Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
STORM
I thought I knew what rage was. After losing my parents, hating Lakeland, and dedicating the last near decade to the pursuit of revenge, I thought I understood what it felt like to suffer loss.
I was wrong.
Because with every happy movement the tiny bodies in front of me make, I find myself slipping into a space so damn incandescent with rage, I find it hard to breathe.
These are my children.
My children, with my eyes. My mother’s eyes.
And I didn’t know they existed until twenty-four hours ago.
The injustice of this fact makes me lose sense, lose empathy. All I know is someone is going to pay for this.
“Tempest, don’t!” My son’s clear voice rings out, hitting me squarely in the chest as they come closer.
I lean against a low railing, blending in with the dwindling crowd as six of the ten guards I brought with me to France silently escort patrons out of the Orangerie. I hadn’t planned on confronting Shae if it turned out the twins weren’t mine, but I prepared as if I already knew the outcome.
Which, in my soul, I did. Because I know Shae Olivya Rivers.
Tempest—God, that’s my daughter’s name—runs after a butterfly, reaching for it as it flutters in the air.
“Tems, stop! You’re gonna hurt it!” my son shouts, pulling at his sister’s arm.
“Don’t be a baby, Raiden. I just want to see it!” Tempest says in rebuttal.
Raiden. His name is Raiden.
Raiden’s face scrunches up, and I can tell he’s agitated. He looks just like me when I was his age.
But when he goes to push his sister down, I step forward.
“Hold on,” I reply, keeping my tone low. I’m surprised my voice doesn’t crack with the force of my emotions.
I feel like I’m cracking inside.
Both kids stop, each giving me a different expression. Tempest looks ready to fight, wary, which is good because I’m a strange man coming up to them without their mother.
Raiden, however, looks at me with a slightly awed expression.
His eyes bore into mine.
The butterfly floats higher, closer to me, and I manage to catch it in the air.
“Ooh, you caught it!” Tempest replies, and I shift my hold to pinch the body between my index and middle fingers.
“Raiden? Tempest?” Hearing Shae’s voice sends a bolt of anger through my chest for the first time, and it flashes hot like lightning.
Crouching to match their height, I say, “This won’t hurt the butterfly if I hold him like this.” I direct this to Raiden, who looks from me to the butterfly, then to his sister, and back again.
“Do you want the butterfly?” I ask Tempest, and she still gives me a suspicious look.
“Raiden! Tempest!” Panic laces Shae’s tone, and a sick part of me feels happy about it. She should be panicked. She should worry about what I’ll do because she kept my children from me.
You have no right to be angry about this, Storm.
I shake the thought away, grounding myself in my fury. Because on the other side of it is a grief so potent, I’m not sure I can survive it.
“My mommy says not to talk to strangers. Let’s go, Raiden,” she announces, grabbing her brother’s arm. But he doesn’t budge, still looking at me as if he recognizes me.
I hear Shae moving around, her words indistinguishable over the sound of shuffling feet as the crowd reduces to nothing at my guards’ directions.
“Can you let him go?” Raiden asks in his soft voice. As he peers into my soul, I release the butterfly to freedom.
Raiden’s face splits into a grin.
“Mommy, over here!” Raiden shouts.
My brain shuts down, and I freeze, trying to figure out how I feel and what I want to do about this miracle and tragedy.
The miracle? Shae and I made children together. We made them out of deep love, deep connection.
The tragedy? The circumstances in our worlds that have brought us to this moment: me kneeling in a garden in France, meeting my kids for the first time, seven years after their birth.
God, I don’t even know their fucking birthdays.
I don’t see Shae approach, but I hear her pained gasp. I count the heartbeats—one, two, three—before I stop looking at my babies’ faces and turn toward their mother.
Fuck her for looking so beautiful. Angelic. With sunlight spilling through the walls of windows, Shae looks encased in gold, soft. But her expression? It’s nothing but pure fire.
“Tempest! Raiden! Get over here now, ” she says through gritted teeth. Her hands begin to shake, the fine tremor visible when she pushes her hair away from her face. A few of the straightened strands stick to her lip gloss.
The twins move toward their mother, and the feeling of a physical tether being stretched between them and me causes me to stand.
“Shae.”
That’s all I say. Just her name, just an accusation of all that’s been lost over the last eight years.
“Mommy, do you know this man?” Tempest says, now tucked into one of her hips. Raiden takes up the other side, his eyes not leaving mine.
Yennifer comes around the bend.
“Where the hell are the guards?” she snips, not looking at us and ostensibly searching for the guards who now lie incapacitated near the back corner.
They’re only knocked out and not dead because I can be merciful…
but how they let the children get close enough to me and allowed my guys to clear out the Orangerie speaks to their utter incompetence.
Yennifer makes a loud choking sound, followed by a short, hacking cough.
“Oh, shit. Shit. Um, hey, Storm,” Yennifer says, tripping over her words. “Imagine seeing you here.”
She rocks back and forth on her feet, and the sound of her heels clicking on the stone floor echoes now that the Orangerie is empty of all other patrons.
My head of security walks over to me, informing me that the area is secure. I don’t move my focus off Shae.
“Mommy?” Tempest asks again, and when I open my mouth to speak, Shae cuts me off.
“Yes! Sweetheart, this is a-an old fr-friend of Mommy’s. Imagine seeing him here in Versailles! What a coincidence ,” she says, adding the last sentence through a tight smile.
“Shae,” I repeat, broadening my stance. “Come here.”
The room goes quiet, and Yennifer makes a small squeaking sound. Shae doesn’t respond to my demand except to pull our kids closer to her body.
“Excuse me?” she hisses. Raiden’s happy expression turns worried at Shae’s tone, and he looks up to her, then back to me. He presses deeper into her side.
No, son. You don’t need to be afraid of me.
“Shae,” I grind out, and she takes another step back.
“No,” she presses, searching for her guards.
“They’re tied up,” I say, not lying. They are tied up. A door closes at the back of the structure, and I know that’s my men dragging the useless security into a van.
“Storm—” she chokes.
“Hey, let’s not do this in front of—” Yennifer starts.
“Shae, we can talk here, where…” I take a deep breath, feeling my chest burn. “Where Tempest and Raiden can finish exploring while you and I begin to clear some stuff up. Or the four of us can go back to the hotel and speak there. You have a choice.”
Although I shouldn’t be giving her any choices. Not after she stole seven years of my kids’ lives from me.
“Jean-Claude? Marcel?” Shae yells for her guards, and Yennifer cranes her neck to look around, too. Then, putting a hand on Shae’s arm, Yennifer whispers something in Shae’s ear. Straightening, Shae’s face twists before settling into a strained smile. Her hold tightens on our kids’ shoulders.
“Okay,” she smiles brightly, even though it’s clearly forced. “You said the four of us. Yenn comes, too. We’d welcome a ride back to the hotel. Right, kids? Ready to get that pain au chocolat, Tems?”
“Ooh, chocolate!” Tempest shouts, jumping up and down. Shae smiles at our daughter, her expression transforming into one of pure love. My heart squeezes again.
But then she looks back at me, and her face morphs into a near-feral expression of a mother protecting her offspring.
I hold out an arm in the direction of the forward exit.
“After you all,” I say graciously.
Wordlessly, our group makes it to the chartered Mercedes van, piles inside, and rides back to the hotel in tense silence. The entire drive, I move my attention between the kids who stare out the window at the scenery and the side of Shae’s face.
Shae sits in the middle of the first passenger row, and her focus doesn’t stray from the windshield.
Entering Maison des Rêves, I escort Shae to her Presidential suite while my guards disperse around their posts within the hotel. She’ll have two on her floor tonight, too.
The kids are quiet when they enter their room, Yennifer following behind them after giving me and Shae a bewildered look.
The door closes, and Shae and I stare at each other. She folds her arms over her chest in a defensive pose, and I stand taller, calling on my mother’s spirit not to explode everywhere.
“Storm…why are you here?” she asks, drawing out each word as if they’re hard for her to compose.
I want to laugh. I want to shout.
I want to cry.
“Why am I here? Well, let me tell you, Sweetness,” I rasp.
“A little over twenty-four hours ago, after pressing you to a wall and making you come on my fingers, I learned that despite having ample opportunity at least in the last forty-eight hours, if not the last eight fucking years , you’ve neglected to tell me we have children together. ”
I huff, my heart racing as energy flows through my blood. Shae’s eyelashes flutter, and she makes small, choked sounds before she finds her words.
“What are you talking about? I told you I was pregnant. You never showed!” She starts to raise her voice, but with a look back at the closed door, she moderates her tone.
I shake my head so hard my teeth clack together.
“Negative. You never told me the words, ‘Storm, I’m pregnant.’ Those words never came out of your mouth.”
“How could I? I couldn’t reach you, you asshole!” she snarls. “I tried my best.”
“Did you?” I spit, and she takes a half-step backward, her eyes turning to slits and her hand flying to her chest.
“Yes, you fucking bastard ,” she hisses.
“No, that’s what you’ve made my children .”
I should have expected her slap; still, it catches me off guard, and I react on instinct.
I pin her to the wall next to the door faster than she can gasp, her wrists grasped in my right hand above her head.
This close to her, I feel her heart racing and the way her chest rises and falls with short breaths.
“You will not hit me again, Shae,” I grind out. “Thank you for confirming they’re my kids. At least you can be honest about that.”
“They look just like you,” she whispers. “I couldn’t deny that even if I wanted.”
“And you wanted to, didn’t you, Shae?” I say, my voice just as low.
She doesn’t answer.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” I rasp, collaring my free hand around her neck. The blood flow through her carotid beats hard against my fingers. I want her to feel it—to understand this ache, this burn that’s hollowed me out from the inside.
I want her to feel some of this pain, instead of her righteous fucking anger, because I am in agony.
Grieving.
“You’re going to go back into that suite and you’re going to smile.
Eat dinner inside and laugh. Then, you’ll put our babies to sleep.
For each kiss you place on their cheeks, you’ll give them one from me, too.
Then, you’ll go to my suite one floor below you, so you can explain yourself.
Then, I’ll decide what I’m going to do about this. ”
Her eyes flash. “What are you going to do? If you try to hurt them?—”
“I’ll never hurt my children,” I snap, my fingers flexing. Her eyes slide closed, and a beautiful tear rolls down her cheek.
“I’ve heard that before. That you won’t hurt someone, and you do it anyway,” she chokes out.
I go still, silent. She’s right. She’s so damn right, but I never could have expected this.
“You have until ten p.m. to arrive at my door, or I’m coming to get you. Then you can explain to our children why I’m dragging you out of the suite in the middle of the night.”
I would never, but I don’t want her thinking there’s any room for disobedience here.
I’m too on edge to give her much grace.
Her eyes widen, seeing the truth in my words, and without saying anything else, she nods.
“Good girl,” I mutter, releasing her neck with a slow slide down her chest.
“Ten p.m.,” I say again and turn on my heel.
I don’t watch her enter her suite, and I take sick satisfaction when the door closes with a muted click , rather than a resounding slam .