5
T
he air in my lungs gushed out of my mouth as soon as I left that hellhole office, as I hadn’t realized that I was holding my breath. The intensity in that room was off the charts, and I had never been so terrified in my life. That man. Mikael Kaiser. Recently released from prison for the murder of Lars Kaiser, my adopted father. It was I who put him in the prison cell and turned the key. Well…I didn’t do it physically, but it was my false confession, forced by the Larsson police, that spurred his arrest.
Mikael Kaiser was my enemy, and he didn’t know that the one person he wanted dead was right before him. The anger that rose from him was a warning of what he was capable of. No one messed with Mikael Kaiser unless you’re stupid or being blackmailed to do so. But that restrained fury was just from using a fake ID to get a job in his club, so I could buy a vehicle to exert my independence. I swore I didn’t know the Kaisers owned this club, just like I didn’t realize the Kaisers were residing here in Gothenburg.
I met my enemy face to face under the protection of my disguise, and I didn’t think he recognized me. Would he remember what I looked like anyway? He didn’t pay me much attention back then, but I had powerful memories of him. Beyond handsome, with a strong Kaiser jaw and black, wavy hair swept back, but his dark eyes missed nothing. That was an attribute of the Kaisers; they noticed everything going around them and had a predatory gaze that quickly noticed shifty behavior.
Sweat poured down the back of my neck as my cheek burned and my glasses blurred from the heat radiating off my skin. I’d never been so terrified in my life. He could kill me with those bare hands, snap my neck, and bury my body in a place where no one will ever find it.
Quickly, I composed myself and calmed my pounding heart by taking deep breaths until my hands stopped trembling. I couldn’t believe I survived being that close to that man, but it concerned me that I might have to do this every dang evening. Perhaps I could ask Betty to give the dinner serving job to someone else. I was prepared to do anything but this. I’d clean the toilets, scrape the fat off the grill, empty ashtrays, crawl on my hands and knees, and pick up lint off the red carpet by hand…anything but being the Kaisers' dinner servant.
Once my head stopped spinning and the heat in my cheeks eased, I wheeled the trolley down the hallway toward the elevator, pushed the button, and waited impatiently for the doors to slide open.
When Ronan opened his office door, I kept my back turned, pretending not to notice. I couldn’t deal with this right now. I honestly didn’t know how long I could keep up the pretense and if Judith the bitch detective, bitchtective will be my new name for her. Not to her face, of course, but in my head or when I was alone. If Bitchtective kept pressuring me to find dirt on these men who want me dead, then I’d flee. Where would I go? I had no idea. Anywhere but here would be good.
I expected Ronan to emerge to sweet-talk me because I gave him the cold shoulder when I dropped off his meal, and he seemed annoyed about it, but instead, the door was abruptly shut, and I was still alone. Good.
I exhaled just as the elevator doors slid open, eager to leave the intensity of this space. Bitchtective wanted me to call her every morning after a shift to update her with whatever the Kaisers were doing. What am I supposed to tell her? Mikael ate lamb chops while smoking a cigar, while Ronan was scanning what looked like staff rosters. Wow, so incriminating. They would hardly tell me their deep, dark secrets and who they ordered a hit on.
Hell, I needed to stop thinking like that because I was freaking myself out.
I pushed the trolley forward into the elevator shaft, and my breath hitched when I heard the sound of the office door opening again. Hastily, a warm hand clamped around my mouth as a strong arm wrapped around my waist and pulled in tight against a solid body of strength. I assumed it was Ronan, but it didn’t feel like Ronan.
Warm breath graced my cheek as a familiar voice whispered, “Hello, Riley.”
“G-” I bit my tongue, dangerously close to saying the name of my foster brother. I corrected myself as he dragged me backward. “Rourke? What are you doing here?” Faking my surprise.
Heck, it dawned on me when Bitchtective kidnapped me and confessed that I was working for the Kaisers that the masked man who always seemed so familiar, yet so far away from me, was indeed Gunner Kaiser. Who else would it be? Only one man on Planet Earth would be that obsessed over a nobody.
My stomach stirred in jealously when it struck me that Gunner was massively crushing on Riley Laws, the fake me, while he didn’t give a flying fuck about the blond girl he fussed over, his foster sister, the real me, Annika.
“Rourke?” I repeated because he didn’t answer me. I had to act like I didn’t understand the connection between him and Ronan and Mikael. “Why are you here? Did you follow me?”
“Yes,” his reply was breathy, coming from the back of his throat, sending shivers down my spine as I could feel his swollen crotch pressed against my back.
“Where are you taking me, Rourke?” I panicked in a muffled voice behind his clammy palm as he dragged me backward into Ronan’s office. “Mr. Byrne will catch you.”
“Don’t worry about him,” he assured me, and I could tell he was smiling, even though I couldn’t see his face.
I didn’t hear Ronan leave his office, and when I spotted a figure sitting at Ronan’s desk, I knew they’d had plans for me. Again, I had to pretend that I didn’t realize who Rourke was and play dumb, but I was so close to allowing my mask to slip and screaming, I am Annika, and allowing them to slit my throat to end my misery.
The door was slammed behind me, and Gunner let me go. I stood before Ronan, who wore a smirk, nostrils flaring, with Mikael on the other side of the wall, who’d be unhappy that I was being held up.
“I have to get back to the kitchen to speak to Betty,” I asserted, hoping they’d be concerned that I might get in trouble. “She’s expecting me.”
“Betty can wait,” Ronan assured me.
I glanced back at Gunner, leaning against the door, arms folded across his chest, making his arm muscles bulge. Breathe. Just breathe. He’s wearing that damn ski mask again and I was so close to telling him that I knew who he was, so let’s drop the bullshit and maybe I’ll say to them everything about Bitchtective and they could save me from a fate worse than hell.
Heck, who was I kidding? Either way, I was screwed. If I reveal who I really am, I’m dead. If I confess to them about the cop forcing me to do this, I’m dead. I'm dead if I confess the entire story from three years ago. If I kept the disguise and continued pretending I was Riley Laws, I might survive long enough to escape this town.
“One day, you might have to remove that mask,” I mumbled as I turned back to Ronan, who watched us closely. When he didn’t reply, I added, “So, you two know each other? I was worried that this mad guy,” I pointed my thumb behind me to Gunner, “might find out where I work, and then he might find out other things too, like…” I hinted that I was about to squeal to Gunner that Ronan had fucked me under the waterfall, but Ronan didn’t seem to care.
“We’ve exchanged notes.” Ronan wiggled his finger at us.
“Oh? That’s weird. And what do these notes say? I hope you haven’t scored me out of ten.” I was so nervous that stupid jokes were my fallback to ease the discomfort swirling about me.
Their stares weighed me down as the temperature seemed to soar. Ironically, I assumed the most dangerous place to be was in the office next door. I was wrong.
“So, it’s not Petra, is it?” Ronan stated flatly, yet it was only yesterday that I would consider Ronan to be the most handsome man in the entire universe. Today, not so much. He was turning uglier by the second.
“No, it’s Riley. Riley Laws,” I told him, even though he already knew.
He nodded his chestnut head toward Rourke while wearing that smirk and caught his blue eyes running over my legs for a second before he focused back on the man behind me. “Your stalker and I had met sometime ago, yet we didn’t know we had you in common.”
“How did you meet?” I played dumb as I cast my eye across his desk, searching for a piece of information to pass on to Judith.
Yeah, like, they were going to have their cooked, tax-evaded books out on display. Or was she hoping I’d found a bloody dagger with a victim’s DNA on it? Let’s face it, they’d never kill anyone with their own hands; they’d order someone else to do it to distance themselves from the crime.
I heard Gunner exhale as if he was becoming irritated by my insistent questions, and I wanted to turn to look at him, but I had it wrong. I always thought Rourke the Stalker Freak was the most dangerous person, but no, the real danger was the man in front of me.
Ronan flicked his finger at me. “I’d like to introduce you to Gunner. " His eyes narrowed and fixed onto my face as if waiting for a reaction. “Kaiser.” He lowered his tone to a raspy snarl when he said ‘Kaiser,’ which made my stomach turn. The last time I heard him speak to me like that was when he wouldn’t let me cum in the nature pool.
I forced myself to frown in confusion. “O-kay,” I faltered a couple of beats before I was brave enough to glance at the face of my foster brother. The boy whose life I ruined the moment I allowed the Larsson police to convince me that lying on oath was my only option. To keep up the game, I added, “I knew you didn’t have burn scars. I knew you were lying about your face covered in scars.”
When I looked at his rugged and beautiful face, I saw a single scar running his left eyebrow, the scar that I had forgotten about. The memory surfaced of how he got that scar, and it was the usual careless childhood games: throwing himself recklessly about, showing off in front of me. But I had to shove that memory back into the dark spaces of my mind.
I held back an escaped sigh and turned back to address Ronan. “So,” I swallowed over my nerves, “So this is Rourke?”
“Yep,” Gunner breathed hotly. It annoyed him that my reaction was so benign, but I couldn’t look at him or I’d crumble into a million pieces.
“And he’s a Kaiser?” I asked Ronan. Even though I couldn’t ask Gunner, my heart was racing so much, and it was easier to talk about him rather than to him. “Yep,” Ronan answered, rubbing his jaw with the back of his knuckles while those eyes flicked to the sinister man behind me before landing back on me again. “The son of Lars Kaiser. Have you heard of him?”
A shiver traveled down my spine at the sound of my foster father’s name being spelled out to me as if they were expecting a reaction. Did this mean that they knew who I was? No. That didn’t make sense.
“Related to my boss?” I pointed to the wall, and Ronan narrowed his eyes. It was a deliberate swerve away from the topic of Lars Kaiser because I didn’t have the strength to go down that rabbit hole, or else I’d find myself tripping up on my own words.
Gunner slid closely past me as his intense body heat draped over my shivering skin, but I held my composure. It was apparent he was attempting to intimidate me by raking those eyes over my trembling body while his solid frame was pumped up in suppressed rage.
It should have been Riley Laws who was angry because he lied to her…me. Riley should have demanded an explanation for why he lied to her and wore that stupid mask.
“Yeah,” Gunner sighed, irritated. “I’m Mikael’s nephew.”
I licked my bottom lip and summoned the courage to look at him briefly before dropping my gaze to the desk. Pain pounded through my chest and stomach, and I tightly clenched my fists until an ache claimed my shoulders. My feet naturally shuffled backward, closer to the door, because it was so hellishly intense there that I could barely breathe.
I have replayed scenes like this thousands of times over the past few years, but I thought this day would never come because I was in a safety net organized by professional and experienced people I trusted.
“Why didn’t you say that in the beginning?” I asked Gunner without looking at him. It was impossible to look at him properly, so I focused on Ronan, which fueled Gunner’s need for my attention. “You lied to me.”
Now, it’s his turn to fabricate a story to convince me. “I didn’t want you to know who I was,” he replied, and I caught him in my peripheral vision, folding his arms across his chest.
“Why? When we met, I wasn’t working here,” I questioned curiously to see what excuse he’d come up with. “I don’t see how it matters who you are.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” he argued as the sound of a lighter being struck urged me to look at his big, warm hands that had touched me so many times.
“No,” I replied bluntly, feeling pressure to return to the kitchen.
“I’m a Kaiser,” he said, raising his voice, which startled me. “We carry a reputation.”
“Like what? Are you crooked?” I challenged him to see how he’d react. “Do you commit illegal acts on the side?” I had to be careful because pushing them away would make it harder to find dirt on them.
“No,” he replied, and of course he was lying. The Kaisers were rampant criminals but were good at hiding their tracks and never got their hands dirty. The only crime they didn’t commit was the death of Lars Kaiser, my foster father.
“I have to go,” I sighed, turning away from my enemies, expecting them to urge me to stay. But I realized this was a test to see if I’d react to Gunner’s unmasking, which would mark me as a guilty liar.
Nerves snaked down my spine as I turned my back on two of the most dangerous men in Gothenburg, which was unwise, but they left me with no choice.
But I wondered, did I succeed under their eyes or fail? It was hard to tell.
As I was about to close the door to their penetrating stares, I asserted to stamp my place, “I don’t want to date you anymore. I prefer not to date liars,” I told Gunner again without looking at him.
Gunner scoffed breathlessly as I closed the door on them. “You don’t have a choice.”
Fearful that they would drag me back into that room again, I ran to the trolley parked in the way of the elevator door so it could shut. My cheeks were burning, and my heart was thudding against my ribcage, but I saved the trolley, pressed the button, and the doors slid shut. I took deep breaths to cool the heat surging across my skin and my rapidly beating heart.
I sincerely don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I can survive working here with them, my enemies, the men who’d slit my throat without hesitation for imprisoning their leader.
I told myself to take it one day at a time. As the elevator opened onto the ground floor, I quickly wheeled the trolley out and back to the kitchen, where I’d search for Betty to update my details and apologize profusely for using a fake ID.
A fake ID to cover the other phony ID.