Chapter 34 The Thing About Sisters #2
Simone blinked quickly as a sheen darkened her blue eyes. I made a mental note to figure out exactly where the jewelry went and get it back as soon as possible.
“But it doesn’t matter now,” Selena went on.
“I—yes, it does. It matters to me.” Simone looked like she wanted to cry. “God, Sel, what more could I have done?”
“Baby, it’s fine.” I reached out, but she wouldn’t let me hold her. It fuckin’ broke me. “I’ll fix it, I swear. I’ll get back your mother’s things and pay off your sister’s debt. It’ll be fine, I promise.”
“It won’t be fine!” Selena shouted in a voice roughened with a hard life and too many cigarettes. “You were too fucking stubborn to share more of this amazing life you’re living, so I ended up screwed over. And now it doesn’t matter because they took Kylie!”
“What?”
Silence bogged the room. Simone sank into the chair next to Selena like her knees had been cut out from under her. The color drained from her face. She looked like she was about to pass out.
Quickly, I crossed to her side and crouched next to her, rubbing a hand up her shaking arm. “Baby. Angel. Simone, look at me.”
The fear etched across those beautiful features made something tighten deep in my chest. “Brendan?” One of her hands flattened over her sternum, like her heart needed to be kept in place.
I continued to rub her arm, pulling her closer on the rolling chair. “It’s going to be okay, angel. I’m going to fix this, I promise.”
“Oh? You going to go out and find my daughter?”
I turned to Selena, keeping a hand on Simone’s knee. I was ready to shove the woman back into the elevator, missing kid or not. Unfortunately for her, I’d grown up with three siblings whose shitty personalities would kick her smarmy ass in a heartbeat.
“I’ll do what I need to do,” I told her evenly. “Which means you need to tell me exactly who the fuck is blackmailing you. Don’t bullshit me and don’t leave anything out.”
My words hung heavy in the air between us. Simone grabbed my hand and squeezed—in stress or gratitude, I wasn’t sure. But I squeezed back, glad I could give her at least that.
“They want your company.”
I was sure I’d misheard her. “Come the fuck again?”
“You heard me.” Selena threw her hands into the air. “I know it sounds insane, but I swear to God, that’s what Ezra said.”
“Ezra who?” I demanded, though an eerie awareness already tingled on the back of my neck.
“Ezra Huntington.” This time it was Simone who spoke, the words soft and monotone, almost like she was numbed.
I sat back on my heels, head spinning. “Ezra Huntington is the loan shark who took your sister for a ride?”
Simone looked confused. “You know Ezra Huntington?”
I huffed. “I—yes, I do. His family has been real estate developers in the Northeast for years. But junior fucked up one too many times a while back, and his dad kicked him to the curb. He’s been trying to get back into his good graces ever since.”
I stopped there because if these were the same people, Selena was in a lot more trouble than I realized.
Yes, I knew the Huntingtons well. They’d been in competition with my family for years over real estate deals, but also over some darker sides of doing business that were usually Ronan’s territory.
Some of Bas Huntington’s associates spent as much time in Vegas as my brother did and probably because they were greasing the same mafia-minded wheels that Ronan did his level best to keep spinning on our behalf.
The real question was how a girl from a Vermont farm had gotten mixed up with their kind.
“We went to high school with Ezra,” Simone said. “In Woodstock.”
“That’s right,” I said more to myself than to the girls. “Bas has a big house in Vermont where he stowed his wife and kids.”
“Who’s Bas?” Simone asked.
“Ezra’s father. He’s done business with mine.” I turned to Selena. “So you and Ezra are, what, friends?” I very much doubted that if he’d taken her kid.
“It wasn’t a big deal,” Selena said. “We ran into each other at a bar back home and got to talking. I floated him a business plan, and he offered to invest.”
And so it fell out. An idiotic scheme for a psychedelic mushroom business, of all things. The predictable failure of said business. The loan Huntington wanted repaid with interest as soon as possible or else he promised to fuck up her life.
Which he would, of course. The Huntingtons were dirty businesspeople.
Rumors of illegal activities to buttress their real estate investments had abounded for years.
I had no problem imagining the profits Ezra Huntington saw when he looked at a beautiful woman like Selena Bishop.
There were all sorts of markets for someone who looked like her.
Or a daughter who would grow into a spitting image of her mother. Or her aunt.
It was a neat little package of fucked up.
A few minutes later, Simone looked like she wanted to sink into the floor from embarrassment, and I was ready to stop hearing this woman’s irritating voice.
“So when exactly did this cross over to taking my company?” I cut into a long tangent about how she left her kid alone for ten minutes to take a smoke break because she just had to get some peace and quiet from her four-year-old.
“Just fucking listen, okay?” Selena snapped.
I glared, and she had the decency to shudder and continue in a slightly more subdued voice.
“I went to Ezra’s office in Rhode Island to make the payment with the jewelry—”
“Oh my God, Sel, you were going to give him Mom’s jewelry?” Simone cut in.
“No, Miss Perfect, I pawned them first. Happy?”
My muscles coiled, ready to tell Selena to get the fuck out for talking to Simone like that again, but Simone’s hand on my wrist kept me in place.
We needed to hear the rest.
“Anyway,” Selena went on, “I had Kylie with me because I didn’t have anywhere else to take her.”
“What about Ginny?” I asked through my teeth. “I sent her to help.”
“Who? Oh, you mean Mary Poppins. I told her to scram when she started suggesting I get rid of my gummies. Excuse me for using perfectly legal modes of chilling the fuck out.”
Simone sucked in a breath, and I joined her, though I was pretty sure the grip I had on Simone’s thigh was going to leave a bruise if her sister went on like this.
“Anyway, the maid took Kylie to do some coloring or some shit while Ezra and I talked. I didn’t think anything of it…”
“Keep going,” I prompted her, my heart sinking into my stomach. It was like listening to the part of a horror story where a couple enters a deserted cabin in the woods.
“He told me he knew about you two. And then he said that if my twin sister was getting married to someone who had ‘fucked with him for the last time,’ then he needed a piece of the pie you’d already taken. I asked what he meant by that, and he said he wants part of Blackguard Holding.”
“That’s fuckin’ absurd,” I said. “I’ve never done business with Ezra Huntington. Ever.”
“That’s what I said!” Selena cried. “But then, he pointed out the window, and I saw this gorilla-sized dude taking Kylie from the maid and leading her to a van. I tried to leave, but they’d locked me in!”
“Selena, my God.” Simone pressed a hand to her mouth as a tear slid down her face.
“All I could do was listen. He took all the money, and then he told me not to go to the cops or he’d kill me and Kylie. And then said I had to come straight to you with his demands or I’d never see Kylie again.”
By the time she was done, her tears were streaming freely again, along with the rest of her makeup.
Well, I couldn’t judge her crying. She’d just lost her own kid, after all.
“Can they do that?” Simone questioned me more than her sister.
“The Huntingtons play by their own rules,” I acknowledged grimly. “Tell me exactly what they want.”
Selena reached into the pocket of her too-tight jeans and handed me a piece of folded-up paper. “He wrote them down. He wants a private meeting with you.”
Simone and I read the note together.
Ezra Huntington had some fucking stones. To begin with, he was demanding things that would require more than just me to acquire. A board seat, for one. Billions in company shares, plus a whole lot more money that even I didn’t have liquid.
Simone’s face broke. Something in my chest broke with it.
“I’ll take care of all this.” I stood up and shoved the paper into my pocket.
“I promise you, I will get your niece back, all right? They won’t hurt her—she’s collateral.
In the meantime, Simone, show Selena one of the guestrooms, all right?
” I hated to keep this viper in my house one second longer, but the truth was, she was more of a liability outside.
“Really?” Even through those so-called tears, Selena’s eyes lit up as she looked around my office.
What did the luxury of my penthouse matter at a time like this? She could not have been more different from Simone if she tried.
“Thank you,” Simone murmured as she stood beside me.
I slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her close. It was the least I could do, but not just because I wanted her to stop looking so sad.
The reality was that this was a lot more complicated than she or Selena knew.
Because what they didn’t know was that after a week of trying, I had finally been able to get through to the LLC buying the bad mortgages and had managed to repurchase the farm’s mortgage back for a stupidly high price from none other than The Huntington Group, owned by Bas Huntington and his good-for-nothing son, Ezra.