"Is that why you ransacked the house while we were burying Daddy?"
"Your stupidity never ceases to amaze me. Of course! Do you really think I gave two squirts of piss about cuff links and jewelry? Now, listen to me, Aston. I'm waiting at the house. You have exactly sixty minutes to get here and unlock that safe or else I'll burn this whole fucking house down with Baby in it."
He wasn't bluffing. He would do it. Hell, he was probably going to do it even if I gave him everything out of the safe.
"I'll be there."
"One hour, Aston—and come alone. Don't even think about bringing that Neanderthal mobster you've been fucking all night."
The revelation that he had been following me hit me like a wave of cold water. Suddenly nervous, I dropped the phone, slid out of bed and reached for my clothes. Was he watching me now? Had he hired someone to keep tabs on me? Knowing that he had Baby, I had to accept that he had instructed those men in the SUVs to try to kill us.
He's insane. You can't go meet him. He'll kill you.
But I was so tired of being afraid of him.
My gaze landed on the matte black pistol Ben had left behind. Picking it up, I tested the weight of it and squeezed the grip. As a backup piece, it was smaller and lighter than the type of weapon a man like Ben would normally carry, but it was perfect for me.
As I got dressed, I remembered what I had promised him. I picked up my phone to call him and let him know that I was leaving, but he hadn't given me his number. I didn't know how to reach him. I doubted anyone was at the auto shop this early. Would anyone even answer if I called?
I couldn't meet Calvin without telling someone so I sent a text message to the only person in the world I trusted without reservation. If anyone could help me now, it was Marley.
* * *
"Well?" Ben watched Zec poke through the massive stash of drugs. "I can move this easy. I won't pay full price, not even to you and Besian, because I'm going to have to be careful about sending this far away to avoid a clash with the Guzman cartel. You'll still get a nice cut."
"I'm not worried about my cut. The money will go to my crew. After tonight's problems, they deserve it." He glanced at the four guards who traveled with Zec. "Can you handle this?"
Zec rose from his crouched position. The shadows hid his face but the glow of a flashlight illuminated the open collar of his shirt. The gnarly scar he bore from a razor that had slashed open his throat was hidden beneath a tattoo that served as a reminder of what he had survived. It also reminded Ben that he had just asked the stupidest question ever.
"Are you that hot to get back to that sweet little heiress you've got tucked away at Alina's?"
Annoyed that he could never have even one secret, he growled, "Did they put us in one of the rooms with the peepholes?"
"No, but when a young woman like Aston McNeil walks into a brothel with one of our men, Alina knows that it's something I want to know." He let loose a laugh. "I would have loved to have seen that girl's face when she realized you had led her right into the most exclusive brothel in Texas."
"It was the only place I could take her."
"I agree." His mouth curved with a teasing grin. "And did you take her?"
"Jesus, you and Devil are worse than a bunch of gossiping old women, you know that? What I do with my dick is my business."
"Until it becomes mine or Besian's," he warned carefully. "Have fun with her if you like. Fuck her for the rest of the weekend if she's good—and then get rid of her." Zec squeezed his shoulder with a brutal hand that Ben knew had done some truly terrible things. "She's beautiful, and I don't blame you for wanting something so precious, but you can't have her. She's too high profile, and she'll bring too much attention to the family."
Ben wanted to argue, but he clenched his teeth together and nodded. Zec's hand moved to the back of his head in an almost fatherly gesture. They shared a silent look. For the first time, Ben saw beyond the soulless blackness of Zec's gaze. For the briefest of seconds, he caught a glimpse of something vulnerable and sad.
But then it was gone, the moment so fleeting Ben questioned whether it had happened at all.
Zec pulled back his hand and cleared his throat. "If you're starting to feel like you want something real and not just a tumble with one of the dancing girls, tell me and I'll find a good girl for you. One of us," he said pointedly. "Someone of our blood. Someone we can trust."
The thought of letting a man like Zec act as his matchmaker was too much for Ben to even consider. He put up his hands. "I'm going. Call Devil. He'll have the cars by now."
Zec pushed the two severed fingers across the table with the tip of the blade Ben had used to separate them from Tayshaun's hand. One would be given to their boss as the payment for the honor debt he owed for stealing those cars. The other would go to Lalo. "Where are you going?"
"To get the Aston Martin," he said matter-of-factly.
"For my delivery?" Zec called after him.
Ben didn't dare ignore him, but the smuggler wasn't going to like the answer. "No."
He half-expected Zec's guards to accost him and drag him back, but they let him pass. Out in Devil's truck, he fired up the ignition and backed out of the alley. He hadn't been to Lalo's house in a few weeks, not since he had delivered that last modified car for the dealer, so he decided to call ahead, especially since it was so damned early in the morning. The call went to voicemail so he left a short message.
No sooner had he ended the call than his phone started ringing. He glanced at the number but didn't recognize it. With a thud, he remembered that he hadn't exchanged contact information with Aston. Even if she wanted to reach him, she couldn't. Unless she had gotten brave enough to venture outside the room where he had left her to find Alina and ask.
"Aston?"
"You gave her a gun!"
Taken aback by the furious voice on the other end of the phone, it took him a moment to place it. "Marley? How did you get this number?"
"How do you think I got it? I asked Spider." She huffed and panted and sounded as if she were trying to get dressed as quickly as possible. "What the hell were you thinking giving Aston a gun?"
"I was trying to protect her." His stomach knotted with dread. "Marley, where is Aston? Why are you calling me?"
"She sent me a text about twenty minutes ago. I didn't see it until I got up to get a drink. She's gone to meet Calvin. He has Baby."
"No, he doesn't." Panic gripped his heart like a vise. "Where is she meeting him?"
"At her house," Marley said, the rattle of keys filling his ear. "I'm heading there now."
"Give me the address." He pulled over long enough to punch in her house number and street for the GPS unit. "I'm fifteen minutes from her house. Where are you?"
"Too far," Marley said, her voice tight. "I'll hurry, but you better get there first. You don't know what he's like. You don't know what he's capable of doing."
"I'll get there." He hung up and dropped the phone onto the seat before checking the rearview mirror and merging back into traffic. If Aston had sent her message twenty minutes ago and she had left the brothel around that time, she wouldn't reach her home in Royal Oaks for another ten minutes or so. That would only put him a few minutes behind her.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, he silently berated himself. How could he have been so foolish? He had left behind the gun not because he intended her to actually use the damned thing but because he had hoped it would make her feel more at ease knowing she had a way to defend herself. He had hoped she would be able to rest and stay safe while he sorted out this clusterfuck.
Now she was running off to confront her psycho stepbrother with the gun he had stupidly thrust into her hands. If she got hurt, he would never forgive himself. Hell, if she got hurt, he would probably end up on the pointy end of a knife Marley borrowed from Spider. That friend of Aston's had a sweet, soft gentleness about her, but he had heard the tales of her biological father. If she had inherited even a drop of his bad blood,
she would flay him alive for exposing her best friend to harm. He would deserve it.
The moment they had escaped the 1-8-7 crew trying to gun them down, he should have driven her straight to a police station. He should have urged her to file a police report on the stolen car and to say that he had kidnapped her and nearly gotten her shot. They would have taken her into protective custody and kept her guarded around the clock.
But he hadn't done that. He'd dragged her to a brothel, seduced her and then left her with a gun and a promise of his return. Shame roiled in his gut and left him feeling sick with himself. Zec was wrong. He didn't need to stay away from Aston because she was too high profile. He needed to stay away from her because she deserved a better man.
A better class of man. Wasn't that what she had said after she smacked him in his office? She had been right. He was too low class and mobbed up to ever be trusted with a woman like her.
Mercifully, there were no gates guarding the entrance to her neighborhood. Just as he had expected, the mansions here were oversized and sumptuous with their pretentious architecture and manicured lawns. It was yet another reminder that this world of Aston's would never be his anymore than his could ever be hers.
He found her house number and turned down the private drive that angled away from the street. Huge pecan and oak trees provided a thick barrier that shrouded the house. He spotted the Camaro parked in front but didn't see another vehicle. Ben refused to believe her stepbrother had gotten his hands on the Aston Martin. It was nothing more than a ruse to lure her close.
But Calvin had gotten more than he had bargained for with his lure. Ben had given Aston his word. Calvin would never hurt her again.
Even if that meant he had to put her stepbrother six feet underground.
Chapter Six
I realized my mistake the second I stepped into the house. The cold, hard tip of a knife pressed into the soft skin of my throat. I gulped and closed my eyes. So this is how it ends.
"Close the door. Give me your phone."
I did exactly as Calvin ordered and made sure to keep my movements slow and small lest he cut me open with the knife he held to my neck. He didn't frisk me for a weapon. If he had run his hand along my back, he would have felt the rigid outline of the gun hidden there. The layers of my top and jacket concealed it for now.
"Don't think about screaming for Nina and Pedro. They're not here."
My chest constricted with fear for the married housekeeper and groundskeeper who had lived in this house and worked for my family since before I was born. "Did you kill them?"
His laughter made my skin scrawl. "No. I paid a cop to call with a fake report of their son's injury. They're probably hitting San Antonio right about now. So it's just you and me now, sis."
"Lucky me," I said, finally daring to look into his eyes.
He let the point of the knife glide down the exposed skin of my throat until it was nestled between my breasts and pressing against my heart. The long line he had scratched into my skin burned and throbbed. "This might be your luckiest night yet." He dragged the knife along the swell of my breast. "Russ said you didn't scream when he took you that night in the pool house, but I've always wondered if it was the drugs or because you actually liked it."
I glared at him. "Fuck. You."
"Later, sweetness," he said with that evil smile I had come to loathe. "I've always wanted to throw you face down across your beloved Daddy's desk. God, I hope he haunts this place. I'm getting hard just thinking about his ghost watching us."
I swallowed hard as bile rose in my throat. "You are such a sick freak."
"Blah, blah, blah," he intoned in a high-pitched voice while talking with his hand. "Like I haven't heard that from fifty psychologists." He pressed the knife back to the curve of my throat. "Walk. Now."
"Where?"
"The office, obviously," he added tersely. "We're going to open up that big ole safe Jack had hidden behind the bookcase there."
A quiver of panic pierced my belly. "I don't know the combination."
"Don't even try that bullshit with me." He purposely nicked my neck to remind me of my precarious position. "He gave you everything before he died. I know he gave you the combination."
"Not to that safe," I hurriedly replied. "Really. I've tried to open it a million times."
"Well, for your sake, I hope one million and one is your lucky number." The knife dug into my throat even harder. "Walk."
When we made it to my father's office, the one room in the house I hadn't dared touch since his death, he shoved me toward the bookcase. I stumbled into it and narrowly missed hitting my cheek. Righting myself, I found the button hidden along the underside of the panel and pressed it. The bookcase popped away from the wall and swung to the side on hidden hinges to reveal the safe.
"Open it." He pushed me to my knees in front of the keypad.
Lifting shaky fingers to the buttons, I tried to remember all the combinations I had tried since my father's death. My birthday, his birthday, my Social Security number, his, my mother's birthday, the day my mother died, the date of his first marriage, the date of the second to Marjorie—none of them worked. As I considered what Calvin thought this safe contained, it finally hit me. "What was the date of the acquisition?"
"What? Of course!" He grasped my shoulders and flung me out of the way. "Move!"
Before I could react, he had opened the safe and started dragging out armfuls of envelopes and cardboard tubes. He pried the cap off one tube, upended it—and nothing but ashes poured onto the rug. I watched with a mixture of dread and fascination as tube after tube and envelope after envelope yielded nothing but ashes, burnt scraps of paper, crushed flash drives and shredded discs.
Calvin grew more agitated and angry. He cursed a blue streak while dumping out the contents of each package. I couldn't help it. I started laughing. Hysterically.
"What the fuck is the matter with you?" Calvin demanded as he whirled on me. "You think this is funny?" He slapped a handful of ash in my face. "Is this hilarious to you?"
Wiping ash from my face and certain I must have looked crazy, I nodded. "I think it’s the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life. Daddy destroyed the one thing you wanted. Even from the grave, he found a way to give you the biggest middle finger imaginable."
"Yeah? You want to talk about graves? Let's talk about my mother's. Do you really think it was an accident that those cupcakes had ground up macadamia nuts in them and that her Epi-Pen malfunctioned?"
My laughter died, and the smile faded from my face. "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that I killed that traitorous bitch. She married the man who ruined my father's company—"
"Your father ruined his own company."
"Your father was lucky you had so many nurses watching him and that you slept in his room around the clock there at the end," Calvin sneered. "I had the perfect end planned for him." His manic smile returned. "But no matter. Now it's time for my real masterpiece."
He wielded his knife like an expert and flew at me. I scuttled out of the way and slung the closest chair in between us. He tripped over it and hit his face on the floor. When I threw the chair at him, the movement freed the gun tucked into the waistband of my skirt. It hit the floor with a loud thunk.
Calvin snarled and dove for the gun, but I got there first. Before I could flick off the safety, he slapped it out of my hands. We scrambled across the floor toward the weapon, our elbows jamming together and our hands smacking. He snatched up the pistol and swung it toward me, but I locked my hands together and used the momentum of both arms to hit him in the face. He managed to get a good smack in, but I put both hands against his chin and shoved hard. He tried to bring the gun toward me and almost succeeded—until a big leather boot connected with his head.
My tattooed knight in leather and denim appeared suddenly and miraculously. The kick he landed to Calvin's head dazed my stepbrother long enough for Ben to take him down to the floor. I clambered out o
f the way, crawling backwards toward the door and unable to look away as Ben used those powerful arms and strong hands of his to throttle Calvin.
Somehow my stepbrother had managed to keep a grip on the pistol. He pointed it toward Ben's head, but Ben blocked it at the last moment. The crack of the gunshot ricocheted off the coffered ceilings and marble floors. I screamed, but Ben proved his prowess in a fight by ripping the gun away from Calvin and pistol-whipping him into submission.
"Aston!"
Shocked by Marley's voice, I glanced at the doorway just in time to see her rush through it. Her eyes widened at the bloody sight before her, but my eyes widened at the sight of Devil running toward her back. He grabbed her by the shoulders and set her aside like one might an unruly child. His long legs ate up the floor as he came to Ben's aid.
When Ben jerked a knife from a scabbard hidden in his boot, I reacted on instinct. "No! Ben! Don't!"
His wild-eyed gaze landed on me. He held the knife to Calvin's neck, ready to slit him wide open. My stepbrother gurgled and coughed as he fought to breathe. The gurgles soon turned to laughter. He was laughing like a hyena, barking with sheer delight and making all of us look at him in horror.
Panting, Ben stated the obvious. "He tried to kill you. He tried to have you raped by his friend. He stole from you. He tried to shoot us both tonight. He damned near kicked off a war with a cartel."
"I know," I said quietly, accepting everything he said as truth. "He killed his mother too. He planned to rape me before he was done tonight."
Ben's expression slackened and then grew fierce like a warrior. "He'll only try to hurt you again. He'll keep hurting other people." Ben brought the knife tight against Calvin's jugular. "He needs to die."
"I know—but it can't be you."
Our gazes held for a tense moment. Ben's jaw worked back and forth. Did he understand why it couldn't be him? Did he understand that I couldn’t bear the thought of Calvin's blood staining his hands forever?
Sitting back on his heels, Ben lowered the knife and glanced at Marley. "Take Aston to her room. Get her cleaned up."