Chapter 38
Itucked my feet underneath me in the wide, luxurious plane seat.
Presley had put a pin in my explanation back in the hangar, insisting we went back to the hotel so I could shower, eat something and rest.
Now that we were forty-thousand feet in the air on our way home, the three of them stared at me expectantly.
Pres took my hand from where he sat in the chair beside me. “You need to tell us everything, Sass.”
Sinclair and Dacre were seated facing us, their concern etched on both their faces.
Dacre leaned forward, elbows pressed to his knees. “You can trust us, you know that.”
I scrubbed a hand over my face, breathing in the scent of Presley from his hoodie, which I was wearing. Presley’s navy hoodie, Sinclair’s grey sweats, and Dacre’s black boxers. I’d wanted casual clothes for the flight home and each of them had offered me a piece of themselves. I didn’t care that I was swimming in them, it brought me comfort when I needed it most.
“The men who took me work for my father. The attack walking home that day, the one outside the club. It’s been my father trying to get to me this whole time.”
The three of them shared hard glances.
“He’s been sending me letters. Threats, really.”
Sinclair’s eyes darkened. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I was scared, Sin. I didn’t know how to ask for help.” I stared down at my hands. “I’ve been weighed down with this secret, this looming business deal of my father’s, for as long as I can remember. Talking about it openly is new for me.” I glanced at each of them. “Having people I can rely on is new for me.”
Presley brushed a thumb over the back of my hand and Dacre reached out to give my knee a reassuring squeeze. Sinclair stared at me, his expression locked down. I wanted to reach for him, to crawl into his lap and beg him to tell me what he was thinking.
He’d been quieter than the others when we’d gone back to the hotel. And again on the way to the airport. I wanted him to open up to me. I’d pry him open with a rusty screwdriver if that’s what it took.
“We know who your father is. He owns a chain of commercial businesses in Seattle,” Dacre said, shifting in his seat.
My gaze shot to him. “How do you know that?”
Presley leaned closer, like he wanted to hold me but wasn’t sure I’d let him. “We looked into you.”
“Byron looked into your father before he proposed to your mother,” Sinclair said. “He wanted to make sure your father wouldn’t become a problem. I used my company to look into you the week before you arrived. The investigator returned a lot of information, mostly about your father and his businesses, same as Byron’s.”
I stared down at my hands in my lap. “Those businesses are just a front.”
“For what?” Dacre asked.
“For his other ones.”
I didn’t need to spell it out for them.
“My father is involved with some seriously shady people. He does deals, makes promises, sometimes ones he can’t keep, which leads him to make other deals to get himself out of them.” I paused, biting the inside of my cheek. “I was one of those deals.”
Dacre brushed a hand over my knee again. “Tell us what the hell is going on, Dempsey.”
I sighed, blowing out a long breath. “Two years ago, my father made some deals, getting himself in deeper than he’d ever been with some seriously shady guys. He was looking down the barrel of more than one gun and he only had one thing to offer to buy his way out.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, chancing a glance at each of them. None of them spoke, no one urging me to go on, letting me get there in my own time.
“The only way to get him out of his dodgy deals alive was to offer up his only daughter as collateral. He wanted to unite our family with one of the biggest crime families in Seattle, tie us to them in a permanent way.”
Sinclair’s hard voice cut through the silence. “With marriage?”
I nodded, tugging on the sleeves of Presley’s hoodie so I could sink further into it. “The benefits for my father were endless. The family had the means to help him with his deals. His reputation would grow, which meant so would his reach in his underworld.”
“But what did it mean for you?” Dacre asked, eyes narrowed on me.
I huffed a humorless laugh. “It meant I’d be married off to their only son. A man with the most vicious reputation that people feared him just by name.” I glanced out the window, lost in my head. “He’s apparently only twenty-three or four, but he’s been feared in the Seattle crime world since he was fourteen.”
Presley’s thumb rubbed soothingly across the back of my hand once more. “What does that mean?”
I glanced at him. “That he beats the shit out of anyone who crosses him or gets in his way. He’s known to kill off his enemies with ruthless efficiency. There was a story that did the rounds about a guy who tried to break into the family’s compound to steal from them and he beheaded him right there on the marble tiles of the entryway without uttering a word. There are endless stories from women he’s been with claiming he beat them during their time together because they didn’t get him off how he wanted. He’s violent for the sake of being violent, just because he can be.”
Another glance passed between the three of them.
My voice trembled as I went on. “I begged my father not to force me into a marriage with him. He was guaranteeing me a life of pain and torture if he forced me to be with their son. But my father cared more about his standing in their world than he did about me being married to someone who was likely to beat me bloody if I burned his eggs in the morning.”
Dacre’s face pinched tight with anger. “You never met him face to face?”
I shook my head. “I’ve never laid eyes on him. My father made sure of it by barely letting me out of the house other than to go to school or swim meets. He tried to keep me as separate from his world as possible, tried to hide me away at home. He said it upped my stock. The more innocent and unobtainable I seemed, the higher price he could get for me. Like I was a piece of livestock he was selling at auction.”
It was partly why I’d been so willing to hook up with Trenton or a random waiter at my mother’s wedding. It was an act of pure defiance against my parents.
Silence hung over us, only the sounds of the plane engine as it sped across the ocean.
Dacre sat back in his chair, clearly lost in his own head as he stared out the window. Presley glanced between each of us, while Sinclair’s hard stare remained locked on me.
“How did you get away from your father? You and Beatrice?” he asked eventually.
My lips twisted as I mulled over how much to tell him. “There was a shooting. I was out with some friends at the mall when someone had taken shots at us. They were clearly aiming for me, which meant I’d become a true pawn in my father’s world. I went straight home to my mother, told her what happened, and begged her to save my life.” I picked at the sleeve of Presley’s hoodie. “She would have stayed with him. Would have died at his side if I hadn’t begged with everything I had for her to get us out of there.”
I shook my head at the memory. At just how much pleading it had taken to get her to put me first.
“She eventually relented. Packed our bags and stashed them in the back of the closet. We crept out in the middle of the night while my father slept.”
Sinclair’s brow pinched. “If you’re so valuable, you didn’t think he’d try to come after you?”
“Oh, he would have. Except my mother left him a note with a key to a safety deposit box at a bank downtown. Inside that box was everything she had on him. She was his spouse for more than a decade, she had everything she needed to bury him. She said if he came after us—came after me—she’d bury him.”
None of it mattered now that he’d blown up the bank with the safety deposit box inside. That life insurance policy was long gone, and my mother had no idea.
Presley’s brows rose, mildly impressed with my mother’s moxie. And it had been impressive. Until she’d sold me out for a rich husband.
“It put him off for a while. For a few years actually. But then my mom met your dad and everything changed. It was like a switch flicked the moment my mother met Byron. She cared less about me and more about being Byron Aston’s new wife. My father knew it, too. Knew my mother wouldn’t risk her new life and social standing in order to save me again, so he grew bold.” I ran a hand through my hair, shoving down the resentment I had for my mother the moment she sold me out for the payday of a lifetime. “Straight after the wedding, the letters started, telling me to come home or he was coming for me.”
Dacre swore, shaking his head. “You should have told us.”
“I didn’t know you then. I didn’t know I could trust you or that I’d come to feel the way I do about you. If the letters started tomorrow, I’d come to you without hesitation. But when they started, I was totally alone.”
Silence descended again. This time unnerving.
“Before I came here, I had a plan,” I said, staring out the window. “I was going to get some money together and go on the run. Start a life somewhere my father wouldn’t be able to find me.” I glanced up, taking in each of them. Each seemed riddled with worry. “Once I got here, I just wanted him to leave me alone. I never expected to fall for each of you the way I did. Never expected to ever feel this way about anyone, let alone all three of you. And then the idea of leaving started to eat away at me, even though I knew if I stayed, I was putting all of us at risk.”
“Fuck the risk,” Sinclair said. “I’ll kill your father with my bare fucking hands if I have to.”
Presley nodded. “There’s no way in hell you’re marrying that asshole, Sass.”
Dacre got to his feet. He leaned down, hand sliding into my hair, and he pressed a kiss to my forehead.
“You’re ours, Dempsey.” His eyes blazed with anger. “And nobody is going to hurt what belongs to us.”