Chapter 24 Willow #2
Ransom’s face is pinched when he hangs up the call, shoving his phone into his pocket.
“Motherfucking cocksuckers,” he mutters under his breath.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur.
“What? What do you have to be sorry for?”
“Your bike. It was brand new, and now—”
Before I can finish, Ransom lets go of my arm. His face is intense as he reaches up, gripping my chin and looking right into my eyes.
“Fuck the bike,” he says firmly. “I don’t give a shit about the bike.”
“But—”
“Willow. No bike, nothing in the world, will ever matter more to me than you. You’re safe, and that’s all that fucking matters. Okay?”
I swallow hard, then nod shakily. The last several minutes feel a little surreal.
We went from just running a simple errand to getting shot at, and I’m still reeling from it a little.
But I force my muscles to stop shaking, reminding myself that there’s no room for fear right now.
I can’t let it cloud my thoughts or slow me down.
“We’re getting a ride out of here, since my bike is fucked,” Ransom explains. “Stay behind me as much as you can.”
He positions his body in front of mine, his fingers wrapped around the grip of his gun as he watches the street warily. We stay like that for what feels like forever, and when Vic and Malice pull up in the car, my heart leaps at the sight of them.
Keeping his gun drawn and his head low, Ransom wraps an arm around my shoulders and hustles me into the car. We jump into the back, and Malice cranks the wheel to pull away from the curb.
“Did you see anything on the way over?” Ransom asks, peering out the back window as he shoves his gun back into his waistband.
Vic shakes his head. “Nothing.” He looks to me, craning his neck from where he sits in the front passenger seat. “You’re alright?”
I nod. “Yeah. Ransom pulled me down before anything could happen.”
“Good.”
Malice adjusts his grip on the wheel as he growls, “What the fuck happened?”
“We were leaving the garage when I heard gunshots,” I tell him. “I think a bullet grazed my arm—”
As soon as the words are out of my mouth, Vic twists around in the front seat, reaching back to take my arm in his hands. He inspects the spot, running his fingers over the raised mark.
“No bleeding, at least,” he murmurs. “You’re sure it was just a graze? You didn’t get hit anywhere else?”
“No.” I swallow. “It’s okay. It doesn’t even really hurt.”
“What else did you see?” Malice wants to know.
Ransom takes over, answering his brother as Vic finally releases my arm. “They were in a car, whoever they were. Speeding down the street. I know shit goes down at Luis’s place sometimes, but this wasn’t like that. It didn’t feel… random.”
“Was anyone else around?”
“There were some of Luis’s guys hanging around like usual, but no one gave us any trouble. I got the part I needed, and we were about to head out when it happened.”
“And you didn’t see who it was?” Malice asks.
Ransom shakes his head. “I was a little busy trying to get us down behind the bike. But the windows were tinted, and they were going too fast anyway.”
“Fuck,” Malice snarls, pounding the wheel with his fist. “This can’t just be about Luis or his suppliers. That’s too big a fucking coincidence. There’s no fucking way.”
I twist my fingers together, my heart racing all over again. “So you think this was about me? About us?”
Malice’s gray eyes flick to mine in the rearview mirror. “I think we have to go forward assuming it was. We take no chances.”
I nod, feeling sick. But Malice is right. There are plenty of people in Detroit who hate me—who hate all of us—so it would be foolish to assume that an attempted drive-by was just a random act of violence. The more likely scenario is that it was targeted. Someone is trying to take us out.
We get back to the penthouse, and the guys surround me again as we get out of the car.
Ransom’s head is on a swivel as Malice locks the car, and all of us are tense and quiet on the elevator ride up.
Once we reach the top floor, Vic holds me back from going inside the penthouse until Malice and Ransom can do a sweep inside.
The thought that someone might be in there, lying in wait for us, ready to kill any or all of us, is enough to make nausea roil my stomach.
“Okay, it’s clear,” Malice says after a minute, beckoning us inside.
As I step over the threshold, my phone rings in my back pocket. The sound is startlingly loud in the silence of the condo, and it makes me jump. I scramble to dig it out of my pocket, and when I see the name on the caller ID, my heart clenches.
Olivia.
Malice is standing close enough to me that he can read her name on the screen, and he looks up from the phone, his gaze locking with mine.
“There are no coincidences,” he says grimly, his jaw tight.
He’s right. There’s no way it doesn’t mean anything that Olivia is calling me less than an hour after someone shot at me.
My throat is tight with anger and worry as I slide my finger across the screen to answer the call. I lift the phone and put it on speaker, forcing words out as Ransom and Vic come to stand close beside me too.
“Were those your people?” I demand, skipping over any pretense of niceties. “Did you hire someone try to gun me down in the street?”
Her laugh is cool and calm in my ear. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, of course,” she says evenly. “I wouldn’t even know how to begin doing something like that. I don’t dabble in crime, unlike your filthy little boyfriends.”
My fingers curl around the phone, irritation pricking at me. Of course she won’t admit it. Not on the phone, where I could be recording her words. She’s smarter than that, which is why she’s managed to ‘dabble in crime,’ as she put it, for years without getting caught.
“It sounds like you must be having a rough afternoon,” she continues, and I can practically hear the smirk in her voice. “Someone shot at you, you say? That’s terrible.”
“Cut the shit, Olivia,” I bite out. “I know you sent them.”
“And I’m telling you I didn’t.” She chuckles.
“But if someone shot at you, my dear, I wouldn’t act so surprised.
After all, you painted a target on your back when you became Troy Copeland’s widow and inherited his entire estate.
Just like you said, you’ve leveled up in this world.
And that comes with its own set of risks. Do you understand?”
My brows pinch together tightly, and I glance at the men around me. What the hell is she getting at?
“Don’t act like you care about me,” I spit. “You’re a fucking cunt, and even if the rest of the world can’t see it, I can.”
She makes a disapproving noise. “Such foul language. Clearly none of my efforts to teach you how to behave like a lady had an effect. But I just wanted to warn you to be careful. You’re my only living relative, after all, just like I’m yours. It would be such a shame if you died.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I demand in a hard voice, sick of her falsely sweet tone. “What do you want?”
“I’ve had my lawyers looking into it, and they’ve found a way to ensure that I will be the benefactor of everything you own in the event of your death,” she says, a note of triumph in her voice. “I just wanted to make you aware of that.”
My stomach drops. “What?”
“Don’t sound so surprised, dear. I just took a page out of your book. You were clever enough to have Troy sign everything over to you before he died tragically. And now it turns out that if the same fate befalls you, I’ll get everything Troy once had. Funny how life works out, isn’t it?”
Malice makes a low, angry noise, and I stare down at the screen of my phone as her words wash over me.
“You’re crazy,” I hiss. “You can’t do this.”
She clicks her tongue against her teeth.
“You know, I was starting to think you understood, but you keep underestimating what I’ll do to preserve my legacy.
I will not sit idly by and let you ruin what I have dedicated my life to building up.
So here are your options. You can either sign everything over to me willingly now, or I’ll get all of it anyway when you die. It’s really quite simple.”
For a horrible moment, I have a flash of being back in that graveyard. Of having just buried Misty, standing over my adoptive mother’s grave as Olivia levied her ultimatum.
I was so helpless then, shocked and without a leg to stand on. The only thing I could do was give in. I can remember her cool, cruel tone, the way she didn’t seem to care at all that she was playing with my life, using me like a puppet just to increase her wealth.
It’s the same now. The fraying edges I saw when she confronted me last are completely gone.
She hasn’t just been struggling to plug the leaks in her business that we’ve been poking over the past weeks. All that time, even as I made moves against her, she was preparing her counterstrike.
And now she’s delivered a warning shot.
“I’ll give you some time to make your choice,” she says coolly.
“But I won’t wait forever. You’ve always said you don’t want any part of this life, Willow.
That you don’t care about the money. Now’s your chance to prove whether that’s really true.
Sign everything over to me, and you can have the peace you want so badly. ”
Then she hangs up the call, leaving me standing in stillness, clutching my phone in a death grip.
I blink, looking up to meet the faces of my men as they huddle around me. They look pissed as hell, but I’m just… reeling.
For as long as I’ve known Olivia, she’s tried to use me. She’s seen me as a pawn in her game. It’s still true, I guess, that she wants me to be useful to her.
But now there’s only one way I can do that.
By being dead.