Chapter 34
I try to peel my eyes open, but my lids are heavy, and I need a few attempts. A groan escapes my lips. My mouth feels so dry that I could drink gallons of water in one go.
Slowly, my mind wakes up, and I remember what happened. I shoot upright, looking frantically around. I am in a small bed in a tiny, musty-smelling room. There’s a window on my right, but it’s too small for me to climb through. I must be in a basement because I need to look up to see the forest surrounding this place.
Felix got me. My friends. Patting my ear, I discover the comm is gone. I need to get out of here and help them. Panic seizes my lungs, and in my haste to get to the door, my feet catch on the fabric of the dress. I stumble, crashing to my knees just as the door swings open, revealing Felix—with Eric standing behind him.
“Hello, daughter.” Hearing his satisfied tone has me fisting my hands on the floor.
It takes everything in me not to tell him the truth.
Play this right . This is not the right moment to uncork my emotions.
Don’t antagonize him.
“I have waited for so long to have you with me.”
For a second, his words made it sound like he always wanted me with him and even cared about me. But Felix is incapable of loving anyone else but himself. Even if he believes I am his daughter, he has never been present in my life. He treated me like he treated all of us—like we were beneath him.
“Are my friends here too?” My tone sounds steady and controlled even though worry and hope battle for a prime spot inside me.
He huffs, his features tightening into a deadly expression. “Those traitors got away, but not for long. Once I get my hands on the Family’s money, they won’t be able to escape me again.”
“If you think I will help you, you’re mistaken,” I snarl.
“Don’t make me force you, Bailey. I can be the father you never had.”
I wished with all of me for my parents’ love, but Felix thinking he could manipulate me like that adds insult to injury. I need an escape plan or to get my hands on some kind of device and send my friends my location.
Felix takes another glance at me, his blue eyes—so similar to Kaden’s when they couldn’t be more different—gleaming. “I’ll let you acclimate for a bit.”
Once Felix leaves, Eric moves further into the room. “Now we can finally be together.”
“Stop being delusional,” I shout.
When he reaches me, I swing my arm back and propel my fist forward, punching him in his throat. “Always go for the eyes or neck.” Hunter drilled that in my head—it’s one thing I’ll never forget.
I stab a finger at him, my body trembling with fury. “Stay away from me.”
Eric stumbles back, coughing and clutching his neck. “You can’t keep me out forever. Once Felix gets what he wants, I will get what I want,” he croaks through a coughing spurt.
“What exactly is it that you want?” I ask, losing any semblance of calm.
“The world.”
I scoff. He’s the living embodiment of a cliché—a spoiled rich boy who did nothing to make it on his own.
“With you at my side, I’ll be unstoppable,” he adds, tone dripping with arrogance.
“Did you drug me?”
He smirks. “How else would I have gotten you here with your friends so close?”
“You knew,” I whisper, more to myself than him.
Love makes you reckless . I still wouldn’t change a thing. Whether I live or die, at least I got to experience that soul-deep, once-in-a-lifetime kind of love.
“He had the audacity to sneak into your room with me under the same roof. I’m going to enjoy killing him for touching what’s mine.”
I yank the engagement ring from my finger and throw it at his face. “I’ve never been and never will be yours.”
He storms toward the door but stops in his tracks, turning back to glare at me. “I’m the only one who truly cares about you here. Don’t make me hurt you.”
“Try it,” I challenge, my voice defiant.
Knowing my friends are okay is the only thing that brings me some peace.
But then Eric opens his mouth again and says, “He won’t survive for long.”
Once I am alone, I make a dash for the door. The handle turns, but it doesn’t open, trapping me inside. With no way of communicating with my friends, despair clouds my judgment, but I shake it off.
Think.
By making Felix believe that I’m working with him, I could send my friends my location. With that plan in mind, I speak through the door, “I am ready to cooperate.”
I count the minutes until I get a reaction. But after two that pass more like an eternity, the door opens, and the bulk of a man says with a thick accent, “Move.”
Not wanting him to put his meaty hands on me, I pass him by. I take the wooden stairs up, arriving at an open space that looks more like a scene from a fairy tale than a prison. The red cement blocks and hardwood floors fit perfectly with the large windows that give a fantastic view of the forest—a place far removed from civilization.
“Get going,” he says, pushing me.
I snarl at him as I follow another guard, who jerks his chin to the right.
“Hey. What’s going on?” Eric asks, coming from the kitchen. Good to know he can eat undisturbed. Fury is a poor description of what is transpiring inside of me. I’d like to shove that toast down his throat until he chokes on his last breath.
No one answers him as we keep walking, which gives me great gratification. Eric is just a pawn, but at least he’s not a complete moron, realizing that too. His entire body strains as he trails after us.
We arrive at an office where Felix sits at a mahogany desk in front of a laptop. A leather glove covers his right hand. It gives me tremendous satisfaction knowing the reason he wears it. Abi and Dane got the best revenge on him.
“I expected it would take more, but you were always the softest in the group,” he says with a tinge of displeasure.
I’ll show him how weak I am when I not only get the money back that he stole from us, but I’ll put up so many firewalls no one in this freaking world will get close enough.
“You should have gone through the initiation. That would have made you tougher. I should have killed that old bitch sooner, and then everything else could have been avoided.”
“Cassandra is the matriarch, as it should be, according to the firstborn right.”
At her name, a flicker of emotions passes through his eyes before they settle into a cold glint. “I’ll enjoy killing that whore next.”
“What will happen afterward, Father? Will you sail into the sunset with my mother?”
“She’s too desperate for my tastes. I got what I wanted from Rebecca.”
His eyes gleam as they settle on me. He’s so far up the ladder of his own self-importance that I can’t wait to knock him down. Soon, he’ll know my mother one-upped him by getting pregnant with his best friend’s baby. That betrayal will be the last thing he thinks about before he dies.
Felix stands and pours himself a glass of whiskey from the shelf in the corner. He should enjoy it—it will be his last. Then, he gestures to the chair in front of his laptop, eyeing me intently. “Don’t play games with me. I wish I’d known about your talent sooner. None of this would have happened.”
It’s clear what he truly longs for: control of the Family. Nothing compares to that kind of power, and he’s desperate to reclaim it.
With every step I take, tension thickens in the air. You couldn’t cut it with a butcher knife.
I sit in front of the computer, and Eric, completely misreading the room, says, “She won’t have to work anyway once she becomes my wife.”
I ignore him just as the rest of the room does.
I don’t have much time, and I need to hurry with Felix over my shoulder, watching like a hawk. He can’t even begin to keep up with how fast I type. Programs open and close rapidly, and within moments, I realize our stolen ten million is gone. Another twenty million more followed, surely funds from the Whitneys—Eric’s parents, but not much is left of that either.
No wonder he’s so desperate. All his accounts are frozen, and he’s in frantic need of more money. Glancing at the hired muscle around us, it’s clear they wouldn’t grant mercy once the money stops flowing.
I pull up the Family’s multiple accounts, showing him a balance of a hundred fifty billion. Felix stares at the sum with greedy eyes, rubbing his hands together in victory.
I open the next window, and a perfect mock transfer is being made to his offshore accounts.
It will take time for the supposed funds to “arrive.” Hopefully, he’ll be long dead by then and won’t realize it was a ruse.
While he gets on his phone, I reinforce the firewalls, ensuring no one can penetrate the system as I did. I am a fan of digitization, but there are hackers out there who are even better than me. It is my responsibility to protect the Family’s assets. No wonder the Family has kept a vault in the estate’s basement since its inception.
“Where is the hacker?” I ask.
Eric couldn’t have been the one behind that. He surely had help.
“I didn’t need him anymore,” Felix says matter-of-factly.
A shudder travels down my spine.
When no one seems to be watching me, I inch my fingers back on the keyboard. I just need a small ping.
Right when I am about to send the location, Eric appears by my side.
“Bad girl,” he tsks. “Good thing I caught you in time.”
“What?” Felix inquires, and I swallow my groan.
“She was about to send her friends our location.”
Felix stomps toward me, and then a slap sounds in the room. My head reels to the side, the force of the hit splitting my lip. I swallow the groan of pain, not wanting to give him any satisfaction. Only a weak man hits a woman to assert his fake power.
“Why are you being so unreasonable? See what you just did?” Eric says with a shake of his head.
Felix waves me off. “Take her with you. I don’t need her anymore.”
“What does that mean?” Eric asks as he drags me up by my elbow.
“She’s a traitor, just like the rest of them.”
“We had a deal.”
“And once I get my money, you can keep her. I am done with her.”
Not that I expected anything else.
“Everyone out,” Felix orders.
The guard shoves me away, but my luck must run out because Eric accompanies me back to the basement.
Once I am back in my cell, Hunter floods my thoughts. This will be my end once Felix realizes I didn’t transfer the money. But I’d rather die than give him the satisfaction of winning.
“I’m sorry, baby, but I refuse to believe this will be our end. Until we meet again,” I mouth, hoping the air will carry my message to Hunter.
I wish we’d had more time.
“Now you split your lip. You represent me. Learn to behave, Bailey,” Eric huffs.
I can’t even mourn in peace. Turning around, I spit. “Fuck you.”
He blinks at me as if my reaction is preposterous. “What did you just say to me?”
“Are you deaf? Fuck you.” I shout, letting all my frustration out. I’m done, reaching my breaking point.
He stalks over to me, but I throw an uppercut to his jaw. He stumbles back before hitting the ground—the sound is deeply gratifying, but he recovers quickly.
Crawling up, he watches me with pupils shifting from left to right, looking like a mad person. “I guess I have to teach you some manners.”
“Bring it on,” I challenge, pumped up to take this asshole down.
Lifting my arms in front of me and shifting from one foot to the other, I get some good punches and kicks in, but the cockroach always stands back up. In a moment of distraction, he catches me in a chokehold. I can’t allow myself to panic. Hunter didn’t spend hours training me just for me to black out. Remembering what he taught me for situations like this, I propel my elbow into Eric’s stomach and twist his arm back before slamming my knee into his balls.
Eric wails, holding his surely tiny penis.
“How is that possible?” he sputters.
“Hunter taught me.” I smirk. “And by the way, nothing you did kept us apart. Every night he was in my bed, fucking your fiancée.”
“You whore!”
“I prefer slut. That’s what Hunter calls me when he fucks me hard.”
Letting out a disgruntled sound, Eric lunges at me again. My calves hit the bed, and I fall back with him on top of me. His fingers dig into my arms so hard that a hiss escapes my lips.
“If you’re a whore, I’ll treat you like one,” he grunts.
But I won’t make it easy for him. Freeing one arm, I claw at his face, thrashing and hitting every opening I could find. It’s more than survival—I want him to regret ever thinking he could take something from me.
Despite my resistance, he still manages to unbuckle his pants while I squirm beneath him. My energy lowers with so much tossing around.
Then a loud bang cuts through the chaos, and we both whip our heads toward the door.
I blink a few times, struggling to compute whether my imagination has conjured Hunter or if he’s truly here. Taking advantage of Eric’s shock, I hit him one more time in the nose, freeing myself.
Hunter closes the distance between us in three swift steps. He yanks Eric from the bed and shoves him so hard into the wall that I hear a crack. The sound of bones snapping is unmistakable. I hope it’s his thick-headed skull.
“No one puts their hands on my woman and gets to live.” A feral growl thunders out of Hunter’s mouth before he slices Eric’s neck in a precise, elegant move. Rivulets of red coat Eric’s throat as his hands flail, trying to stop the bleeding. Eric slides down the wall, drowning in a pool of his own blood. As I watch the life drain from him, I feel a fleeting regret for his youth but nothing more. His choices led him to a premature death.
Hunter rushes to me. Cupping my face, he makes me look at him, taking in every inch of me—my sun brightening my world. Everything else vanishes from my mind.
Undiluted love mixes with pure terror in his gray eyes. “Are you hurt? In places I can’t see? Did he touch you?”
“No, to all of that.”
He expels a long sigh of relief as if he had been holding his breath, trapped, waiting for my answer.
“How did you find me so quickly?”
He inhales deeply before locking eyes with me. “I chipped you. I’m not sorry, Bailey, so please don’t be angry with me. I am crazy about you and turning even crazier at the thought of something happening to you.”
Fully understanding his reasoning, the corners of my mouth arch into a teasing smile. “I’m sure it was on one of the multiple occasions when you fucked me into a near coma.”
He grins, pride etched in his eyes. “Nope, before we got together. I’ve loved you for far longer than I wanted to admit. Needed to protect you and keep you safe by any means, knowing I could not bear losing you. Not you. Never you.”
A million suns collide in my heart, illuminating every nook and cranny of my chest. We were never unrequited; we were just happening in our own way.
“And when would you have told me?” I ask out of curiosity, not even a little mad at him. Besides, without it, I would have probably ended up raped or dead by the time the Family found me.
“I planned a vacation once this was over and I would have had you chip me right there and then in exchange.”
I believe him wholeheartedly. “Thank you for saving me.”
He pulls me flush to his chest. “You were doing a fantastic job on your own.”
“I had a wonderful teacher,” I say, rising onto my toes and crossing my arms around his neck. I plant a kiss on his mouth, but a sharp hiss breaks free.
“Did he do that?” he growls as he caresses my bottom lip with his thumb with utter gentleness.
“No, Felix.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.” His eyes droop as if he failed me, but I can’t have that.
“You were in my heart and in my mind, helping me through it all.”
My words seem to ease him, and he grabs my hand. “Let’s get out of here. The rest must have caught him by now.”
“You came for me.” It’s not a question, not even a surprise. It’s a fact. I just love hearing that out loud, even though I know the answer.
“Always. You’re my number one priority, Bailey.”
We move toward the door. Hunter gives me his gun and slides in front of me, a knife thrust forward as we slip out of the room. I see two men lying dead in a blanket of crimson.
Hunter is about to grab the gun from one guard just as Dane runs down the stairs, surely to set a fire.
“We got Felix. Everyone is already out. Give me two minutes.”
I throw the gun aside, and hand in hand, Hunter and I climb the stairs, rushing out.
Outside, my friends surround Felix in a tight circle, and Kaden pushes him to his knees. Blake taps a finger on his dagger, the intention clear.
Not far away, ten of Cassandra’s guards are standing near a couple of vans, watching our every move.
Hunter strides to Felix and slams his fist into the side of his face with such force that his head flies back, and blood spurts from his nose and mouth. I can’t move, wanting to imprint this image in my brain. Catching him seemed almost impossible for so long, but we’ve accomplished it.
The girls run to me.
“How are you?” Abi asks, her voice thick with concern.
“I’m good,” I reply as Celine circles me, checking for injuries, while Mia pulls me into a tight hug.
I jerk my chin toward Felix. “Why isn’t he dead yet?”
“We tried, but the matriarch’s guards protected him until we promised not to kill him,” Celine groans.
That’s strange. No wonder my friends look tense. None of us will sleep peacefully, knowing he’s still alive. It’s come to the point that only his death can give us back our peace of mind.
As Felix shouts, cursing us all, Kaden shoves him back to the ground, slamming his foot on his father’s back and holding him there until he stops moving.
I march up to him, looking down at his battered form and reveling in his defeat.
“By the way, I’m not your daughter. Caleb is my biological father.”
His forehead creases, incredulity etched across his face. He blinks, as though not wanting to take the betrayal into consideration. “What? No. That can’t be true.”
“It is.” Smiling, I bend over, placing my hands on my knees. “Regarding the money… you would have never gotten a penny anyway. So, stick that softness up your ass, Father,” I say, my voice dripping with sarcasm.
Kaden doesn’t even bother looking at Felix—he was done with him long ago.
Everything falls silent when someone steps out of one of the vans.
It’s Cassandra.
Sebastian follows her out of the van. The group and I exchange quick glances, none of us understanding what’s happening.
Dressed impeccably in a structured, long-sleeved blue gown with a draped bow and red diamonds, she strides over to Felix like a supermodel on the runway—elegant, self-assured, captivating, and oozing power.
“I’m sorry. I know how much you wanted to kill him, but his death is mine alone,” she says. “Rot in hell, asshole.”
Then she pulls out the gun strapped to her exposed thigh and shoots Felix between the eyes. The bullet rips through the air with finality as we all stare at her in muted shock.
Dane comes out of the cabin just in time to see the entire scene. He quickly ushers us to a safe distance before everything explodes. Cement and wood splinter, raining down around us along with body parts.
Cassandra sweeps her gaze over us when the carnage settles. “You did a fantastic job. I am very proud of all of you.”
Looking from Dane and back to the flames, she continues, “My mother told me about your penchant for setting things on fire. Impressive. Now head back home. We’ll meet you at the estate after taking care of this.”
Hunter takes my hand, and the group and I start walking toward the forest until we come to another van. The others jump inside first, and I am about to follow when Hunter pulls me back. The group eyes him quizzically, but he just shuts the door in their faces. Turning me around, he stretches out his hand for me. I take it, having no idea where this is going.
Right then, the sky opens, and rain drizzles on us as if baptizing us for a new life.
“Will you dance with me?” he asks, his voice filled with emotion.
“But we don’t have music.” Not that it would matter. Elation makes me giddy.
He snakes his hands around my back, pulling me closer to his chest. As I lock my arms around his neck, he begins to softly sing “Wicked Game.” His raspy, deep voice carries the soulful melody, and I listen, completely entranced.
“I didn’t know you could sing.” I am in awe, and so in love with him that I feel like I might burst.
“I’ve never sung for anyone before.”
“I love your voice,” I say as he twirls me around. I can’t believe we’ve made it. And to top it off, I am having the most romantic moment of my life—dancing with my man under the moonlight and rain while he sings to me.
“Then I’ll sing to you all the songs in the world. I’ll dance with you until the end of time.”
I sigh dreamily, contentment settling deep in my soul. “I’ll only ever dance with you,” I vow softly.
Placing my cheek against his chest, the rest of the world fades away. It’s just us, wrapped in our little world.
Our eyes lock when I lift my chin, and I see my entire future playing out in his. “Those eyes of yours…” I inhale deeply, trying to form coherent sentences when it feels like I am high on endless love and pure joy. “Those silver eyes that peer right into my soul and devour my heart, they make me want—”
“What, Bailey?” he asks, his features drenched in determination as if he lives to make all my wishes come true.
“To have their entire attention, be the center of their focus… that they see only me and no one else…”
Cupping my cheek and neck with both hands, he lowers his forehead to mine, his voice as soft as balm but firm like steel. “They do. Ever since I laid eyes on you for the first time and until I close them forever. I love you, Bailey. And I will never stop.”
“I love you, Hunter. Until there’s no trace of me left.”
We seal our promises with a deep kiss before climbing into the van to join our friends.
A collective sigh of relief fills the air as we sit together. The emotions are high, evident in the exchange of glances.
We did it. We won. We’re free. As we hold on to the people we love, we can finally move away from the corrupt legacy and the threat to our lives.
“We made it,” Kaden says, clearly relieved.
“We made it,” we all echo in unison.
I lean my head on Hunter’s arm, and he caresses my side.
“You’re mine now. Forever, kitten,” he whispers in my ear, and butterflies swarm in my belly.
“I am. But so are you.”
Someone pops a bottle of champagne open. Laughing, we clink to the beginning of our new lives.