Chapter 15
Ella
It’s remarkably easy to get out. I just wait until Aiden is occupied with work, and Luke is at the gym, and Leo is off presumably killing someone and taking a piece of them as a trophy. They are busy men.
As soon as I have some time to myself, I take some cash and a car. But I leave the car parked neatly and I mail the keys back to them, so it’s not grand theft auto; at least, not for long.
I ensure that I take a good amount of money. Not enough for them to really miss, but enough for me to get around with. Ten grand. Okay, it’s kind of a lot by normal standards, but these guys aren’t normal and ten grand is nothing to them.
I still don’t have much of an appetite, but I get some sushi, and I sit in the shop with a little suitcase at my feet and I watch the world go by and I wonder if I will ever feel like I am actually part of it.
I’ve seen too much. Too much has happened to me.
I’ve done things I should never have done.
I see a young woman about my age walking past with a stroller that she’s pushing with one hand, and an iced coffee with whipped cream in the other.
I feel so much envy for her, and what I imagine is a simple, but satisfying life.
I’m going to find one of those.
Leo
“Sorry,” Aiden reads the note. “But I’ve gone away. Do not follow me. It’s best for all of us.”
He puts it down. “Cameras have her leaving the property while we were occupied. She took cash from my office, around ten thousand dollars in unmarked bills. She took the car, then dumped that, and got a ride share, then a bus.”
I snort. Smart move. She must have realized how easily we’d follow the car.
“Cameras aren’t actually everywhere yet?”
“I think she put a mask on,” he says. “And a hat. The loose cell network would have picked her up if not.”
One of the tools certain agencies and people have at their disposal is the ability to tap into cameras on cell phones and have them as a kind of remote surveillance.
You get a lot of insides of pockets and bags that way, but in a day and age when people are taking pictures and videos all over the place, or at the very least looking at their phones, it’s quite easy to get interesting little bits of data here and there.
“How does she know about that?”
“She worked for BP for a long time. I’d put money on her knowing a lot of things. It may not be easy to find her.”
“What has gotten into her?” Luke asks. “Why did she run?”
“You’d have to find her and ask her, but I imagine, based on what she said before she left, that she thought she would feel better once we punished her thoroughly, but as it turns out, even the hottest sex isn’t a substitute for therapy,” Aiden drawls.
The three of us are standing in his office.
Luke looks crestfallen, Aiden has his usual impenetrable mask on.
I am feeling a mixture of things. Irritation that she thought something as pedestrian and avoidant as running away would possibly work, and fear of what might happen to her, or what she might do.
“We have to get her back,” Captain Obvious, I mean Luke, says.
“And we will,” Aiden replies. He is quite determined.
“I’m gonna spank her ass,” Luke growls. “We’ve been through all of this, and she runs away? Like a teenager?”
“Running away from home is an ageless act,” I deadpan. “And it’s in right now.”
“Oh, yes,” Aiden agrees, playing along in one of his rare demonstrations that he has a functional sense of humor. “Abandoning one’s loved ones is so hot right now.”
I smile.
“What’s funny?” Luke demands.
“It’s a bit like a treasure hunt, isn’t it?” I say. “One of us will be the first to find her.”
“If it’s a treasure hunt, what’s the prize?” he asks. It’s a damn good question.
I pause for a moment. And then it comes to me.
“Whichever one of us finds her first, and when I say find her, I mean physically reaches her first—gets her hand in marriage.”
Aiden and Luke look at me with what they probably want to be horror, but which we all know is interest.
“One of us has to marry her to make her legitimate in the household,” I say.
“I assumed it would be me,” Aiden says.
“Of course you did. But why should it be? There’s not one of us that has any claim to her more than another. She’s intimate with all of us. She’s attached to all of us…”
“Or not, given she ran the fuck away,” Luke says.
He doesn’t get it. With someone like Ella, running away doesn’t mean anything.
She ran for dozens of reasons, none of which had anything to do with how she felt about us.
Running is the one thing I understand more than anything, because prey always runs.
I feel better, actually, knowing she chose that path.
It means at her core she’s not a predator.
I had my concerns, here and there, that we might still be getting played.
There’s just something about the way I saw her after she gave me my own dose that has stuck with me.
In the moment she left, she was more than triumphant.
She felt so completely at home doing what she’d done.
She was smooth, she was competent and, yes, she smirked and enjoyed the moment, but who wouldn’t. I have been unsettled since.
This is the first thing she has done since that moment that makes me comfortable.
“If you think about this in the right way, it could be framed as a test. Which of us knows her the best and can find her the quickest?”
Aiden and Luke look at each other, and back at me.
“You’re suggesting turning this incident into some kind of competition,” Aiden says. “Instead of treating it like a security concern.”
“Is it a security concern?”
“She could be anywhere. With anything happening to her.”
“All the more reason to find her quickly and stop complaining,” I say.
I am excited by the prospect. I enjoy the hunt. I know Aiden will be in favor. It is just sweet, sensitive, occasionally addled Luke who might decide to play moral compass for the entire family.
“I think you’re all sick, but that’s not exactly news, is it,” Luke says.
“The two of you are going to look very nice as groomsmen,” Aiden says. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and retrieve my wife.”
“Hang on,” Luke says “We need to set up some parameters. It has to be fair. We can’t use the private jet, for example, because only one of us could do that. We have to have a set budget, too, and we have to put rules around contacts.”
He’s making rules, and that means he’s in.
I couldn’t be more pleased. This is going to be fun.
“Everyone has two hours of access to our sources and intel. We’ll roll dice to determine who goes first,” Aiden says.
“Not dice. We’ll tear up some paper and draw lots,” Luke says. “I don’t trust any dice you have.”
“You do the lots,” Aiden says indulgently.
Luke busies himself cutting up three identical pieces of paper and carefully pencils a number on each of them. He folds each of them precisely, trying his best to make sure they are all the same size when he’s done, then he puts them in a small bowl that held ornamental things in it.
We each draw a number. Luke gets the first go. Aiden is second. I am third. I am not worried. I wasn’t intending on using our intel anyway. I think I know exactly where our runaway bride would have gone.
“Wait. One last thing. Is it who finds her first? Or who catches her first? Because those might not be the same thing.”
“You have to get her in your custody and back at this house,” Aiden says. “Spotting her isn’t enough. We’re not birdwatchers. We’re going to marry her.”
“Deal,” Luke agrees. I also nod in agreement.
“I’ll leave you in here to do your two hours,” Aiden says. “A hundred and twenty minutes. That’s it.”
Luke grins and sits down behind Aiden’s computer. “I am going to have her before either one of you have any hope of working out where your own asses are.”
Aiden and I leave the room. Aiden shuts the door behind him and locks it.
I lift a brow at him. “We didn’t agree not to sabotage each other,” he says. “I’m about to disconnect the internet and phone, too. Don’t worry. I’ll get the butler to ensure he’s fed and watered.”
“You assholes!” Luke bangs on the door. “Leo! Let me out! If you don’t let me out, there will be hell to fucking pay! And you think Aiden’s not going to fuck you over too? This is against the rules!”
“We never said we couldn’t interfere with one another,” Aiden says. “It’s entirely within the ruleset you agreed to.”
Luke curses. “I’m going to put a fucking hole in this wall if you don’t open the door.”
Aiden puts his hands in his pockets, turns, and walks away. About a minute later, Luke’s foot comes through the wall, much like he promised. He kicks out the drywall, comes crawling through the hole he made, his blond hair getting thoroughly covered in dust.
He lunges at Aiden, who still hasn’t bothered to turn around—rookie error—and starts beating the hell out of him.
I take the opportunity to get underway. Aiden is going to be dealing with Luke for a while, I’d say.
It’s not often he gets physically attacked, and Luke has been doing nothing but working out since Teddy died.