Chapter 28
28
Christa
“ A h, you’re up,” Vince Mancini says as he unlocks the bedroom door and comes in with a to-go latte and a packaged croissant. “Brought you breakfast.”
“I don’t drink coffee,” I bluntly reply.
He frowns, then offers a rather uncaring shrug. “Good thing I told the barista to hold the sugar pump, then,” he says and takes a long sip. “Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff. I suppose you still eat, though.”
He tosses the croissant over, and I catch it. I’m famished, truth be told, so it doesn’t take long for me to inhale the warm pastry as I sit on the edge of the sagging, dusty bed. I’m in an old apartment with peeling wallpaper and creaky floors, with layers of grime on the shabby furniture and bolted windows. I could break one and climb out, but we’re on the sixth floor of an apartment building. Pregnant or not, I cannot take such chances.
I’m stuck here for now. I’ll find another way out.
“I wouldn’t have fed you, personally,” Vince says as he rests against the wall close to the door. “I would, however, have you on your knees and begging for mercy. But my sister thinks you deserve much worse.”
“Alexandra is calling the shots, then?” I ask, trying to assess their relationship.
From all of his previous rants, I now know that Vince and Alexandra are siblings. Their father, a high-ranking Mancini, went to prison for twenty years along with a few others in the family after I took down Perry-Sage. So this is about revenge. Slow, life-crushing revenge, judging by the amount of work Alexandra put into crafting a new identity and a new company to infiltrate the Hawthorne Corporation.
The timeline is weird, however.
“We’re a team,” Vince scoffs. “Alexandra is our undercover operative, let’s say. I’m the red herring. We’re a good team, you must admit. I mean, we got you here.”
“You could’ve gotten me so many times before.”
The more I get him to open up, the more I get him to talk, the more time I’m able to buy myself and to figure out a way to escape.
Vince gives me a cold, heartless grin. “We could’ve. But the point of this exercise is to make you suffer for what you did.”
“I figured you had better and more important things to do than come after me.”
“So, you don’t deny what you did,” Vince sneers, quite satisfied with his conclusion.
I give him a confused frown. “I could’ve done much worse. You have a skewed perception of reality, don’t you? You think what your family’s been doing for entire generations is perfectly okay and reasonable?”
“Hey, it’s a free country. Survival of the fittest and all that.”
“You have been making a fortune from hurting and terrifying people. That’s not survival, that’s just plain brutality. And honestly, I probably would’ve kept my head down at Perry-Sage, I probably would’ve worked there for longer if your people hadn’t stepped in to kill Brett and so many others who were just trying to get away!”
“We run a tight ship, and it’s a harsh world out there,” Vince replies. “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.”
“My God, you’ve got all the cliches at the ready. Did Alexandra teach you what to say?”
And there it is. The contempt. The muted rage lurking beneath the surface. I knew she was the brains behind the entire scheme from the moment she took me out of my office at gunpoint. I never suspected she was involved. She played her part with great artistry. I have to give credit where credit is due.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Vince says. “I’m the one who figured out who you were.”
“Oh, really?” I reply, my voice dripping with skepticism.
He nods with newfound confidence. “A screenshot here, a bribe there, a rumor picked up at the right place at the right time. A well-placed source among the so-called survivors of Perry-Sage. It didn’t take long to find Sharon, you know. Of course, she had no idea whom she was confiding in. But she confided. My source got a name, a phone number. Alexandra and I knew it was only a matter of time before you’d come back to Portland.”
“That’s why she laid the groundwork earlier,” I mutter, finally making sense of the timeline. “Why she was already involved with Hawthorne Corporation when I started working there.”
“Yeah, that was her idea. My sister is smart. Not smarter than me, but smart enough to pull off something like that.”
“What was the point of this exercise then? To get close to me?”
“To get close to you and those around you. We did some digging, some careful research before we started. You gotta know your enemy.” He chuckles. “Your bestie, Teagan, your aunt Mary, the Hawthornes… I had my people ask around about you when you were a kid. Who your friends were, your company, and activities. I have to say, your life was pretty boring.”
I can’t help but smile. “At least it wasn’t built on the corpses of others.”
“Either way, you’re done here,” he says. “Alexandra is about to wrap things up over at your lover boys’ offices. Though kudos to you, sweetheart. Bagging all three Hawthornes like you did… it makes me wonder what you’ve got under your skirt to have hooked them like that.”
My stomach churns. Bile gathers in the back of my throat. Of course he knows. If Alexandra knows about my relationship, so does her conniving brother. They were in this together, after all.
“They won’t let you get away with this,” I say.
“They can’t prove we did anything,” Vince laughs. “Hell, right now, I’m told they’re freaking out, trying to figure out where you are. And Alexandra is right there by their side, comforting them.”
“She’ll be on the security cameras,” I tell him.
He shakes his head. “You think you’re the only one with a hacker on your payroll?”
My blood runs cold. “What are you talking about?”
I didn’t use my own credentials to swipe in last night. I used multiple keycards. But even so, if the Hawthornes check the security footage, they might pick me up from at least a couple of angles. I was careful, but I wasn’t hiding from them specifically. What Vince is insinuating, however, is downright terrifying.
“Oh, we know all about your buddy Spike,” he says, then grabs my purse from the side table and takes out my phone. “Alexandra planted a little spyware thingy in your phone during that brunch date with Teagan.”
“No.”
“We knew what you were trying to do.”
“Teagan—" I’m about to get up and lunge at him, fury taking over and blinding me altogether, but he straightens his back and raises an arm to keep me at bay.
“Take one step and I will knock you on your ass, you self-righteous bitch,” Vince snarls. “Sit the fuck down. No one’s touching the Hawthorne girl. We’re not stupid. You and Spike, however, are fair game.”
“What did you do to Spike?” I ask with a trembling voice, the horror drowning my rage as I sit back down on the edge of the bed. The helplessness is overwhelming as I realize they knew what we were planning. They knew about the software and the launch we did last night. My brain is rapidly firing signals back and forth as I try to prepare for every possible scenario.
“I did a lot of things to Spike,” Vince grumbles, gazing out the window. It’s cloudy and gray, a perfect metaphor given my current situation. There’s a storm coming. I can almost smell it. “But I will give you this one thing… Your friends are loyal. Too loyal for their own good.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to understand. You just need to know that you made it so much worse for yourself the minute you decided to hit us with your cyber-hacking bullshit,” he snaps.
“What happened to Spike?” I ask again.
He gives me a hard look. “I think you should worry more about yourself. When Alexandra returns, she’ll want to take her sweet time with you.”
“You’re fucking monsters.”
I try to keep my tears from flowing, but I still feel them rolling down my cheeks as I understand the depth of their atrocities. I’m starting to regret getting him to open up like this. I’m learning things I might’ve been better off not knowing.
“We are. And you should’ve just kept your head down. You should’ve just died with the rest of them,” Vince says. “Because now, I have not only to clean up after you, but I also have to destroy everyone and everything you love.”
“Wait, you said you weren’t going to hurt the Hawthornes,” I reply as he is about to walk out the door. “You said you weren’t going to touch Teagan!”
He smiles, one foot in the hallway. “She’s going to suffer, but she’s going to live so she can pick up the pieces. Your boyfriends, however, are a different story. For their audacity to come into my office and threaten me, I’ll make sure I’m the last face they see before they die. And I’ll make sure they know what I will do to you once they’re gone.”
“No!” I cry out, but it’s too late.
The door shuts. The key turns in the lock.
And I’m left to my own despair once again, with no way out. I cradle my belly and pray to all the gods that we survive what’s coming.