Chapter 48
WES
It all happened within a matter of seconds. My vision went dark. Someone pushed my head down with a grip on the back of my neck. Strong hands pulled my arms behind my back and restrained them.
I was shoved inside a vehicle that started moving immediately.
The first thing I saw when the black bag was pulled off my head was Roman, sitting next to me in the tinted SUV, holding a gun in his lap. We were surrounded by bulky, imposing men, whom I could only assume were also armed.
Through the haze of adrenaline, my only cohesive thought for several seconds was that at least if Roman’s attention was on me, it was away from her.
I needed to keep it that way.
After I’d made it clear I wasn’t going to speak, Roman’s taunting smile grew. He glanced at his watch. “Nova won’t be awake for another few hours, right?”
My blood boiled inside my veins, but I stared forward, unmoving.
“Her routines have become quite the fascination. I enjoy watching her grocery shop. It’s endearing, the crease between her brows, the way she has to scan and compare every miniscule price tag.
It makes it even more satisfying to know she won’t ever have to worry about money or cooking for herself ever again. ”
“Roman, I will fucking kill—”
Three guns pointed at my head—one from the passenger’s seat and two from the seats behind us. Roman didn’t even lift his own gun. He just smiled.
I faced forward again. Several minutes passed before we stopped in front of a massive townhouse in Greenwich Village. It must’ve been a new acquisition of my father’s, seeing as Roman owned nothing of his own.
“Don’t you want to know how?” he asked as the men surrounded us on our walk to the service entrance.
I ignored him, quickly scanning our environment once we were inside. The house was quiet. I was shoved forward, quickly ushered downstairs into the cellar.
“Leave us,” Roman said with a wave of his gun, and the men retreated upstairs.
With the barrel on the back of my neck, Roman forced me into the entertainment room, where a fully stocked bar faced seating.
“Sit down.”
I sat down in one of the chairs, and Roman walked to the bar. I knew his security team was likely watching via hidden camera feeds, gathered upstairs, ready to kill for their psychopath boss.
“We’ve built a citywide surveillance network,” Roman said, even though I never fucking asked. “With the marvels of AI combined with our security partnerships and the cloud infrastructure provider we own… camera feeds all over the city work for us now.”
My stomach soured. I’d always known my father’s ambitions pointed him in this direction, but even five years ago, his influence and technological advancements were nowhere near capable of this level of dystopian control. A lot had changed since then.
“It’s even on my phone now,” Roman said as he poured himself a whiskey. He lifted his phone like he was an attention-starved thirteen-year-old showing me his cool new video game. “I can watch her from anywhere.”
My fists clenched.
Roman returned, placing the whiskey on the glass table in front of us as he took the adjacent leather chair. “Drink, Wes.”
The words seemed to echo against the windowless cellar.
My eyes slowly met his. “No.”
Roman glanced at his gun where it rested in his hand on the armrest.
“What are you going to do? Shoot me?” I hissed.
We both knew our father would never forgive him for that. And at the end of the day, Roman wanted Daddy’s approval more than he wanted anything else in this world.
Our father might’ve been a Machiavellian narcissist on the sociopath spectrum, but he still valued his sons, his own flesh and blood legacies—even the son who had spit in the face of his empire and stopped speaking to him over five years ago.
In fact, it was possible he valued me even more after that, in some sick and twisted way. Which was half the reason Roman had a gun pointed at me.
“So, here’s the thing. I might not be able to kill you without consequence, but I can kill Nova. Actually, I can do far worse things to her than kill her.”
I felt thin cords of restraint snapping one by one, and the only thing holding me in place was her. I couldn’t get myself hurt, not when she needed me. I had to stay calm for her.
Roman showed me his phone. I recognized the street footage immediately. Nova’s apartment was clearly visible, as well as a man in a black hoodie standing outside.
Roman’s face lit up with satisfaction as he watched every last drop of my power slip away. “You know what I did to the last one now, right?”
I trembled with rage. I’d figured it out too late. My dreams, the cards—they’d all been trying to warn me, but I was too ashamed to fully revisit my past, and I’d spent too many years drunk to piece it all together.
Time had run out.
“Drink,” Roman snarled, his eyes dark and unfeeling. In one hand, he held a gun, and in the other, his phone. One weapon was vastly more dangerous.
I picked up the glass of whiskey. The smell of it was nauseatingly familiar.
My heart raced. My life flashed before my eyes: my mom’s radiance and love, her slow death, my exile to New York City, twelve years of chaos and destruction, one year of darkness so dark, I didn’t think I would ever taste the light again.
I saw my slow climb out of that endless pit, one fistful of dirt and grime after the next. The hands that reached for me—Will’s hands, the hands of neighbors, friends, and even strangers. My mom’s, from beyond the grave.
Because of all of them, I could sit outside on my stoop with someone I loved and feel the sun on my skin again.
If the gun had only been pointed at me, I wouldn’t have drank.
But it wasn’t.
The gun was also pointed at Nova.
Whiskey coated my tongue, sharp and smoky.
“Finish it.”
I drank the whole glass, at least three shots, on an empty stomach. My world grew fuzzier immediately from the raw adrenaline. My every nerve pulsed with a kind of unwanted, automatic pleasure that terrified me.
This was my worst nightmare, and he knew it. Someone I loved was in danger, and I was helpless to stop it.
Instead of meeting Roman’s taunting eyes, I stared at the empty glass. Five years of sobriety, gone in an instant.
Roman refilled the glass. “Again.”
Sweat broke out on my forehead, my insides warm and sickened. As more amber liquid coated my gut, I gagged.
“If you throw up, I’ll shoot you in the foot.”
Roman reached for a stack of books on the table. He pulled out The Story of O—the copy he’d stolen from me years ago—and started casually flipping through the pages.
My vision grew blurry, unfocused, my sense of gravity starting to tilt.
He laughed when he got to a passage at the end of the book, as if at an inside joke I wasn’t privy to.
“Where is Max?” I bit out.
“Unplugging from the world for a weekend with his latest whore. But don’t you worry about that. No one is going to disturb our fun tonight.”
Tonight. Tonight, Nova would be going to the party, and I’d been taken before I could warn her about Roman.
“What are you doing, Roman?” I growled. I stared at his gun, at the way it was barely in his hand as he alternated between leafing through the book and rapidly typing on his phone. “You already won. You won years ago.” My words started to slur. I rested my head back on the seat.
“And yet, you still continue to invest in companies that fuck with our bottom line,” he said dryly, as if he was bored now that I was incapacitated.
“You’re not some tech vigilante hero, Wesley.
I know you’re just biding time until your next real strike.
You cannot fool me. But after tonight, you’ll be forced out for good.
Out of the tech space, and out of my fucking city. ”
I closed my eyes as vertigo started spinning me in circles. It was hard to remember what I was going to say next. Bile churned in my stomach. I gripped the armrests. Roman laughed.
“You pride yourself on not being like us, but your cherished sentimentality will be your downfall. It makes you so easy to control.”
I stopped being able to focus on what Roman was saying. His voice slowly slipped away as I lost consciousness.
He was right, in the end. The last thing I saw behind my heavy eyelids was the woman I loved, the woman I’d sacrifice anything to save.