exactly my cup of tea. I didn’t bring you here for any of that.”
“Then why am I here? Is this some sort of joke you and Jace are playing? Because it’s not funny, and you’re hurting me.”
“It’s no joke. Jace has something I need, and he hasn’t been willing to give it to me so far. So you’re going to help me get it from him. Just my luck I ran into you tonight.”
“Huh? What is it you need from Jace?” I asked, becoming increasingly convinced by the second that I was trapped in some sort of nightmare. Surely this wasn’t real. I felt like I was starring in some sort of early nineties slasher film.
“You’ll see,” Roy replied softly. He turned around for a second, and I saw him get something out of his pocket before sniffing loudly. I wasn’t exactly an expert on illicit substances, but I immediately knew what he was doing—he was snorting something, probably cocaine or speed. God, how the hell had I not put two and two together earlier? I’d thought he was just naturally skinny, and it hadn’t even occurred to me that he might be one of Jace’s old drug addict friends from school. No wonder he’d just been conveniently carrying around pills to slip in my drink to knock me out; he probably always had all kinds of things on him.
“Roy,” I said, hoping I could reason with him before he got too high on whatever it was he was currently snorting. “Let me go, and I’ll talk to Jace for you. Whatever he has that you want, I can help. Just untie me.”
He turned back to me. “Why? You think he’ll listen to you because you’re fucking him?” he spat out.
I winced at the ugly way he’d worded that sentence. “I’m not sleeping with Jace.”
“Bullshit. You know, you’re nothing to him, whether you’re his stepsister or not. He’s a fucking dickhead. He’ll fuck you and then toss you aside, just like he does with every single skank that jumps into bed with him. He’s a shitty person and a shitty friend. You might think that he’s there for you, but he isn’t. He only cares about himself.”
“I’m not sleeping with him,” I repeated. It was true; Jace and I had done other sexual things, but we’d never gone so far as full-on sex.
He smirked. “Actually, that makes sense. If you had fucked him already, he wouldn’t give a shit about you—he’d have already moved on to the next slut. So the fact that he’s on h
is way here to get you shows that he’s obviously still trying to get you into bed. Lucky you….but mark my words, when he’s done with you, it’ll be like you never existed to him.”
I felt a stinging pain in my heart as the darker parts of my mind wondered if that was even remotely true, but I didn’t let it show. “Okay, Roy, I get why you think that about him. I’ve heard all about his past. I have no idea what’s gone on between you and him, though, and I assure you, it has nothing to do with me.”
He rolled his eyes, and I pressed on.
“Please, you must be able to see that what you’re doing is crazy. If this spirals, you’ll get in so much trouble. You’ll end up in prison. Is that what you want?”
“That won’t happen. I told him not to involve the cops. And on the off chance something goes wrong, well, I guess that’s just fucking life. Not all of us are rich fuckers with daddies who can buy us out of trouble.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why don’t you ask your precious Jace when he gets here with my money?”
Of course…this was about money. Roy was obviously desperate for it to fuel his drug habit, so he’d taken me in the hopes that Jace would give him anything to rescue me. I hoped to god he was right about that.
“I thought Jace was your friend,” I said, trying to keep Roy talking for the time being.
That was probably a mistake, because he came right up in my face and practically screamed, spittle flying out of his mouth and hitting me on the cheeks. “Shut the fuck up! You don’t know shit, so stop talking!”
I swallowed hard and kept going, knowing I needed to push through this. “Then please enlighten me, because this all seems totally crazy to me.”
“Jace is a fucking bastard. That’s all you need to know.”
“No, it isn’t. I want to know what he did to you that was so bad. If I’m getting dragged into it all, then I deserve to know why. Tell me.”
“Okay, fine. You really want to know?”
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