Chapter 23
Islap my hands over my mouth to keep from crying out. One wrong move, one overly loud sound, and they’ll know I”m here, that I’ve heard every single word. I hadn’t wanted Marcus to see me pull up to the house, not when I’ve been crying, and thought I’d have a better chance of slipping inside if I parked at the end of the driveway and walked.
Too distracted by grief, too distracted by love to want to talk to him or see his face and have to make up excuses for the tear stains. I’ll have to tell him how I feel eventually. I thought of all the ways to do it on the walk up the short drive, of all the ways Marcus might shut me down.
Sneaky.
I’m not the only sneaky one.
Tears continue to leak down my face, and no matter how hard I bite down on my lip, the pain doesn’t stop them. Not only from earlier, but from the conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear. Parker and his goons are here, at my house, and staring them down is the lone knight guarding the gate to the kingdom.
He’s as gorgeous as ever. Then again, they say the devil was the most beautiful angel once.
“Shut your goddamn mouth,” Marcus snaps.
“Me? You’ve got fucking brass balls to be pissed at me when you’re the reason the Stones are six feet under.” To make matters worse, Parker starts to laugh, loudly, broadly.
Did my misery become his joke?
“Oh, Marcus. Does it torment you? Knowing what you know now? No.” Parker’s laughter dwindles off to nothing. “Not you. You’re stone cold at the heart of you, nothing but a brute who terrorizes others for his own ill-gotten gain.”
“Say it again, and I’ll break more than your nose this time,” Marcus replies.
The men continue to argue with each other, their voices lifting louder and louder until it’s impossible to miss even a syllable.
You were supposed be on the plane.
My parents died because of Marcus.
Because someone wanted to make him pay for whatever he’d done in the past, or whatever they thought they’d done. Except his life wasn’t the only one impacted—mine had been irrevocably changed.
I’ve spent all this time since the crash trying to get back to some kind of normal, even though it’s impossible to go backward. My old life is gone.
What did Marcus do that was so bad someone wanted him dead?
You don’t know him at all.
Apparently not. He’s always been closed lipped about his past, saying he chooses to focus on the future rather than get mired down in the muck he came from. He and Parker are cut from the same cloth. Creeps and liars.
I scrub my hands over my eyes until they burn, but the tears keep coming. What the hell am I supposed to do now? It’s not like I can go back to not knowing. My parent’s plane crash hadn’t been an accident.
On purpose.
Someone chose to send them shooting down, chose to let their lives end in fire and pain.
The knowledge starts to eat me up one bite at a time, hollowing out my insides until I’m an empty maw of suffering.
I clutch my stomach, but the pain refuses to ease. Had Mom and Dad known about Marcus and his checkered past and still chose to bring him on as their manager? As mine? I had to believe they wouldn’t have made him my guardian if they thought I’d be in any kind of real danger.
But Parker is here, and he clearly means business.
It’s too much.
Too much to know, too much to handle.
“Look at you. You barely blinked when you found out. How did you manage to stay off the plane that day, if you don’t mind me asking? Did you make up some excuse?” Parker asks.
“Stop it,” Marcus urges in a low voice.
“Or what?”
The image I have in my head is the two of them face to face, barely an inch to spare between them, both ready to throw hands. Both ready to attack the other.
“I really am curious to know how you managed. Maybe you had something better to do, or maybe you knew the Family hasn’t been happy with you since your departure.”
“I got out fair and square.”
“There’s no such thing as fair,” Parker snaps. “There is only payment for the rest of your miserable life, and yours was supposed to end. Does Empire have any idea your extracurricular activities caused her Mommy and Daddy to die? Think she”d still look at you the way she does when she finds out?”
My chest constricts until the band around my heart and ribs is too tight and I can’t breathe. Every inhalation is a struggle, and only the barest minimum air leaks out of me. Into me. I shift out of the crouch and a branch cracks. One of the goons shifts to stare in my direction, and I go still, waiting for him to turn back around.
The others are too engrossed in their argument to care when I scuttle around toward the back of the house and the door I know is unlocked.
Sneaking back inside is easier than getting control of myself. No matter how hard I try, I”m so far from calm, it’s making me sick. I stop halfway around the side of the house as I hear Marcus snap something that sounds like my name.
It takes me that long to realize I no longer hear the two of them fighting. Whatever sort of yelling match they’d started ended abruptly.
“Not Empire. No.”
He’s definitely talking about me, but his voice is too low for me to have any idea what he’s saying. I pause, my knees in the dirt, hands in front of me to keep steady.
There’s a pause, and then Marcus answers, “Non-negotiable, I’m afraid.”
He’s on the phone.
But I haven’t heard the crunch of tires or anything, so Parker is still here. Who is Marcus talking to? Who the hell would he have stopped to call right now? Not Sherry.
It strikes me how little I know about him. The man I love, the one I claim to love, is nothing but astranger to me. I have to get out of there before he realizes I’ve been listening, but it’s impossible to make myself move.
“If we’re going to work together, I need to be assured of her safety. Yes. Yes, I ‘m willing to do whatever you need me to do,” Marcus murmurs. “Parker? He’s still here.” He pauses for a beat before saying, “Yes, it’s not a problem.”
I strain to hear him and try to figure out who the hell is on the other end of that call.
“Well, what do we have here?”
The rest of the breath drives out of my body when two massive arms wrap around my torso and yank me backward. My feet kick against open air, my body bent back at an odd angle.
“We’ve got a little mouse sneaking around, trying to hear things she’s not ready to hear, huh?” The man’s breath is hot on my ear. Goosebumps erupt down my arms and along my shoulders as he drags me out of the bushes into the open. “What did you hear?”
“Let go of me! Let go.” I kick and again find no purchase.
He squeezes hard enough to quiet those words and I gasp, struggling against his hold. He’s got me from the back, his arms across my chest tighter than a straitjacket, my legs far enough away from his body to ensure he’s safe and I’m ineffective.
“I can see why they’re so taken with you,” the goon continues, waddling toward the back door. “You’re even prettier in person. And eighteen. You’re legal.”
I struggle against his hold, but nothing I do helps.
He throws me over his shoulder to free up an arm, the jolt of his bone into my ribs making me go temporarily still while he opens the sliding glass doors. Unlocked.
Why are they unlocked?
The goon strides through the house like he owns the place and unerringly finds his way to the office where the two men must have moved their conversation.
“Nice, sweet ass, too.” The man slaps me across one cheek and then the other on his way down the hall. “It’s a shame you’re untouchable.”
He angles through the open door and drops me to the floor, his hand fisted in my hair and pulling painfully before I have a chance to escape.
“Look like we have a visitor,” he tells the others. “Were you expecting her home so early?”
I look up and meet Marcus’ eyes, then Parker’s, who looks gleeful at the interruption.
“Perfect timing, Empire,” he murmurs. “Won’t you have a seat and join us?” He snaps his fingers, and the man slowly untangles himself from me.
I grit my teeth against the pain, still crying, still panicked. The man shoves me into the empty chair in front of my father’s desk. Marcus maintains eye contact through the conversation with whoever is on the other end of the phone.
“What did you hear?” Parker asks while we both wait for Marcus to finish up.
I shake my head, dropping my gaze to the ground and refusing to answer him.
“Oh, come now. I’m sure there’s a lot you want to say to me, all of it trapped in your throat. Should I try my hand at getting those words to dislodge?”
Shock has me glancing up at him, mouth wide.
“Ah, there. I had a gut feeling, but you’ve proved it to me,” Parker replies smugly. “How many times has he shoved his tongue between those lips of yours, Empire? I knew there was more going on than the whole guardian-ward relationship he tried to sell me.”
I snap my attention to Marcus, and he’s still looking at me, his face giving nothing away. Rather than give Parker anymore ammunition against me, I swipe my hand underneath my eyes, and my skin comes away smeared with makeup.
Pangs of cold radiate up from my knees. I lean forward, shuddering at the sensation, at the harsh bits of emotion inside of me, scraping at my insides.
That little bit of movement has the goon stepping toward me once again, but Marcus hisses a low warning, and I lift my brows when the man stops.
“He thinks his little call is going to make all the difference,” Parker says. “As though it’s as simple as that. He values your life more than anyone else”s, you know. Even his own, if you choose to believe him.”
I frown. “Why can’t you leave us alone?”
“It’s not as simple as you’d like to believe. It never is once you pull back the curtain. It’s time for you to stop living in the shadows, little girl. Time to see what really makes the world tick, and it’s not sunshine and rainbows,” Parker replies.
No, it’s not. It’s death and fire and bits of metal slashing through trees and digging into dirt.
Marcus prowls behind the desk, his gaze on me all the while, but he doesn’t sit. He nods his head once, twice. His lips are thin. “It’s a deal.” He says it loudly and clicks off the phone, setting it on his desk face down.
He braces his palms flat and takes a beat while Parker chuckles beside me.
“I take it that things didn’t go well for you,” he says.
Marcus glances up and captures my gaze once again. Something in his eye seems to beg me to pay attention, to listen. To forgive him. Everything inside of me tenses, and for a brief moment, I wonder if this isn’t another nightmare, and soon I’ll wake up screaming.