38. Rose
Chapter 38
Rose
“…and perhaps it will be pleasing to have remembered these things one day.” ― Virgil
L oud chimes sounded all around me. I packed away the few crayons I’d stashed in my pocket and kicked the door softly, making sure it wouldn’t slam against the wall as I left the grandfather clock.
It was dinner time—the air smelled of sweet rolls and soup, and my stomach gurgled as I walked down the hall toward the dining room. The sounds of my mother speaking made me halt. I wasn’t supposed to interfere with her on days she worked from home, and today was no exception.
But the sight of another woman as I crept my way across the floor forced my back to the wall.
“You’re sure about this?” my mother whispered. I peeked around the corner long enough to see the woman with blonde curls and long lashes, a dip on her cheek that shone in the sun through the window. When she nodded, the sun moved along her face, leaving half cloaked in shadows. I pulled my head back, hiding behind the hallway wall. “I don’t want you to get hurt. This all has to be kept secret until the trial.”
The woman’s voice cracked. “I know. I’m aware of the risks—”
“The boys—do they know?”
The woman was quick to answer, “No. God, no. I don’t want them involved.”
“They could be good key witnesses, Vi,” my mother suggested softly.
“I said no.” The woman’s voice raised, but not in a way that made me think she was angry at my mom. She sounded like what my mom sounded like when I did something that made her scared—like crossing the street or when she found out I climbed trees with a boy in my class and had almost fallen. I peeked again, squinting my eyes to look at her. She kind of looked like him.
“There are protections we can put into place. They can be safe.”
The lady named Vi shook her head. “He will find them. And when he does”—she made a fist on her lap—“when he does, it won’t be good. Besides, Beckett won’t stand to be separated from his father. He’d grow and find him, and this would all be for nothing.”
My mother’s brow arched. “You wouldn’t consider asking Briggs—”
“Absolutely not. They may be completely opposite, but they share everything.” She hesitated, glancing out the window as she continued, “It will only be me. Their father won’t hurt them. He’s a terrible person, but he’d never…he…oh God, what am I doing, Margot?” Her voice broke as tears fell down her cheeks. “What if he hurts them?”
My mother’s eyes darted to me, and I turned and ran to the kitchen. A few minutes later, the woman hugged my mother before leaving, and then my mom came to sit at the dining room table. Her cheeks were red, her eyes puffy. I wanted to ask her what was wrong, but I knew she’d caught me snooping, and I didn’t want to get in trouble. She was a good mom but much more stern than my dad.
Her eyes slid to me, and a soft smile replaced the anger and sadness I thought I saw.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Steady sounds filled the kitchen, and a tightness formed in my chest. It felt like someone was squeezing me.
Beep. Beep.
I looked around, confused. The kitchen began to fade, along with my dad, who was standing by the stove, and my mom, who was sitting at the dining room table across from me. My side began to burn—the grandfather clock now inches from me. One moment, I was sitting, the next, I was crawling along the floor.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
“Run, Rose!” Loud bangs and screams pierced my ears as my body fought to make its way to safety. My mind froze, and my side burned more. Flames roared in front of me, but still, I crawled through. Everything hurt—my chest, my head, my nose as I breathed through the heavy smoke.
My skin felt like it was being ripped apart.
Beep. Beep.
That sound…it hadn’t ever been in here before. I reached for the clock and struggled to get inside enough to close the door. It was hot in the space but calmed my mind as I rocked back and forth, covering my ears and humming to myself as the temperature climbed.
Beep.
I reached for my side, expecting the pain to be there, my sharp breaths and pounding heart clawing their way through my tense body. All of that pain was replaced by another as I took in the room and the man beside me.
“He was just awake for a minute there.”
I cleared the damp hair from my forehead and turned along the hospital bed, careful not to move Briggs’ arm and the wires attached to him. Dean was sitting with his head propped up on his hands, his forehead wrinkling as he watched me readjust myself. I was still in the dress from the night before, only now, it had red splotches coating my chest and abdomen.
“Here.” He passed me a cup, and as I sniffed it, he chuckled. “It’s just water. ”
“Was hoping it was something stronger.” I took a sip, then set the cup down on the table beside the bed. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” His thumbs twiddled together. “I didn’t know…fuck.” He scraped his hands down his face, then spread his arms along the back of the couch as he leaned back. “I didn’t know you were the girl. I never got names or faces, just a story.” I watched him for a bit longer as he peered out the window where the morning sun was rising. “He gets them too, you know.”
“What?”
Dean jutted his chin at me as he turned back around. “The nightmares. Kind of hard not to hear you shouting about a fire when I’m sitting right here.”
I threaded my fingers through Briggs’. “He told me he was there.” I assumed, at this point, that Dean knew exactly what I was talking about. He knew what Briggs had gone through, so surely he knew what his business partner had done. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure. Anything.”
I started tracing the vines along Briggs’ arm, focusing on them more than my question that I already knew the answer to. “What was Briggs’ mother’s name?”
“Victoria,” Dean replied.
I sighed. “She went by Vi, right?”
Dean blinked. “Yeah. How’d you—”
“Rose,” Briggs murmured, moving his hand to splay across my stomach as he tried to pull me to his front.
My chest swelled, and I turned to face him, being less careful about the wires this time. I stared up at him like I thought I’d never hear his voice again—because that’s what I thought the moment the gun went off. The moment he turned to take the bullet that had been meant to kill me.
“Baby,” he whispered, cupping my cheek with his hand and brushing away the tears with his thumb. “I’m okay.”
“You’re not okay. You were shot,” I replied. He chuckled, then coughed, which made him shudder in pain. “You need to rest more and don’t move an inch. The doctor said—”
“I don’t care what the doctor said.” He moved to shuffle down lower, then grasped my chin and pressed his lips to mine. “I’ll move if I want to.”
Dean cleared his throat. “Maybe not too much, yeah? Unless you want to rip open all those sutures they put in you.”
Briggs held my gaze and smiled at me. “Rose could have done a better job.”
I rolled my eyes. “Please. I was freaking out watching you being rolled away from me. My hands would have been too shaky to do anything.”
“I heard you performed CPR until they arrived.” His thumb brushed my bottom lip. “I think you would have done a great job.”
I looked at the gauzy white bandage that covered an almost fatal shot. “It should have been me with the battle scar, not you.”
His eyes darkened. “No, it should have been him.” His eyes snapped to Dean. “Where is he?” Briggs started to lift from the bed, grunting in pain but still moving until he was two beats away from standing.
“You have to stay still and rest,” Dean urged .
“I can rest when he’s dead,” Briggs growled. “Where the fuck is he?”
I put a hand on the part of his chest that wasn’t injured, drawing his attention back to me. “He ran after I grabbed your gun and tried to shoot him.”
His brows shot up. “You did what?”
“I thought he killed you, and I was so mad and hurt that I grabbed your gun from the floor and tried to shoot him. Turns out I have terrible aim.” I laughed, whereas Briggs did not.
“That’s reckless, Rose. You could have been hurt. He could have shot you.”
I shrugged. “He already tried to shoot me, remember? And you blocked him, you big idiot. Why the hell would you take a bullet for me?”
He gripped my chin, his touch warm. “Because I fucking love you, Rose. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you.” He kissed me again, stealing the breath from my lungs. I was still dazed as he stood and started ripping the taped cords from his arms and chest.
“Briggs, sit your ass back down. Wherever he went, you won’t be finding him in your condition,” Dean said, standing from the couch and moving to block the door Briggs was eyeing. “I think we need to talk about why your father wants her dead so badly.”
“He thinks Rose is a threat to me taking over the company. Seems pretty straightforward to me.” Briggs clenched his fists at his sides and reluctantly sat back down beside me. A nurse rushed in, sneering at Briggs until he held his arms out for her to fix the mess of cords he left on the floor. “He’s pissed he can’t force me to marry someone else, and he has it in his head that your daughter is the only acceptable choice so I can run the entire company.”
Dean snorted. “I told him a long time ago that was never going to work out.”
But they were wrong. All of it was wrong. “Your mom and my mom were working together.”
His hands cupped my neck, his thumbs smoothing the line of my jaw as his forehead scrunched in confusion. “My mom knew your mom?” I watched as those magnificent gears in his head started to turn.
I bit down on my lip in thought, then glanced between Briggs and Dean. “Yeah. I think they were friends before, too. She was at their wedding, and there’s an M and a V carved into the floors at my grandparents’ house in her old bedroom. Her voice is the same in my dream and in the video.” I paused, collecting my thoughts. “They went deeper than working together. They must have been really good friends, and that’s why your mom trusted my mom as a lawyer to confide in.”
“Victoria grew up here. Your father didn’t,” Dean said pointedly. “They could have easily been friends without him knowing at first.”
Briggs adjusted himself on the bed, trying to hide the pain he was in as he took my hand. “I don’t usually hear what they’re saying—mostly, the nightmare is the fire and nothing more, but now I think…I think I know what they were talking about. At least, some of it. ”
Briggs’ eyes darted between mine. “He said there were two. He wasn’t talking about you at all, was he? He meant our moms, didn’t he?”
I nodded again. “Your mom was talking about you and Beck and using one of you as a witness. She was scared, Briggs. I don’t think she wanted to do what she was doing but felt she had no choice.”
“My mom left us in January, almost two months after the fire.” Briggs turned his attention to Dean. “Do you know where my mom went all those years ago?”
Dean was silent for a beat, his shoes tapping along the tile. “I know she’s alive. As for where, I’m not sure. That’s the whole point of entering yourself into the witness protection program.”
Briggs’ eyes widened. “You knew she ran because of this?”
Dean raised his voice. “Because of this? No. I knew she ran, and I knew she wasn’t fucking traceable. I put two-and-two together. Victoria was a self-preservationist, and when your father—”
“Your best friend ,” Briggs pointed out.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Briggs. He’s hardly anything to me beyond the partner in a business I now want to see you at the head of, seeing as you’re willing. For all I care, you can put that bullet in your father like you want. I don’t give a damn. He overstepped when he started beating you. I’m not currently sitting here for him, now am I?”
“You want the company?” I asked, surprised the first thing from my mouth wasn’t about shooting his father. It’s funny how once someone comes after your life and the lives of the ones you love, you can suddenly justify someone else ending theirs. But that feeling went away almost immediately—it was wrong to take a life. That wasn’t a decision either of us should make.
“All I want is you,” Briggs answered, and my heart swelled. “Business is what I know and am good at, and if I decide to leave it down the road, at least I know I had a hand at turning the VanAndrews name around.” He leaned in, pressing his forehead to mine, the next words spoken low and meant only for us to hear. “As long as I can come home to you for the rest of my life, I’ll be the happiest man alive.”
He turned his focus back to Dean as goosebumps flooded my skin. “What could her mother and my mother possibly have on him or the company all those years ago that was kept hidden for this long?”
Dean pressed his elbows to his knees as he leaned forward on the couch, two fingers tapping his lips. “The amount of things your father dips his hands into started becoming too difficult to follow a long time ago.” Briggs looked less than pleased with that answer, a dark storm brewing in his eyes as he leaned back. “I’ve been trying to sort out a few things myself lately.”
“So, what do we do now?”