Chapter 23
What kind of self-control do you have to have to work at a packaging bubble factory?
— Brecken’s secret thoughts
brECKEN
After a fight for my life in the bathroom, I’d arrived in the kitchen to find all of Shasha’s family gone, and my brothers on the couch watching a soccer game.
My sisters were in the kitchen putting away leftovers, and I joined them, helping them clean up.
“They are all gone?” I asked.
“You were gone for an hour, honey.” JJ side-eyed me. “You expected them to stay that long after dessert with the one man that tied them to this place gone?”
“No.” My shoulders slumped. “I hate my body sometimes.”
“You know, you could also try this novel idea…” McCoy started.
I flipped her off. “Listen, none of you have any idea how sucky it is to give up cheese and milk. Eggs and whatever else makes my stomach hate me. You guys only have a mild version of this. It’s nearly impossible to give up everything that you love. So don’t judge me on it if you’re not going to try to do it yourselves.”
“She has you there,” JJ pointed out.
“Why are y’all cleaning this up when there are four capable men on the couch in there that didn’t cook at all?” I asked as I took over the pot washing from McCoy.
“Because they suck at washing dishes and leave food behind, and you know how I hate that,” McCoy explained.
“That doesn’t mean that they couldn’t be in here putting the food away,” I pointed out.
“The last time they put the food away from one of our family dinners, all they did was stick the pot in the fridge instead of putting it into Tupperware,” JJ said as she licked her finger clean after condensing pies into one pie pan.
She handed me the dirty pie plates and I got to washing those next.
“Weaponized incompetence is bullshit,” I said. “One day, they’ll meet a great lady, and then where will they be?”
“Up Shit Creek.” McCoy’s eyes gleamed. “Hey, do you want to go out to the barn with me?”
I grimaced. “Actually, no. I want to go find out what, exactly, is going on at Shasha’s place. Do y’all remember me telling you about the teacher that was being abused?”
“Yes,” they both answered at once.
I gave them a quick rundown of the situation, ending with, “And now he’s at Shasha’s house, and I really want to figure out why.”
“Take the farm truck,” McCoy suggested. “I’ll get the new ranch hand I hired to give me a ride to it tomorrow.”
“Thanks.” I smiled. “I’ll see you guys later. You killed it with dinner tonight. Even though it killed me.”
And might still kill me later.
But I hoped that wouldn’t happen.
Sadly, sometimes it did…
“Love you,” they both said as I gave them quick hugs.
In the living room, I jumped over the side of the couch and landed on Tibbs and Bronc, causing them both to let out whooshes of air.
They’d seen me coming, though.
I’d learned my lesson when I’d snuck up on them accidentally, then tried to jump on them much the same way that I’d just done, only for Ryler to throw me three feet in the air and Tibbs to body slam me to the ground as if they’d planned it.
I’d broken two ribs in the process, and they’d nearly cried when they’d seen what they’d done to me.
I’d felt horrible for it, too, realizing that I probably shouldn’t sneak up on grown men that were specially trained in the military to be ghosts.
“Fuck,” Bronc groaned as he pushed me off him and toward Ryler.
Ryler kept pushing me, too, right into Holden.
Holden wrapped his arms around me and squeezed until I couldn’t breathe.
I bit him on the neck, causing him to yelp and push me toward Tibbs.
I hugged him, kissed him on the cheek, and said, “Love y’all.”
After hearing a chorus of “you, too” from them, I headed outside to the farm truck.
Then I turned around and ran up to my old room and grabbed enough clothes to get me through a day at school and a weekend at Shasha’s.
The jeans would be a little tight, but luckily none of them had holes, making it legal to wear to school.
I’d stop in the office tomorrow and buy a Red Out shirt that I’d been meaning to buy anyway and then wear that as my top.
The wedge heels I was wearing would match perfectly with the red homecoming shirt and look like I’d intentionally meant to match it that well.
After stopping into the kitchen once more to find JJ and McCoy sharing a bottle of wine and letting McCoy know that the truck would be at Shasha’s tomorrow, I headed out to the truck and to Shasha’s.
In all, Shasha had been gone for over an hour by the time I arrived, but likely only at the house itself for forty-five minutes.
When I pulled into the street, red and blue lights were strobing through the darkness.
I spotted Shasha instantly, his arms crossed tightly across his chest, as he watched with a blank look as a tall, well-dressed man that was likely Gabriel shouted at him with four cops separating the two men.
There was an elderly couple and a younger woman off to the side, watching but not entering into the fray near the fence.
Two of Shasha’s men, only one of whom I recognized, were standing at the closed gate, watching everything.
Their eyes were a whole lot less blank than their boss’s eyes.
They looked furious, and I wondered what’d gone down in the last forty-five minutes.
I pulled to a stop pretty far back, left my bag, and got out.
Shasha’s eyes locked on mine the moment I exited the truck.
He moved slightly, and I realized that he was positioning himself so that his big body was blocking the angry man from view.
I walked up to him, past a cop that clocked me the moment that I got there as well, and curled into him from behind.
He wrapped one arm around me, his large hand going to my ass to bring me closer to him, and held me there.
I listened as the irate man continued to yell.
“…has my baby, and I want him back!”
“Mr. Stone,” one of the female officers on the scene said. “I realize why you’re here, but an officer has looked through that house as per Mr. Semyonov’s permission. There is no child in there.”
“He has him somewhere!” he yelled out.
“The only woman in there at all is an elderly woman that says she’s the maid. There is no child anywhere. No sign of a child. Not a single toy or baby paraphernalia in sight. There is no child in that house nor looks to have ever been in that house,” the female cop continued.
“I’m telling you, my wife was pregnant when she left, and then when she was hit, she wasn’t. There was no baby,” he continued. “It’s just suspicious that she was on this road at all. But there is no doubt in my mind that there was a reason for her to be on this road in particular. Why else would she have come out here?”
“I’ve already shared with the police months ago when this happened that I have no idea why she was here,” Shasha said. “This is a public road, and I didn’t close on the property on either side of my house until just two months ago. That was well after the accident. That means that she could’ve been here looking at lots of land for all I know. Hundreds of people were on this street looking at those lots.”
“I don’t care what you say, I know you’re…”
Gabriel was interrupted by the quiet officer that’d been observing everything without saying a word.
“Gabriel,” the officer said. “It’s time to go. This is not how you’re going to solve this.”
“I don’t care what you say, Haze. I’m not leaving this time,” Gabriel said. “I’m staying until I get some answers!”
“Your answers aren’t coming,” the officer, Haze, said. “What you will get is trespassed, and then you’ll get arrested if you refuse to leave.”
“Do it,” Gabriel charged.
“Don’t bother,” Shasha interrupted then. “We’ll just go inside. It’s supposed to rain tonight anyway, so he won’t stay long.”
The guard that I didn’t know, but looked vaguely familiar, snorted.
That’s when Gabriel’s attention turned toward me.
I knew the moment he’d recognized me, too.
His eyes narrowed, and despite the darkness, I could see the look of pure calculation in his eyes.
He saw me, and I knew that this was about to go very, very bad.
Because of the few times that I’d met him in person, he’d always been very confrontational toward me because I was a “dumbass blonde.”
At the time of our first meeting, we’d been talking about public safety personnel and their need to stop for buses that had their stop signs out and their blinking red lights on.
I’d argued that firemen had to follow the rules of the road regardless of whether there was an emergency—at least within reason.
And he’d automatically contradicted me because “people were dying while stupid ass kids were getting on the bus.”
I didn’t care who, what, or why. Kids always came first in my book.
I also had a thing about people that didn’t respect it when a kid was loading onto a bus.
Kids were injured and even killed during loading and unloading because of drivers thinking they owned the road and rules didn’t apply to them.
It was one of my hot buttons, and the man that’d called me a “dumbass blonde” had pressed it. Repeatedly.
Needless to say, I was neither a dumbass nor a blonde.
I dyed my blah brown hair to a more appealing dirty blonde that didn’t look too bad when I went eight to ten weeks between appointments because I was a lazy bitch.
But his automatic assumption about my intelligence had rubbed me the wrong way the first time we’d met, and I’d called him on his shit.
Every time from then on I’d seen him, he’d sneered at me like I was a disgusting addition to Viveka’s life that he’d like to scrape off.
Viveka never had, despite Gabriel’s obvious dislike of me.
“What the fuck?” Gabriel snapped. “Now it’s all making fucking sense!”
I blinked at him. “At first, I couldn’t figure out why she would bring the kid to him, and seeing you, it’s all clicking into place. You encouraged Viveka to find this man, didn’t you?”
Well, I was sure how it looked.
But I hadn’t exactly encouraged Viveka to find Shasha in particular. Just a man that would be scary enough to stand up against Gabriel’s scariness and rich enough to withstand a legal battle if the asshole took it that far.
I was happy to find out she’d chosen Shasha, though.
It worked out well for me in the end.
My hand tightened to the tails of Shasha’s shirt, but my spine stiffened.
Before I could go blurting out what I really thought of the asshole, Shasha murmured, “We literally just met. Any circumstantial evidence you’re adding up in your head doesn’t compute. Also, why are you only concerned with the baby here? Let’s talk about the hit-and-run. From what I understand, you used to own a Tesla, correct?”
The quiet officer turned to look at Gabriel then.
He knew about the case.
That was why he was here.
Was he a detective?
If he was, that would make sense of why he was there, just observing, and not actually participating in keeping Gabriel out of Shasha’s face.
Another car started down the road just as the first few sprinkles from tonight’s impending storm started to drop around us.
Seeing as it was now going well past twilight into darkness, there wasn’t much to see besides the headlights as they came to a stop behind my truck, and I couldn’t see the figure who was approaching until he was right under the security light that lit up the area in which everything had gone down over the last who knew how long.
He was a tall man and had slightly red, perfectly styled hair.
His eyes were a mossy green, and he was dressed much the same way that Shasha dressed.
He came to a stop closer to Shasha than the man that was causing the disturbance and said, “This is him, Semyonov.”
Shasha blew out a breath. “I know.”
“Why is he here?” he asked.
Gabriel stiffened as he realized they were talking about him.
“He thinks that I have his child, and I don’t,” Shasha said. “He’s been asked to leave multiple times. We were just about to go inside to avoid the storm.”
“I’d like to join you,” he said. “We have some things to discuss on the merger that we’re working on.”
“Oh?” Shasha asked curiously.
“Yes,” the man confirmed.
“Well, gentlemen,” Shasha drawled. “I’m headed inside before the storm releases its fury on us and my beautiful girlfriend melts because she’s made of pure sugar.”
I rolled my eyes but felt a hint of a blush hit my cheeks.
Thank God it was dark, and it hid my embarrassment at being called sweet as sugar.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, to be honest.
It felt like a show, and I wasn’t sure why.
I wasn’t upset about the situation as much as the curiosity was absolutely killing me.
Shasha caught my hand, and the gate behind us opened. The guards, who Shasha addressed as “Artur and Alexi,” stepped into the opening and waited as if they expected the gates to be rushed by the small crowd.
None of them made a move, not even a clearly furious Gabriel.
He’d “made his connections,” and he was angry that he’d been played.
Well, he hadn’t.
But I could definitely see the way it looked.
As we passed, Shasha stopped me with his hand on my hip and said, “Keys, Kisa .”
I scrunched up my nose.
“They’re in the truck still,” I admitted.
I mean, the truck was so old and smelled like cow shit that none of us bothered bringing in the keys.
We could park it in the middle of the worst neighborhood in Dallas and it would still be there when we got back.
Shasha handed the larger of the two men, Alexi, his keys and then said, “Cayden’s keys are with him.”
“Thanks, Alexi,” Cayden said from behind me.
So that was who he was.
I was glad to see that he was okay, although he still had obvious bruises and abrasions.
We made it inside before the bottom dropped out of the sky, but only barely.
Poor Cayden’s back ended up getting soaked, but he didn’t seem to mind as he followed us inside.
Shasha dragged me through his McMansion into what I assumed was his office, but not before stopping at an older woman and calling out to her.
“Polina,” Shasha said carefully. “Call your daughter and ask her to find an extended vacation for the next month. Tell her I’ll fund the bill and smooth it over with her husband’s boss.”
Polina snorted. “You’re her husband’s boss.”
“True.” Shasha winked. “But still. Get her out of here. I want to deal with this before she comes back.”
“Yes, Shasha.”
We went farther into the office, and Shasha led me to the far wall where his desk chair was and directed me to it.
I took a seat, crossed my legs beneath me, and scooted up until I could put my elbows on the desk.
The two men watched the show, clearly amused.
“What are you doing here?” Shasha asked once I’d settled.
“How much does she know?” he asked.
“All of it,” Shasha answered.
I doubted I knew the half of it, but he was telling Cayden a lie so he’d speak freely in front of me.
I appreciated his thoughtfulness.
“I was coming here to take care of the problem,” he finally said very carefully. “But wasn’t aware that there were cops here.”
“Whatever you do, don’t do it with me around. That detective you saw in his black military garb was a pain in the ass detective who doesn’t want me in his town. He’s already been poking his nose around where it shouldn’t be,” Shasha grumbled.
“What do you take me as, an amateur?” Cayden countered.
I had a feeling they were literally discussing getting rid of Gabriel right in front of me without actually saying the exact words.
It was fascinating.
“I’ll stay until they’re gone.” He took a seat. “Then I’ll get him back to my town.”
That was interesting.
Even more interesting was how Shasha sat on the corner of his desk next to me, keeping himself between Cayden and me.
That made my heart feel all warm and gooey.
“You have the kid?” he asked.
“The girl?” Shasha asked without confirming. “I’m sure she’s somewhere safe.”
His non-answer was enough.
Yes, he had the little girl.
Yes, she was safe.
No, he wasn’t going to tell him any more about her.
My lips twitched.
“Boss.” Alexi came into the room. “They’re gone.”
He tossed three sets of keys and left, leaving us again just as fast as he’d arrived.
Cayden was up seconds later, catching the keys that Shasha lobbed at him. “Be careful, Cayden.”
Cayden’s eyes went a little dark and scary as he said, “Oh, I will be.”