25. Lena #2
“See you? What are you talking about?” I was calculating distances. The door was at least ten feet away. He was faster than me. Stronger than me. “Let me out. Whatever this is, we can talk about it upstairs.”
“Talk.” He laughed, but it wasn’t his laugh. It was brittle and wrong. The sound echoed off the stone walls, bouncing back at me from every direction. “I’ve been talking for years. You never heard me. Not really. None of you ever heard me.”
Raphael roared along our connection. He felt my fear starting to build.
I could sense him reaching for me, trying to understand what was happening.
But the connection was blurry with distance, and I couldn’t send him anything coherent.
Just fear. Just the dawning realization that I had made a terrible mistake.
“You don’t even know, do you?” Michael took a step toward me, and I pressed harder against the wall.
The stone was rough against my back, ancient and cold through my blouse.
“All these years. Working beside you. Watching you inherit everything. The hotel, the name, Richard’s precious legacy.
All of it handed to you like it was your birthright. ”
“It was my birthright.” My voice was shaking now. “He was my father.”
“He was mine too.”
The words hit like a fist to the chest. The room seemed to tilt around me, the shadows stretching and distorting. I couldn’t process what he was saying. Couldn’t make the words fit into any shape that made sense.
“What?”
“Richard Hughes.” Michael’s voice cracked on the name.
His hands were trembling at his sides, fingers curling and uncurling like he wanted to grab me or hit the wall or tear his own skin off.
“Our father. He kept me hidden. Paid off my mother. Made sure I knew exactly what I was worth to him, which was nothing. Less than nothing.” His breathing was ragged now, uneven, his chest heaving.
“And you… you got everything. The hotel, the inheritance, the name. You got to be his daughter, while I cleaned his hotel and pretended I was nothing to him.”
“That’s not possible.” But even as I said it, I was remembering.
Maya’s revelations about Richard’s affairs.
The secret suites. The women he had kept hidden from the world.
From me. The life my father had lived that I never knew about, the secrets buried so deep I was still uncovering them months after his death.
“I have proof.” Michael’s voice steadied, grief hardening into resolve. “DNA. Documentation. Everything I need to take what should have been mine. What he owed me.”
I lunged for the door.
He caught me before I made it three steps.
His hands closed around my arms, fingers digging into my flesh hard enough to bruise.
He was stronger than I expected. Stronger than the mild-mannered general manager I thought I knew.
The professional mask was gone completely now, and the man underneath was a stranger with wild eyes and an iron grip.
I kicked at his shins, struggled, tried to break free. “Let me go—”
He spun me around, and cloth pressed against my face.
Damp cloth. Chemical smell, sharp and bitter, burning my nostrils and the back of my throat.
Chloroform. Or something like it. I held my breath, fighting, kicking, but his grip was iron and the cloth was covering my nose and mouth and I couldn’t hold my breath forever and I couldn’t think and I couldn’t—
Raphael’s terror slammed into me. Pure, consuming, matching my own as it flooded the connection between us. He screamed across our bond, frantic and furious and too far away to help. He knew. He felt my fear surge through the mate bond and he knew.
I tried to reach for him through the connection.
Tried to send anything. An apology. A location.
A goodbye. But the bond was slippery, fading, and I couldn’t hold onto it.
The chemical haze was pulling me under, clouding my thoughts, making everything soft and distant. My lungs burned. My vision blurred.
“Everything that should have been mine… he gave to you.” Michael’s voice was muffled now, far away through the darkness creeping in at the edges of my vision.
Father. Same father. Brother. The words bounced around in my skull without finding purchase, without meaning anything coherent. My knees buckled. The stone floor rushed up to meet me, but Michael caught me, lowering me down almost gently.
Raphael’s howl tore along our connection. His wolf raged, frantic to reach me, to save me. His fury and his fear and his love burned through the connection like wildfire. But he was so far away. An entire world away. And I was slipping, falling, the darkness rushing up to swallow me whole.
“I just wanted you to see me. I helped you with everything, but you never let me in.” Michael’s voice was the last thing I heard, soft and wounded and terrifying in its gentleness.
His hand brushed hair from my face, a gesture so tender it made the horror worse.
I heard him move away, heard the soft sounds of him going through my bag, but I couldn’t open my eyes to see what he was doing. “I just wanted to be your brother.”
Brother.
The word echoed in the darkness, meaningless and enormous at once.
One last flare along our connection. Raphael, burning with fear and fury and love so fierce it hurt.
He reached for me across the miles. His wolf howled into the void between us.
His terror flooded through and mixed with mine until I couldn’t tell which fear belonged to whom, which heartbeat was pounding, which lungs were screaming for air.
I’m sorry. Find me.
I didn’t know if the thought reached him. The bond was fading, stretching thin, the chemical darkness pulling me away from everything I knew. Away from the hotel and the afternoon sun and the life I had built. Away from Raphael.
The last thing I felt was Raphael, raw and furious, screaming into a void I could no longer hear. His wolf’s howl fading into silence.
Then nothing.
Only darkness.