Chapter Forty-Four #2
I let out a laugh. “Yeah, you do. Good luck with that,” I told him.
His lips quirked. “I’m not shocked I produced a stubborn son. Their mother is the same.”
I never considered Elizabeth as stubborn. Maybe she has always been stubbornly determined to protect her children from him.
Nova is clutching the champagne flute so tight, I’m surprised it doesn’t shatter in his fist. His cheek is stitched and bandaged. Boating accident, he’s told people in his gruff don’t ask me more Nova way.
Honestly…he shouldn’t be here.
I didn’t want Nova to come, but the mental fuckery I’d need to perform just to talk Varrick out of it was too much. So that is precisely why this boat meeting is a three-person affair and not two.
Nova runs a hand over his head. “I have questions that I know you won’t answer.”
“Try me first.” Varrick sips the bubbling liquor. “Have some faith, Nova.”
I tilt my ear to them, listening while I scan the water.
“Fine.” Nova glares. “Where are you from?”
“America. Now, where exactly was I born? Toledo.”
“Ohio?” I raise my brows.
“You know your geography,” he quips with a smile into another sip. I hate this conversation already.
“And Elizabeth?” Nova nods over at him.
“Huh.” Varrick leans back with a breathy laugh of surprise. “I would’ve thought she’d trust her own children with that information.”
The godmothers never wanted us to incriminate them. To find their origins.
Let me make this clear—I don’t give a fuck about what Varrick has to say. I don’t care if he’s being honest. If he’s blowing smoke. We will never really know if he’s spouting facts or feeding us lies. I believe mostly what I can see.
We saw him on camera breaking into the loft.
We saw pinpricked condoms in Phoebe’s room.
We saw him shove Nova into a fucking mirror.
So now, we’re entertaining him the way you would a guest at a dinner party. He thinks he’s placating us—fine.
Placate me, bitch.
“She never told me,” Varrick says, “but I suspected Beth was from Jersey. Addison, New York, originally—her accent would fight through in the early days. Your mother is likely Italian, maybe Scillian. Or even Greek. Probably had parents or grandparents who immigrated over here through Ellis Island.”
I want to dump my liquor in the ocean. I don’t drink it as I ask, “These are your unproven theories of how many years? When did you first meet?”
“They were nineteen. Though they said they were older at the time. I was around twenty-one, twenty-two. Young. Ran into them at a bar on the Upper East Side. We had mutual acquaintances. The rest, as you know, is history.”
“Romantic,” I say dryly.
He grins. “You remind me of me. Phoebe of her mother.”
“Yeah?” I tilt my head, appraising him before I lean forward. “Funny you say that, considering we’re in a bit of a…situation. Kind of the same one Elizabeth found herself in.”
“Phoebe’s pregnant,” he says with a satisfied smile. “I know.” He raises his champagne, congratulating me.
I raise mine back, not hiding my surprise. Only I’m more surprised he filled the blank in for me. Rookie mistake. “How’d you figure it out?”
“A dad always knows.”
Sick fuck.
Nova is crawling out of his skin. He has to ditch the champagne and stand up. Varrick is confused at his volatile reaction. He’s trying to make sense of why Nova wouldn’t want Phoebe to be pregnant. He’s wondering if Nova knows he’s the cause.
“It was an accident,” I say, capturing Varrick’s attention. “Me and Phoebe. Unplanned. Surprise pregnancy, whatever you want to call it.”
“I assumed.”
I’m sure you did.
Fireworks whizz overhead. Just intermittent pops in the sky, slowly building to the climax. I’ve been to enough of these extravagant parties to know no expense is wasted on the two-hour firework show.
Whistling, whooshing, and crackling in the night sky draws eyes upward and off us. Varrick’s face lights in greens as I tell him, “Nova knows me and Phoebe don’t want kids.”
This takes him aback. “No?”
“No.” I shake my head tensely. His mind is working overtime right now. I try to guide him in a direction. “You want a kid?”
“Pardon?”
“You want a baby?” I enunciate very clearly. “A child to raise?”
He searches my face so rapidly. All he can likely see is pure fucking rage. “What are you getting at, Brayden?”
“Let’s cut to the fucking chase.” I set the glass in a cupholder. Varrick does the same. We stand at the same time.
He threads his arms over his chest, his brows pleated as if he’s patiently awaiting me. “You go first.”
“Fine. I’m not going to work with you after we pull the rope on Trent. None of us want to work with you, and I think you know that. I think you’ve always known that we’d never be one big happy team.”
“I did.” He smiles a little, impressed. “Keep going.” Sizzling gold embers rain down behind him.
“We’ve figured out you want a baby. For whatever reason. You want to tell me why?”
“You six turned out to be great assets to Beth and Addy. Better than they even give you credit for, and I know you’ll never trust me to the extent that you trusted them. Even if they’ve burned you now.”
“But a child will trust you?”
“My child will.” Varrick arches his brows.
“You don’t understand the pain Beth caused me.
By lying. Taking my kids away from me.” He points at Nova.
“She did what we said we’d do together, educate our children in the family business in our way.
How she betrayed you—multiply it times a hundred.
So I would love nothing more than to raise my daughter’s child.
It will…destroy Beth. Do you know how much she loves Phoebe? ”
Yes. “I’m aware.”
Varrick drops his arm. “So let’s make a deal, all of us.”
“Let’s make a deal,” I repeat in a biting tone.
“I’ll leave Victoria if you give me the baby.”
Yeah.
I knew this was coming.
“I’ll raise them as my own,” he continues, purple hues bathing his pitiless face. “You’ll never hear or see from me again. You get what you want. A town without me in it. I get what I want.”
Revenge and a little pawn of his own making.
I start laughing. Barrel-chested hard laughter while we lock eyes.
His features become a brick wall, but he can hide in every musty fucking corner all he wants, trying to scurry away from me.
It doesn’t matter what he makes me believe anymore.
“You think you’re going to ride away from Victoria as the Lone Wolfe?
” I ask, using the name the town has adopted for him.
“With a billion-dollar fortune still at your disposal?”
“We can work out those finances.” He’s scouring my eyes for what I’m thinking, feeling—what I might do. “We can share.”
“We can’t.” I step forward—so close our forearms touch.
“Because here’s the thing, Varrick, you aren’t the Lone Wolfe.
You aren’t the Big Bad Wolfe. You’re just a fucking termite who’s eaten away at my family tree.
” Fireworks pop, sizzle—paint our livid faces purple again.
“And you’ve been gnawing on his.” I motion my head toward Nova.
“His sister. His mother.” Another step forward.
“Brayden—”
“Phoebe isn’t pregnant.”
His face falls. I devour his sheer shock, then his torment at realizing…he was conned. “No…?”
“Surprise,” I say dryly. “There is no baby.”
“No, there…” He squints at me as fireworks explode in aggressive, quick succession. “You’re lying.” He begins to smile. “If it’s Hailey, we can work something out. This isn’t the end—”
“This is the end,” Nova cuts in. Before I can send him a warning look to stay out of this, he shoves me so hard, I careen into the seat.
And then he tells his father, “Never again.”
Nova barrels into Varrick with an unrelenting, merciless impact, forcing him overboard. And they plunge into the dark water…together.
Fuck, fuck, fuck! I bend over the boat. I see no one. No heads pop out of the rough ocean. The current is strong tonight. The water lights up in gold as fireworks crack one after the other. There is no pause in the sky.
Nova is killing his father.
Nova is going to drown with him. Because he’s not trained to hold his breath beneath the water like I am.
“NOVA!” I scream, and on impulse, I wave over at neighboring boats. “They fell in! Get help!!” Ladies on a yacht understand my frantic energy. Phones go to ears. This needs to appear like a drunken accident, but also, we actually need EMS.
I’m going to kill Nova if he’s not already dead.
They’re not coming up for air. No one is coming up.
I don’t think anymore. “I’m sorry, Phoebe.” She might lose more than a brother tonight. Quickly, I step onto the seat, the edge of the boat, and I dive into the water. Salt burns my eyes. It’s so fucking dark.
I swim around, diving and coming up for air. People yell at me from a neighboring speedboat. Saying they’re looking, too. I dive again around where they fell in. I swim deeper and deeper, and that’s when I feel a sinking body.
Familiar.
Brother.
Hers.
I know him. I know him too well, and I should’ve known he would do this before I could. It was supposed to be me.
Me pushing Varrick into the water. Me dragging Varrick down. Me hoping Varrick wouldn’t drown me with him. Me hopefully coming up for air and acting like I accidentally fell in.
Now, I’m wrapping my arms around Nova’s body. I kick to the surface. Nova is all heavy soaked muscle. He’s gone. He’s gone. Not breathing. Not moving. I breach the water, and I keep him against my chest while I kick my legs toward the swim platform of the Salty Miss.
I grit my teeth and scream between them.
It takes so much fucking energy to lift him onto the platform. When I’m on the hard surface with him, I check his pulse. None. I start compressions on his chest.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” I hear a lady on the nearest boat.
“Call 911!” another screams.
“Is someone still in the water?!” they’re shouting at me.
I act like I can’t hear. Like I’m too busy trying to save my wife’s brother, and I fucking am.
I give Nova mouth-to-mouth, then restart compressions.
I feel his ribs crack beneath my pumping hands.
“Come on, Nov. Come on.” My eyes sear, burn, scald.
He can’t die. He can’t die tonight. Please don’t fucking die.
Please, Nov.
Please.
This is my job.
My responsibility.
To protect them. To protect him.
I can’t lose another family member to the water. “Come on, Nov!” I shout with another hard compression. His face is pallid. His head jostles with my movements.
I scream.
A tortured, furious, agonized scream tears through me like an animal I’ve never let out—that I’ve never been allowed to release—not in my entire life. Don’t fucking die.
Don’t die.
Please.
It should’ve been me.
One minute is an eternity. The next time I blow air into his lungs…Nova begins to choke. Quickly, I turn him on his side while he coughs up the sea. Relief is a sledgehammer against my body. After he gets it all out, I collapse backward.
We’re both spent. Exhausted. Breathing too hard as we chase after oxygen and stare at each other for a long, long moment.
Fireworks blast around us. He can read my pained gaze that says, You weren’t supposed to go in with him.
That wasn’t part of the plan.
It was always supposed to be me.
His eyes are bloodshot. “I had to…” He pants. “I had to make sure he wasn’t coming back, Rock.” He wanted it to be over.
We summered at Stonehaven to get closer to Varrick. So he’d believe we were desperate for his help with pulling the rope with Trent. So he would never suspect that we’d want to kill him.
The explosions in the sky, the commotion, the booze, the accidents—it’s all around us like it was ten years ago at a lake house somewhere outside of Boston.
The first time we buried a body.
We knew tonight we’d try to drown one instead.