Chapter 31 Willow
WILLOW
My stomach drops, and I’m suddenly glad that all I’ve eaten today was that oatmeal bar, because otherwise I would probably be sick all over the shiny linoleum of this kitchen.
X and Olivia are one and the same, so whatever she’s messaging them about cannot be good.
“Decrypt it,” Malice says, his voice sharp.
“Working on it,” Vic replies.
And of course it takes forever.
I have no idea how long these things usually take, but the minutes seem to crawl by. Malice starts pacing, and Ransom bounces his leg where he’s still sitting on the counter. Vic stares at the screen of the laptop as if he can will the progress to go faster just with his eyes.
I just stand where I am, my stomach in knots and my heart racing.
Whatever she has to say, it’s not going to be good. Although the men wore ski masks when they rescued me, there’s no way Olivia wouldn’t be able to guess who they were. She’s going to be furious, and she’s going to take it out on the guys.
Dozens of horrible scenarios play out in my mind, and I chew on my bottom lip, trying to breathe through the rush of panic and anxiety.
Maybe she already knows where we are. Maybe she’s already sent someone to get us.
Maybe she’s right outside, and she’s just sending this message as a formality before she comes bursting in with her hired security team to drag us away.
I flick my eyes to the darkened windows, but I can’t see anything through the inky blackness of night outside. Just the warm reflection of the kitchen we’re all in.
I try to tell myself that it would be impossible for her to know our location. Vic covered our tracks, and it would have taken Olivia some time to regroup from the attack at the church.
We had a head start, and she would have been following the tracker, which we left behind early.
I force myself to take one deep breath and then another, trying to settle my heart down before it explodes out of my chest.
“Okay, here we go,” Vic finally says. We all cluster around behind him to see the screen of his computer as the message loads.
The first thing I see is a picture of Troy.
He’s flat on his back against the dull beige carpet of the church where he was shot, lying in a pool of his own blood. His face is streaked with more blood, and it soaks into the white of his dress shirt.
“Fuck,” I gasp, and my stomach lurches even more. “You killed him.”
“He got what he deserved,” Malice bites out, no remorse in his voice at all. “Scroll down.”
Vic obeys, scrolling down to the message itself.
And just as I expected, Olivia is pissed the fuck off.
Clearly my words of warning meant nothing to you, the message reads. So I’ll just have to show you how serious I am about this. There will be consequences for taking what wasn’t yours.
I clench my hands into fists, hating her even more. I hate how she talks about me like I’m a piece of property, like something she owned that the guys walked in and stole. It makes me feel even worse, and I swallow hard.
“Fucking bitch!” Malice explodes after a second, moving away from our little huddle. He goes back to his pacing, running a tatted up hand through his dark hair. “Who the fuck does she think she is? She doesn’t own Willow. Willow’s a goddamned person.”
Warmth spreads through me to hear him say that, and I walk over to him, reaching out and resting a hand on his arm.
“She’s terrible, I know,” I whisper. “But she’s wrong. I was never hers. Not really.”
He looks at me, coal gray eyes burning, and when he yanks me against his body, I stumble but don’t fight it. I let him hold me close, his nose buried in my hair as he breathes me in, hoping it will calm down some of his agitation.
“You know how rich people are,” Ransom chimes in, his lip curling in disgust. “Everything is either property or an opportunity to them. They don’t see the world like the rest of us.”
“She can go to hell,” Malice mutters. “And I’ll be happy to send her there myself.”
Vic starts to type something on the laptop, and my eyes fly open wide.
“What are you doing? Won’t responding to her give away our location?”
He shakes his head. “No, that’s not how it works. The connection is secure. And it’s encrypted. Just like we couldn’t find out where she was before, she won’t be able to track this back to us.”
I bite my lip, still unsure.
“Plus, this is a good chance to find out what she’s up to,” Ransom tells me. “If we get her talking, maybe she’ll let some info slip. Give us a better idea of what she knows and how she’s planning to track us down.”
“You mean if we piss her off enough,” Malice mutters.
Ransom grins, arching his pierced brow. “That too. People fuck up when they’re angry.”
Instead of comforting me, that just makes me worry more. Because he’s right. People do fuck up when they’re angry, and it’s pretty safe to say that all the guys are angry at Olivia for what she’s done.
“What if we let something slip instead?” I ask, making a face. “We could make a mistake just as easily as she could.”
“Vic? Make a mistake like that?” Ransom shakes his head. “Maybe if it was Malice, but Vic would never be that sloppy.”
Malice flips him off over my head, and there’s a small hint of a smile on Vic’s face as he keeps typing.
“What are you telling her?” I want to know.
“That she should be careful who she starts a war with,” he replies.
There’s an edge to his voice that makes him sound more like Malice than I’ve ever heard before, and I’m reminded all over again that the two of them are twins.
He sends the message, and now all we can do is wait. Malice goes back to his pacing, cracking his knuckles over and over again. Ransom raids the food box, grumbling under his breath about the things on offer, even though he was one of the people who packed it.
“Why the fuck didn’t we bring any real food?” he complains.
“Because real food is perishable, and we don’t know what our conditions are going to be like,” Vic answers promptly.
Ransom makes a face. “And there’s probably no fast food this far out either. Which sucks, because I could murder a fucking cheeseburger right now.”
“Stop complaining,” Malice snaps.
Ransom throws a granola bar at him, and Malice plucks it from the air easily before it hits him. He doesn’t eat it though, just shoves it in his back pocket and goes back to his pacing.
I drop into a chair at the kitchen table, bouncing my leg and trying not to let the crawling feeling of anxiety get too bad. What’s done is done, after all. It’s not like we can go back and undo it.
Especially considering that picture of Troy’s body. Malice was right. There’s no one for me to marry to make amends now.
Vic’s laptop pings after an hour or so, and then there’s another wait as he decrypts that message as well. He turns the laptop so we can all see it, and there’s another picture right at the top.
At first, it’s hard to make out.
Something is burning, the flames bright, and the air thick with smoke. Whatever the building is—was—it’s being reduced to ashes now, the walls black and charred.
I’m confused for a second, but then I recognize the area, and I gasp sharply as it hits me.
It’s the guys’ warehouse. Their home. It’s burning to the ground.
Vic scrolls down to the message that goes with the photo, and Olivia has thrown his words right back at him, telling him he and his brothers should be careful who they start a war with.
Little slights can turn into grudges, and it doesn’t take much to fan the flames, she adds at the end.
I frown, turning that over in my head. What the guys did here couldn’t be considered a little slight. Not really. So clearly she’s talking about something else.
“The Donovans,” Vic murmurs before I can ask. “She got them to burn our place down.”
“What the fuck?” Malice scowls. “Why the fuck would they do that?”
“‘It doesn’t take much to fan the flames,’” Vic reads out loud.
“She probably offered them a good payday to take care of her dirty work for her. She knows enough about our business in Detroit to know that they’ve had a grudge against us, and she took advantage of that to recruit them for this job.
They were already pissed at us, so it probably didn’t take much. ”
“I can’t believe she’d do this,” I say, my throat going so tight that it’s hard to breathe. “That was your home. That was… she’s trying to take everything away.”
I glance around as I speak, expecting to see anguish and fury on the three faces around me.
But although all of the men look grim, their expressions haven’t changed much from before we opened X’s latest message.
They’re clearly pissed, but they’ve been pissed since the beginning.
Olivia wanted this to be a personal attack, but they aren’t rising to the bait like I would have thought.
“Don’t you care?” I ask them. “She burned down your home. How can you be okay with this?”
Ransom shrugs, and when I blink at him in shock, he comes over and wraps an arm around me, trailing his fingers down the line of my jaw.
“We do care, angel,” he says. “It’s just that we expected this.
Maybe not this exact scenario, but something like it.
We may have left the warehouse in one piece when we headed out this morning, but we knew we were torching our old life.
First, we thought we were all running away together, and then we had to literally go snatch you from your wedding. We knew we could never go back there.”
He says it so calmly, like it’s no big deal, but that’s so far from the truth.
It’s a huge deal, and the enormity of it hits me in a tender place.
The three of them were willing to give up everything. Their home, their livelihood, their foothold in the city, all of it. For me. And they did it willingly. I never asked them to, and I couldn’t have ever even made myself think of asking, but they did it.
Maybe Malice is right. I can’t protect them by trying to run off and make deals behind their backs. But I can do my damnedest to protect them now, by staying by their sides and seeing this through.
“Okay,” I say, determination rising in me. “Then what’s our plan from here?”