Chapter 44 #2
Her gaze softens a fraction as she looks at me. Not with kindness but with assessment.
“What did your mother tell you?”
Confusion seeps through my addled brain.
“About what?”
She sighs impatiently. “About where my money is, you stupid girl,” she snarls, her darkness coming full circle.
“It’s why I sent Henry after her all those years ago.
To get the money she stole from me. Millions of dollars my families money that went into that fucking cattle ranch.
Your disgraceful mother up and took it when she ran from town to become a fucking druggie ass bitch. ”
My breath stutters.
Millions?
The word seems surreal against the backdrop of blood and rope and the way my arms burns like it’s on fire. Millions. Stolen. Hidden.
“I don’t know anything about money,” I choke out in a whisper. “She never had any money. We were broke.”
Laurel tilts her head, debating on whether or not I am lying. Her eyes flicker, calculating, then narrow.”
“Of course you’d say that,” she murmurs. “Sadie always was convincing when it came to playing the victim.”
“She wasn’t playing,” I snap, pain spiking as my voice rises. “She went hungry so I could eat. We slept in our car. Shelters. Motels with roaches in the walls. If she had millions of dollars, don’t you think she would have used it?”
Laurel straightens slowly, her expression cooling further. “You assume she would have spent it on you.”
That’s a knife to my heart I wasn’t expecting.
I shake my head. “That’s not…she loved me.”
“Love is a convenient excuse,” Laurel says lightly. “Especially for people who don’t want to explain their greed.”
My heart pounds, each beat a full ache in my ears. The drugs in my system make it hard to separate rage from nausea, fear from dizziness.
“You’re lying,” I say hoarsely. “You killed her because she didn’t give you want you wanted.”
“Laurel smiles then. Not wide. Not Cruel. It is satisfied.
“Yes.”
The single word drops like a guillotine.
“And now,” she continues calmly. “Here you are, because your fucking mother couldn’t do what she was fucking told. Always the screw up, that one.”
She gestures to my arm, to the blood soaking my sleeve. “All I wanted was to move up in the ranks. I didn’t want to be the wife of a cattle rancher. I wanted more and your mother was supposed to get that for me. But she couldn’t even do that properly.”
“What are you talking about?”
Laurel’s nostrils flare. “Stop pretending like you don’t know.”
My stomach lurches. “I don’t know anything. I’ve told you that. I don’t know where she would have hid millions. Hell, I barely know why she left Crimson Ridge.”
Laurel laughs.
“You poor girl,” she pouts mockingly. “Did you honestly not put it all together yet? How thick can you be? I would have thought that with all the evidence I piled in that dilapidated old barn, you would have figured it out.”
I stare at her, breath ragged, heart pounding so hard it makes my vision pulse.
“The barn,” I whisper.
Laurel’s smile sharpens. “Ah. So you did see everything.”
My stomach rolls. Images of that day flash through my drug hazed mind in disjointed pieces. The packed boxes, the newspaper articles, the obituary. Documents that didn’t make any sense. Names I didn’t recognize. The weight of it all, hidden away like rot beneath hay and dust.
“My mother wasn’t exiled, was she?” I ask, the words scraping out of my throat. “She took the money so she could hide.”
Laurel laughs, slow and indulgent. “A cowards way out if you ask me. A weakness.”
“She was terrified,” I snap, remembering as child all the times she looked over her shoulder, coached me on what to say, hid in the shadows. All before Henry. “Of you. Of what you would do if you found her.”
My words earn me a look. Not anger. Not denial.
Approval.
“Yes,” she says softly. “She was. And I did find her. Or…well, Henry did, but the bastard got greedy and complacent. He chased her down several times. Every time she ran from him until one day, she disappeared completely. Then, when he found her, he couldn’t do as I ordered and kill her.
No…he wanted to play. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’d be dead. Just like her.”
My chest tightens. “Killing us wouldn’t have gotten you the money you wanted.”
“No,” she admits coolly. “But it would have gotten me the control. The ascension. Power. Influence. A seat at the table of being passed scraps like a good little ranch wife. I would have spun both of your deaths to fall on my dear old husband. I would have been shocked and disturbed. Turned him in to Hudson to gain favor and it all would have been mine.”
She turns away from me, heels clicking as she paces, hands clasped behind her back like a lecturer warming to her favorite subject.
“Do you know who Emma Denver is?” she asks casually.
The name hits like a punch to the gut.
John’s first wife.
Pace and Lee’s mother.
“She was kind,” Laurel continues, not waiting for me to answer. “Beloved. Loyal. Everything a woman is supposed to be.” She scoffs. “Which made her very inconvenient.”
My pulse spikes. I remember the news article in the barn. The one about the car crash that was assumed to be an accident.
“What did you do?”
Laurel stops pacing. Slowly, deliberately, she turns back to me.
“I removed an obstacle.”
The world goes quiet.
Not silence, but pressure. As if the air itself has thickened, pressing in on my lungs.
“She died in a car accident,” I say numbly. “That’s what the article said…”
Laurel nods. “Accidents are remarkably easy to arrange when you have the right leverage and the right men.”
My vision blurs. “Why?”
“Because John Denver was untouchable as long as he was happy,” she states simply. This woman is psychotic. “A loyal husband. Devoted Father. A man content with his place.”
She steps closer, eyes glittering. “Grief changes people.”
I shake my head weakly. “Why would you do something like that?”
“Emma’s death was the first move,” she admits, almost wistful. My hands tremble against the restraints.
“And my mother?” I whisper.
Laurel exhales through her nose, clearly irritated now. “Sadie was the second.” She tilts her head, studying me, gauging how much I can take.
“I raised her to be obedient,” Laurel continues. “To understand that family obligations come before personal weakness. She was beautiful. Persuasive. Easy to mold.”
My stomach churns, bilious and sour.
“You set her up.” The truth dawns on me in horror. The warehouse closes in on me.
“I instructed her. John needed a little…help, to see her in a new light,” Laurel admits casually as if she wasn’t talking about rape. “It wasn’t hard to convince her, she loved him so much and had been so heartbroken when he chose Emma over her.”
The words hit one after another, brutal and final.
“Why though?” I ask, trying to wrap my head around how psychotic this woman truly is. “He would have known he was drugged.”
Laurel shrugs. “He’d already been drinking heavily, my dear. John would have chucked it up to a drunken one-night stand.”
“But why?” I press again.
The smile she shoots me chills me to the bone.
“You, my dear.” She laughs. “John isn’t the type of person to knock someone up and not take care of them. Sadie’s pregnancy would have locked her in to being part of the Black Diamond legacy and I would finally get to move up the social ladder.”
My chest burns. “You’re sick.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Laurel snaps. “Men like John Denver don’t get destroyed. They get reshaped. But your mother had to go and ruin it.”
My voice shakes. “She couldn’t live with it, could she?”
“No,” Laurel agrees, her lips turned in a sneer. “She couldn’t. She was weak.”
Her eyes harden.
“She came to me afterward,” she admits. “Told me she wanted out. That she was going to tell John everything. That she wouldn’t be a pawn anymore. That she couldn’t continue hurting him.”
A sob claws its way up my throat.
“So, I reminded her that loyalty isn’t an option,” Laurel continues. “Gave her an ultimatum.”
“But she ran,” I whispered.
“And took my money,” Laurel hisses, her jaw tightening.
“Stole from me. Henry was supposed to bring her back originally, but with Sadie’s name tainted all over town, I couldn’t have that anymore.
Of course, I didn’t realize you existed before, so I let Henry have his fun.
Try to find my money. But, of course, he is good for nothing. ”
My chest tightens painfully at the thought that my mother did what she could to protect me.
To save me from being this woman’s pawn, like she had been.
I sag against the restraints, breath coming in shallow gasps.
Everything I thought I knew, about my mother and John, fractures and reshapes in my mind.
“She wasn’t weak,” I whisper. “If she had been, she would have stayed, but she decided to do what was best.”
Lauren leans in close, her face inches from mine.
“She failed.”
Rage ignites through the haze, sharp and incandescent.
“You destroyed her.”
Laurel straightens, unimpressed. “Sacrifices were necessary.”
My laugh comes out broken. “You killed Emma Denver. You ruined my father. You broke your own daughter. Now you are trying to cut into me because you think I’m just…what? Another loose end?”
Her eyes gleam. “You’re leverage.”
I lift my chin despite the pain. “If you think they are going to give you the money you lost and let you walk away, you are wrong. You won’t get away with it.”
“They will never know it’s me,” she says, smoothing her coat. “No one will ever suspect me. Colter will burn the world down looking for you and still miss the truth. Henry will get my money and when he does—” she glances at my bleeding arm. “—you will be disposed of. Like your mother.”
Something cold and steady settles in my chest beneath the fear.
“No,” I say hoarsely. “You’re wrong about one thing.
Laurel pauses, eyebrow arching.
“I’m not my mother,” I continue. “And Colter isn’t John. Colter loves me. Is obsessed with me. If you think that you took me and he didn’t have a way to find me…you’re delusional.”
Her smile falters for a fraction of a second.
I cling to that.
Laurel turns away, heels clicking toward the shadows.
“Keep her alive,” she orders one of the men standing in the shadows. “For now.”
The door slams shut.
I slump back in the chair, shaking, blood drying sticky against my skin, but my mind is on fire.
Now I understand what my father and Colter have been keeping from me.
And why.
They thought she caused the car accident. They believed that she alone drugged and raped my father to gain leverage. Running made her look guilty. The two of them have been trying to protect me from fracturing my memory of her.
My mother wasn’t weak.
She was used and abused. She ran because she was trying to protect me.
Laurel Masterson will not be winning this time around.
I refuse to be her victim.
Colter and my father will come for me.
And when they do, I know there will be hell to pay.
Because apparently, there is more to this ranch town than I thought.