Chapter Sixteen
AURELIA
Khalil hasn’t spoken a word to me since we left the sheriff’s office. I’m pretty sure it’s by design, choosing instead to silently fume the entire drive as we tailed the sheriff to the ranch. But there’s also a distracted pinch to his brow that tells me this isn’t about control.
He’s using the limited time we have until we reach the ranch to come up with a plan for how to keep me safe.
He also wants to throttle me, but he’ll have to get in line.
As soon as we left the station, Khalil had radioed up to the cabin to warn Thorin and Zeke where we were going. There was violence in Thorin’s tone when he signed off, and I still felt the tight grip of his fury twenty minutes later.
My nerves are shot by the time we reach the short gate blocking access to the paved driveway. The gate and the brown picket fence it’s attached to are both easily climbable, so I figure it was built by the previous owners more for the aesthetic than for security.
It would have been the first change my uncle would have ordered if I’d ever arrived—higher walls and armed guards because he doesn’t understand how to keep a low profile.
After a couple of months in hiding, he probably would have leaked the information himself to a few of his most loyal paps just to spark intrigue and keep me relevant.
The rustic house, which is bigger than I imagined, sits about a thousand feet away with rolling hills behind it and the Cold Peaks looming even farther away in the distance.
We wait for a few minutes while the sheriff speaks to someone over the call box.
A few seconds later, the gate slowly parts with a mechanical whir and we’re driving through.
My arm shoots out to grab Khalil’s hand that’s dangling over the cupholder, and he gives mine a squeeze in return that says he’s here.
He’s got me.
I didn’t expect him to comfort me since he’s clearly pissed at me for putting myself in this position, but I’m even more surprised that I doubted him. The first thing I fell in love with about Khalil is his unerring loyalty.
As we get closer to the house, more of the characteristics that were obscure when we first arrived become distinct.
What if my plane had never crashed, and I’d arrived here three months ago?
Once my resentment and anger at being exiled eventually faded, I would have found peace in the solitude.
I might have even come to enjoy the view.
I can almost imagine myself relaxing on the wraparound porch with my bare feet propped on the railing as I sip from a steaming cup of coffee and admire the beauty of the snowcapped mountains that belong in a painting.
Never once guessing that my destiny lay within those peaks.
After a few months away, once the world began to crave Aurelia George—flaws and all—my uncle would have shattered my peace and whisked me back home to give the people what they wanted. And I would have gone back never having known them. My mountain men.
But no, that’s not right either. Because if my uncle had his way, I never would have made it home at all. Rather than wait for the world to change their hearts, his plan all along had been to send the death squad after me and preserve what was left of my image and my legacy while he could.
I wonder how they would have done it.
Finnegan said they were supposed to make it look like an accident. As we inch toward the house, my gaze catches on the paddock not far away and the horses grazing inside it.
Crushed by a temperamental mare perhaps?
One thing was for certain, this house—as alluring as it may be—wasn’t my home.
It was my grave. My final resting place.
We’ve only been gone a few hours, but even now, my heart longed for the cabin and all of its simplicity.
Khalil and the sheriff park their trucks, but I don’t move and Khalil doesn’t kill the engine. I just stare straight ahead while Khalil waits silently, ready to drive us away if I give him even the smallest sign that I’m not ready to face my uncle.
After a few minutes, I sigh and the small sound from me is enough to break Khalil’s silence.
“We doing this, Goldilocks?” His glare is fixed on the house through the windshield as if he can see my uncle through the stone walls.
“Yes. I have to do this.”
He’s careful not to react and nods instead. “Okay.”
Khalil reaches under his seat and pulls out a handgun. He checks the clip before reaching behind him and shoving it in his waistband. He looks at me once he pulls his shirt over it and gives me a crooked smile once he finds me watching him. “Just in case.”
“We’re not killing my uncle, Khalil. At least not today.”
“No promises,” he says before he opens his doors and steps out.
I don’t wait for Khalil to come around and open my door because if I don’t get out of the truck now I never will, so I quickly unbuckle my belt and practically fly from the seat.
The sheriff steps out of his truck too, and none of us say a word as we make our way to the front door.
The luxury car parked outside is obviously a rental, but it has my uncle written all over it.
He always has to put on a show wherever we go.
The reminder that I was funding his lifestyle and all of these luxuries, and that I have done so half my life, fuels me up the stairs and onto the porch.
Khalil keeps his rigid body in front of mine, keeping me from view and harm like a shield that will never bend, break, or fold. My stomach turns knowing my uncle won’t miss it and will do everything in his power to test and batter my defenses.
The three of us reach the door, and the sheriff knocks.
Almost immediately, I hear footsteps approaching on the other side.
I can’t see thanks to the immovable wall of flesh and muscle in front of me, but judging by the voice, it’s a woman who answers the door.
She lets us inside after the sheriff asks for my uncle, and then we’re left alone in the foyer while the woman I assume is a housekeeper disappears into the house to fetch my uncle.
I take the time to look around.
There’s a formal dining room immediately to my left with a crystal chandelier above the long table that only makes me think of the antler one hanging above the table at home.
The one Khalil had carved with his bare, capable hands.
I huddle a little closer to his strong back and breathe in his cardamom scent with strong notes of mint.
The ceilings become higher the farther we travel inside the house until we reach the cavernous living room. I immediately drift over to the huge windows when I spot the mountains framed by the glass like a painting in a frame.
Unwilling to leave my side for even a moment, Khalil shadows me over to the window and stands close behind me, lending me his heat and his strength as he places his hands on my shoulders. I close my eyes and lean against him as he massages the tension in my muscles.
Just as I start to relax and center myself, my uncle’s voice penetrates the fog and I’m tense again.
“Ah, Sheriff,” Uncle Mars greets without an ounce of concern for why the sheriff called on him out of the blue.
It’s the voice of a man who’s used to having his will enforced.
Already, the crushing weight of his presence is heavy in the air, making it hard to breathe.
“I wasn’t expecting you. How can I help? ”
“Yes, well, we had an unexpected development regarding your niece that I thought you might want to know.”
Khalil’s hands tighten on my shoulders. Neither of us move from the window, but I doubt my uncle has missed our presence. Khalil is blocking me from view, but the massive man would be hard to miss by anyone, including someone as egocentric as Marston George.
“Is that right?” my uncle asks in a tone that doesn’t sound like someone concerned. Even in death, I’m still causing him problems. I don’t realize I’m smiling until I catch my fiendish grin in the reflection of the window. “Well, what have you found? Has her body been recovered?”
The sheriff stammers and stumbles for a response.
Meanwhile, I grab that powerful feeling of being a thorn in my uncle’s side by the reins and decide to harness it by stepping out from the protective shield of Khalil’s body.
Uncle Mar’s golden-brown skin becomes white as a sheet when he sees me.
We share the same complexion and are often mistaken for being biracial by people who don’t understand that Black folks come in fifty-’leven shades.
There have been many occasions—like forcing me to dye my hair blond—that my uncle has used our proximity to whiteness to get ahead, and his colorist views are just one of the many reasons I have to fight back the sneer that wants to take over my faux-calm expression.
While I’m fighting to not react at all, he blinks as if he can’t believe his eyes.
I’m sure I look like a stranger to him, but I’ve never felt more like me. My natural hair is longer, unkempt, and splitting at the ends. The gold in my curls that’s become my trademark has become dull and is receding by the day, giving way to the dark brown that I inherited from my mother.
I’m not dressed in one of those ridiculous costumes that he insists makes millions of girls across the globe want to be me while at the same time appearing desirable to men yet unapproachable.
Whatever that means.
My face is also clear of makeup, but it was never something he allowed me to overindulge in once our PR team caught wind of my natural beauty being praised in the media.
I don’t look like the superstar he created.
Instead, it’s just me. Daughter to Jamila and Logan George. Wolf. Songbird. The sun in Seth’s world. Goldilocks. Princess. Survivor.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Uncle Mars.” Fitting since I’m supposed to be dead.
“Aurelia?”
“In the flesh. Surprised?”
“I don’t understand,” he says after struggling to recover. The shock is fake. The horror that I’m alive and dared to show myself to him is very much real. “How is this possible?”