Chapter 9
BIANCA
The champagne tastes funny.
Sweet bubbles burst over my tongue, followed by a bitter chemical film that clings to the back of my throat. I swallow again.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
A buzz wouldn’t have been the worst thing tonight. I wasn’t planning to drink at all, but I’ve been on the verge of a panic attack since I put my hand in his and climbed onto this stage. It would’ve been nice for every light and stranger and ugly truth to be blurred.
But I majorly fucked up.
Montgomery isn’t watching the room toast me. He’s watching my face, waiting.
Heat slips beneath my skin.
He put something in the champagne.
He’s forcing my heat early.
Panic clouds my vision. I crush it down before it reaches my face. He already got inside my body. I won’t give him the further satisfaction of watching me crumble.
A pressure low in my abdomen tightens. Not a cramp. A pull. Across the ballroom, Owen’s head jerks up, followed by Freddie’s, Tristan’s, then Weller’s. My scent is too strong, vanilla and burnt sugar pushing through flowers, food, and too many bodies.
Sweat gathers at my hairline under the burn of the lights and all these eyes. My pulse is going too hard and too fast, knocking to escape.
Get off this stage, get to them, get out, and then I can quietly lose my mind somewhere I’m not a spectacle.
Montgomery hasn’t stopped talking. He’s rambling about distribution and partnerships and interested parties reaching out to Barrett Pharmaceuticals, and every third word is the omega, which he says the way others say the Lord, like it’s a precious sacred thing in his eyes. Which is laughable considering.
My long-lost sisters stand off to the side of the stage in their beautiful gowns, watching him with something that looks a lot like admiration.
It makes me ill.
They don’t stand like hostages. Their faces are glossy, pretty, unmarred by life. One of them leans over to murmur a comment to the other. She laughs behind her hand, easy and private, the laugh of somebody who has known you for years. They lean into each other, and I can tell they’re close.
Something about it feels like I’m being punched in the gut. Did he let them be normal girls or did he hurt them in some way too? Are they going to cry when I kill him?
A screech tears through the speakers, and the whole room flinches hard as the screen behind us wakes up.
It comes into focus slowly, and the floor of the world drops out from under me.
I lean over and grab my knees. I can’t feel the scars through this fucking dress.
Breathe.
In for four, hold, out for four.
Because it’s the white room - the one he kept me in, and it’s me in it, up there on the screen.
The recording starts with Rebecca’s nose breaking beneath my forehead.
Cut. My teeth sink into Whitney’s arm. Cut. My heel drives Katie into the bedside table, and the wet crack blasts through the ballroom speakers.
“You killed Katie!” Liz screams.
Cut. Liz is facedown under me with my arm locked beneath her chin.
“Let her go!” Whitney cries.
Nothing before that. No rope burning my wrist. No scissors hacking through my hair. No knife pressed to my jaw. No collar turning me inside out.
My mouth fills with blood that isn’t there. My scalp sears, and the cold tile finds the back of my skull again.
Then my voice comes through the speakers.
“I hate you.”
The footage jumps to my thighs locked around Rebecca’s throat.
“I hate you.”
I launch myself at Whitney. We hit the floor clawing and striking, and the screen jumps again. Now the knife is in my hand.
“I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”
I never said that.
I never fucking said that.
Oh my god, I look psychotic as fuck.
Breathe, Bianca, breathe.
I blow out a deep breath. The spotlights shining might as well be blistering my skin.
On the screen, the knife rises and falls. Somebody has slowed that part down and zoomed in on my face while Whitney’s blood spreads beneath us. Her knife is gone. The part where she stabbed Rebecca is gone. Every second where they were hurting me is gone.
My heart is going to pound out of my chest. Montgomery’s precious omega, his beloved little beast, tearing four women apart.
The room’s noise rattles my teeth. Gasps and whispers, a chair scraping back, a woman near the front going oh my God, oh my God on a loop like a stuck record, and a flute hitting the floor somewhere and shattering.
The bond is going haywire, the tension in the alphas building to a breaking point, even from across the room. I curl my toes inside Montgomery’s shoes and stay upright.
Montgomery isn’t glowing anymore.
“Stop it,” he says off-mic, low and terse, to nobody I can see. Then he wheels around and snaps his fingers at the dark above the lights like a man calling a dog. “Kill the feed. Kill it. Whoever’s in that booth, shut it down now.”
It’s the most emotion I’ve ever seen from him.
He pats his jacket as if the remote might be hiding there, then casts around the stage floor. “Hale. Get someone in the booth. Now, Hale!”
It doesn’t stop.
My stolen voice keeps saying I hate you as I drive the knife down again and again.
It plays all the way to the end, to Whitney going still on that white floor in a spreading red, and I can almost feel the knife in my hand.
The screen goes black.
It’s over, I think, and my knees nearly buckle with relief.
Then the black stutters and Whitney’s face fills the wall.
For a second, my brain refuses to make sense of her. A photo, I tell myself. A memorial slide. Some sick little bow on the package. She’s pale and thinner than I remember, bandages visible above her gown, propped upright somewhere very bright.
Then she blinks and smiles.
“Hello, Daddy.”
Holy. Fucking. Shit. What the hell is this?
“You know how much I love a party.” She keeps an upbeat cadence that’s uncanny, coated sweet. “So imagine how sad I was when my invitation to Bianca’s birthday party got lost in the mail.”
No way. I felt her heart quit under my hands. I checked. She’s dead.
My skin feels too tight. Itchy. My brain is telling me to run.
“I’d have come in person, but...” She lifts one hand from her lap slowly and gestures down at herself and the wheelchair she’s sitting in. The smile never slips. “Travel’s a little complicated for me these days. You understand, Daddy. You’re the one who parked me here.”
She’s alive. And he let everyone believe she died in a yacht accident.
“Best care money can buy, the brochure says. I should know. I helped design it.” Whitney tips her head, and behind her, through a wide window, there are white-topped mountains.
A view so picturesque it looks like a painting.
The blanket over her legs is tucked smooth enough for a hospital bed, and one hand rests curled in her lap while the other performs the show.
I have the urge to scream. I had almost pushed Whitney out of my mind.
Almost.
I finally remember the audience. People are on their feet. Montgomery’s guards move through the tables with their hands out, plucking phones from hands as people hold them up.
“You saved me,” Whitney says, soft and almost whimsical.
“And that part was sweet, I guess. You found me bleeding out on the floor where that sewer rat brutalized me. She’s always been jealous of me, and you didn’t protect me from her.
And then - you didn’t take me home. You tucked me away.
Out of sight, out of mind. Far from my house. Far from my life.”
She glares at the camera now. Her scowl is cutting.
“Far from my pack,” she hisses.
My pack.
Every claiming mark hidden beneath makeup and diamonds seems to burn at once. Hearing those words in her mouth, knowing she’s referring to my mates, still drops me straight back into the girl staring at a video on a cliff and believing she had lost everything forever.
Owen’s snarl carries all the way to the stage, and it’s what finally snaps me back.
I turn, hunting for them in the chaos. Guards are checking people as they flee.
Owen’s chest is heaving, his eyes black and locked on me.
He shoves through the guards without slowing.
Weller drives one man’s hand away from his collar, protecting his ribs with the other arm even while he forces a path forward.
Tristan catches the opening, and Freddie stays tight beside him.
They’re coming for me.
“So it’s only fair,” Whitney says, and the bright, empty smile snaps back into place, “you know what it feels like. And oh, watch your back, B. B for bitch.”
There’s a pause and then she says, “Actually, don’t bother. It won’t help.”
A shot cracks in the air.
It takes me a moment to place it. The sound doesn’t fit the space.
But then Montgomery’s hand flies to the side of his neck and comes away red.
The bullet has opened a shallow line through the flesh above his collar.
Blood runs over his fingers to paint the white fabric as he lurches sideways and starts crawling behind a piece of furniture.
Everyone starts screaming at once. Chairs flip. A man crawls beneath a table without letting go of his phone. One of Montgomery’s granddaughters disappears under her mother’s skirt as bodies push toward every door at once.
“BIANCA. GET DOWN.”
Weller’s command hits me in the spine. My knees strike the floor and my body folds, and I go down, cheek to the floor, silk pooling around me.
Fury flashes through the terror. His alpha bark irritates me for one second, and then another shot bites into the floor where my head was.
Dr. Montgomery is crouched nearby, a guard holding a white bandage to his neck. His eyes are hunting across the running bodies.
Then they find me.
“Get to the house,” he says simply, and then to the guards nearby: “Take her back to the house. Get her inside. Away from the windows.”
His gaze moves over my limbs and settles once he decides his investment is intact.
His head snaps around. “Hale. Hale.”
The silver buzz cut is already there, like an annoying shadow.
“Escort them and put your best men on the doors. Nobody in, nobody out until I clear it myself. Nobody.” Montgomery’s eyes come back to me. “Go.”
Weller pulls me up, his good arm locked around my waist. Owen places his body between mine and the windows. Freddie’s palm lands between my shoulder blades, warm and steady. Tristan clears the path ahead, one hand out behind him that I’m gripping for dear life to make sure we stay together.
At the service corridor we pass through, a silver serving tray lies crooked on its stand, the remains of somebody’s cheese course scattered across it. A small knife glints beside an overturned dish.
I take it.
My hand closes around the thin blade. Nobody in this room is looking at the doll anymore. They’re all looking at the doors.
We break out into cold air, damp grass, and darkness. The temperature drop should feel good. It doesn’t touch the heat moving under my skin. Police begin to arrive, blue and red light breaking across the glass, the lawn, and tuxedos disappearing into the trees.
Whitney’s mansion is at the bottom of the slope, its white columns pale against the black tree line. We run for it.
I make it twenty steps before my heels turn traitor. The left one punches into soft ground and stops dead. My ankle nearly goes with it. I stagger and bend to tear the stupid thing off -
Freddie scoops me up, and then I’m over his shoulder with the grass wheeling underneath me and his forearm locked across the backs of my thighs.
Golden honey and cedar fill my lungs.
“Freddie!”
“You can yell at me the whole way down, Bianca.” He’s already running, the words bouncing with his stride. “We need to get you the fuck out of here.”
Can’t really argue with him there, so I shut up.
Upside down and jostling, facts knock loose and collide. Whitney is alive. That slippery bitch. Montgomery was shot. I have sisters. Someone tried to kill me. A lot of people just watched me commit a crime. A heinous one. My heat is coming, sooner than later. Definitely not three weeks.
No single thought stays for long.
The mansion welcomes us back. Guards haul the front doors open, and we spill into the entry as they sweep the rooms before leaving us alone. The doors boom shut at our backs.
Freddie puts me on my feet and drops to strip off my remaining heel.
Everyone moves.
We’re tucked away safely as far as they’re concerned, but I could almost kiss Whitney for the distraction.