His lips thin, but he doesn’t deny me my request. “Garner Neuville.”
“Garner Neuville,” I repeat, drawing a hard breath and then letting it out. “I know his name, but nothing else comes to me. I still can’t remember. I need a picture.” I grab my phone to Google him.
He takes my phone. “I have photos, but do you really want to see him right now? Are you ready to remember? Because I’ve worked things out with Niccolo. There is no imminent threat.”
“Until Neuville shows up.”
“Neuville will not step in Niccolo’s territory. Niccolo is the stronger brother, which is why Neuville wants the money that necklace represents, and why Niccolo doesn’t want him to have it.”
“I’m done fearing unknown monsters that are about to jump out at me from around every corner, Kayden. I want my enemy to have a face and a name.”
He hesitates and then reaches behind me, removing a folder from his jacket. “We’re going to do this slowly.”
“I don’t want to go slowly,” I object. “Just show me the asshole’s photo.”
He hands me a photo of an expensive-looking gray stone building. “What is this place?”
“His home,” I bite out. “In Paris. There’s a view of the Eiffel Tower outside his bedroom window.”
He replaces that shot with one of a black Mercedes, and I say, “One of his cars. Kayden—”
“Who is this man?” he asks, handing me a photo of a dark-haired, athletic-looking man.
“I don’t know him.” I glance at Kayden. “Should I?”
“He’s been showing a photo of a red-haired woman around Paris.”
“He’s looking for me.”
“It would seem that way, which means he’ll know who you are. I’m trying to find him.”
“Ferguson,” I whisper, the name coming to me from out of nowhere.
Kayden’s brow furrows. “The man is Ferguson?”
“No. That’s my last name. But there are tons of Fergusons, and my identity has been wiped out.”
“We will find you with that last name. I promise you.”
I give a choppy nod. “Let’s go on.”
He studies me a moment, seeming to weigh my state of mind based on “just bad” or “too bad,” and “just bad” must win, because he slips another photo in front of me. I inhale with the image of a man’s wrist and a watch that looks just like Kayden’s. “Neuville’s watch,” I murmur.
“That I made the unfortunate decision to buy for myself, and will be donating mine to charity.”
I set all of the photos aside. “Just show me his photo, Kayden. Stop softening the blow. It’s going to suck, and that isn’t going to change by leading up to it.”
“I have more than his photo, Ella. Matteo hacked a few security cameras in areas he frequents.”
My hand goes to my throat. “You have photos of me with him.”
“I do, and I can show you one of just him, or I can show you all of them. Or we can just get naked, make love, and forget this until tomorrow.”
I grab the folder from him and open it, sucking in air as I stare down at a man who is devastatingly handsome, with thick, slicked-back dark hair. “Neuville,” I whisper, and my stupid hand starts to tremble. I grab it and will it to stop, forcing myself to look at the photo again. Images flit through my mind: Him kissing me. Him touching me. Him staring at me with brutally sexy eyes.
“Bastard,” I hiss, flipping to the next photo, my spine stiffening at the sight of me sitting across from him at a table in a café. Laughing. God, I was laughing. “What a fool I was,” I whisper.
Kayden’s hands slide around my calves. “Ella.”
I look up at him, into eyes that are a hundred times sexier than Neuville’s, but just as brutal. Kayden can kill. Kayden can be cold. But there’s a kindness and fairness in him that made me fall in love with him. “Just so you know, I never loved him. I had this hero complex when he rescued me.”
“How did he rescue you?”
“David disappeared, I think. I’m not sure yet. I know he’s dead, but at the time, he’d just disappeared. All I know is that he was gone and I had no money or passport. Neuville rescued me. Only . . . I think I found out that he had arranged for me to end up with no money or passport. Yes. I don’t know how I know this, but he arranged it all.”
Eager for more to come to me, I refocus on the photos, flipping to yet another image, this one of me getting into the Mercedes, with Neuville’s hand intimately placed at my back. I flip to the next and I’m trembling, inside and out. It’s me and Neuville sitting at a table in a highly exclusive restaurant, with a woman standing at the table talking to us. And that woman is the woman. My trembling becomes shaking, and suddenly I’m back in time, reliving a memory, but with far more detail than before.
He is angry. He is always angry. He is also at my back, stalking me as we walk down a hallway in a club he says I’ll soon enjoy as he does. There was a time when he would have said such a thing to me and I’d have believed him. That time has passed. The hallway ends and he punches a code into the door panel. An odd thing in a club, but of course he wouldn’t frequent anyplace that isn’t exclusive in every possible way. The door buzzes open and I enter what looks like a small, round coliseum, stepping past two huge pillars to find a naked woman with long, dark hair resting on her knees, her arms tied to some sort of posts. I gasp and turn to leave, but he steps in front of me. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I don’t want to be here.”
“You need to see what happens if you disobey me again.”
“I already promised I’d listen from now on.”
He caresses my cheek and I cringe. He notices and is not pleased, his fingers digging into my arm as he turns me to face forward. “You watch. You learn. If you move right now, you will become her.” He shoves me to my knees, his legs at my spine, and my gaze meets the woman waiting for whatever punishment is soon to be hers. But she isn’t afraid, as I am. She welcomes it. She wants it. A door opens to the left, and a beautiful blond woman in leather holding a whip enters the room.
“No!” I stand and face him. “No. No. No.”
He grabs my hair and drags me toward the two women, glancing over my shoulder to say, “She goes first.”
I inhale and try to pull myself out of the memory right here, where it normally stops, but I can’t.
“Ella,” I hear Kayden say, and on some level I am aware of being in his arms, but I still can’t get back to him. I am back in the past.
Both of my arms are tied to the posts, stretched wide, and my back burns with the punishment it has taken. “Please stop.” And it does stop. There is silence. So much silence, and then Neuville is in front of me, cupping my face, his thumb stroking over my lips. “You are so fucking perfect.”
He kisses me and rage rises inside me, and every part of me that has faked it with him disappears. I bite his tongue, hard and fast, and he yelps, pulling back to glare at me. “You little bitch!” he says, fury filling his eyes before he slaps me. The pain radiates in my temples, and everything goes black.
The next thing I remember, I’m in a bed, lying on my stomach, and that woman is stroking my hair. I moan and she kneels on the edge of the bed beside me. “You cannot ever cross him again. He’s going to come in here. He’s going to want an apology. You must give it to him. Give it to him.”
“Please help me.”
“There’s only one person who can help you, and I’m not sure that’s help.”
“Who? Who can . . . help?”
“Niccolo, but think long and hard before you ask for his help.”
“I want help. When? How? I have something. . . . I have . . .”
The door opens and she leans to my ear. “Fuck him and fuck him good, honey. For your own safety.”
She is gone then, and I hear her talking to him in French, something about me being beautiful, and him being lucky. And then Neuville’s hand is on my head. “You should not have bit
ten me.”
My skin crawls, but I see an image of my father yelling at me to run another lap. “Don’t be weak! Push! Push! Push!”
“I got scared,” I whisper. “I thought . . . you were someone else. I was disoriented and I didn’t want a stranger to touch me.”
And then he is pulling me into his arms, cradling me, and touching me.
I blink back to the present. “Ella. Sweetheart, you’re scaring me. Nathan, she’s trembling and I can’t get her to wake up, just like in the dressing room that time.”
“I’m okay,” I say, pushing out of his arms, tears streaming down my cheeks. “But I’m sick. I’m going to throw up.”
He scoops me up and carries me to the bathroom, setting me down on the thick rug in front of the toilet.
“Please go,” I whisper, grabbing the seat, willing myself not to be sick until he does. “Please—” I heave. And I heave again and again. I lose time and place all over again, but when I come back to the present, Kayden is holding my hair, his arm around my waist.
“I told you . . . to go,” I pant out, taking the towel he offers me and wiping my mouth.
“And I told you,” he says, sitting against the door and cradling me in his lap, “I’m not ever letting you go.”
“It’s okay to let me go when I’m throwing up.”
“No,” he says, tightening his arms around me. “It’s not ever okay to let you go.”
I sink into him, suddenly okay with that. He strokes my hair and my back, and I shut my eyes. “He did horrible things to me, but I wasn’t weak. I made my father proud. I did what I had to survive, but . . . it was horrible.”
“I’ve never known anyone braver, Ella,” he says, and in that moment I flash back to the kitchen the moment after I had shot the last of my father’s two attackers. I drop the gun and look down at my father, and he looks at me, blood running from his mouth. “My brave little girl,” he whispers, before shutting his eyes and never opening them again.
I sob, and Kayden does what he promised. He doesn’t let go, and I finally fall asleep.
nineteen
I wake in bed, still dressed in my sweats, and Kayden is holding me. Memories flow back to me. Him carrying me to bed. Him holding me while I slept off the adrenaline and shock over remembering Neuville. Me waking up in the middle of the night to find Kayden wide-awake, watching over me. We talked for hours then, trying to make sense of the random memories coming at me, with no completion or logical order.
“You’re awake,” Kayden says, nuzzling my neck.
Smiling, something I’d not thought possible before our middle of the night talk, I face him. His jaw is shadowed, his light brown hair mussed up, and the pale blue T-shirt he still wears remains a striking match for his eyes. “You’re even beautiful when you wake up,” I say, sighing. “While I’m a puffy-eyed mess from all the tears.”
He kisses my forehead. “You make puffy gorgeous, sweetheart.”
I laugh. “You get an A for suaveness, because if you’d said I wasn’t puffy, I’d never have believed a compliment from you again.”
His cell phone vibrates on the nightstand and he rolls over to grab it, settling on his back to eye his messages. “Nathan checking on you again,” he says, keying in a reply.
“You freaked him out when you called him and told him I wouldn’t wake up.”
He sits up against the headboard. “Because I was freaked out. You scared the hell out of me, woman.”
I sit up and pull my legs to my chest. “Well, considering all the things I remembered last night, I’m pretty incredulous that I still can’t remember where the necklace is.”
“You remembered what the note said from inside the necklace,” he reminds me. “That’s a start.”
“Do you have any idea what Pierre Remy—Marc—0000 means?”
“Pierre Remy is a restaurant, but it has many locations in France. I assume Marc is a person, and 0000 some sort of code. We have to be cautious about asking too many questions, so we don’t spook ‘Marc’ and send him and the necklace underground. I trust Sasha, and she’s good at using games to get answers.”
“But I thought she left France because of Neuville?”
“Against my orders, Sasha tried to seduce Neuville in order to retrieve something he took from someone. She’s lucky she didn’t end up like Enzo. But that was years ago, and she won’t be there as Sasha, anyway.”
My brow furrows. “You know, I initially didn’t think I could read the note because it was in another language, but ‘Pierre Remy—Marc—0000’ is pretty easy to make out. So maybe there’s more to the note.”
“Or maybe you were just blocking it out,” he suggests. “You obviously didn’t want to remember Neuville.”
A memory from the club tries to surface and I shove it aside. “But I said I couldn’t read the note because it was in another language. Since I speak French, wouldn’t I be able to read it?”
“Speaking a language and reading it are two different things.” He sits up and grabs a pad of paper and a pencil next to the bed, scribbling something down and handing it to me. “Let’s see if you read French.”
I study the sentence. “The sky is blue and the sun is yellow.” I hand him the paper back. “I can definitely read French. Something feels off about this restaurant theory. Could Pierre Remy be Italian? Does it translate to here?”
“It could be, but you were in France and the restaurant has no franchises here. And there’s every indication that Niccolo had no idea you were connected to the necklace, but that Neuville did and set the entire David situation up himself.”
“I don’t have clarity on that, but yes,” I say. “I believe I somehow found out that Neuville set up the David situation.”
“Pierre Remy therefore somehow connects dots between David and Neuville.”
“That makes sense, but I can’t help but feel like it’s something different altogether.”
His phone buzzes again and he reads the message and eyes me. “Marabella has hot croissants just out of the oven, and wants to know if we want some.”
“Are we even considering an answer other than yes?”
“Exactly my thoughts,” he says, typing a reply. “I’ll tell her to bring them up.”
“Wait, though. What time is it? We’re supposed to have lunch with Giada.”
He glances at the clock on his phone. “It’s ten o’clock, but I cancelled with Giada and told her tentatively tomorrow. I didn’t know how you’d feel today.”
“Thank you. I’m eager to talk to her, but today is not the day. And is it even safe, anyway?”
He scoots closer and slides his arm under my knees. “Neuville won’t come here. And now not only do you have me and Evil Eye protecting you, which Niccolo knows, by the way, but he himself has any number of reasons to do so, as well.”
A knock sounds on the door, and we hear, “Brunch in bed! Are you decent?”
Kayden and I both smile, and he murmurs, “For once, we are. You up for this?”
“Are you kidding? Who wouldn’t be?”
He kisses my nose and calls out, “Come in, Marabella,” and that silly, tender action has me ridiculously giddy when he releases me and gets up to help her.
A few moments later the room is enveloped in the scent of hot bread and coffee, as well as Marabella’s chattiness, and I have this surreal moment of family and belonging. My mind shifts to Sara, my friend in the States, and I know then that she’s as alone as I am, but we’ve found a sisterhood in each other. A bit like what I hope I can give Giada. Thoughts like that remain on my mind after Marabella leaves and Kayden and I head to the bathroom to shower.
“How about we have a date day?” he suggests, tearing his shirt over his head, giving me a distracting view of his naked torso. “We’ll go buy us both ridiculously expensive watches, explore the neighborhood, and then go to dinner.” He steps to me and reaches for my shirt, pulling it over my head before sliding his arm up my back and molding me to him. “You
need to know your neighborhood.”
“Right. I want to, but I think . . . I’m just feeling gun-shy.”
“That’s why we need to do this. And know this, Ella. I hate Niccolo, but I will partner with him to destroy Neuville, if that’s what it takes to give you peace.”
“Niccolo killed Kevin and Elizabeth. You can’t—”
“Patience is a virtue that keeps people alive and gets you what you want. Niccolo will get what he has coming to him, but right now, you are what matters. Neuville is in my sights, and he has no idea what is coming his way.”
“What are you going to do?”
“The list is long. Think kid in a candy store of weapons, and I’m the kid.” He lifts me and sets me on the sink, pulling my arm and the bracelet between us. “This is a showpiece you can wear anywhere and anytime, but today we’ll also get you a Hawk tattoo to match mine. A message to anyone who dares touch you, that they will die.” He tangles his fingers in my hair, dragging my gaze to his. “They will die painfully.” Then he kisses me, and that promise of protection is on his lips, but there’s more. Something darker. Something that makes me kiss him deeper and, once we’re in the shower, fuck harder. Something that feels way too much like dread.
Kayden and I dress casually, both ending up in black jeans and T-shirts, with lace-up black boots. While I feel quite chic in my Chanel coat, he’s ruggedly handsome in his black-and-gray biker jacket. We take a car service to the Spanish Steps and spend the afternoon shopping, walking around the high-end stores nearby, where he indeed buys a ridiculously expensive Rolex for himself and tries to buy one for me as well, but I refuse. I want my tattoo on one arm and my bracelet on the other, a choice that warms his eyes. We are growing closer, stronger. We laugh and talk easily, my memories of my mother and father blossoming, and I share them as they come to me.
At one point we sit at a tiny café, waiting for espressos. “I already have someone working on connecting you to your last name,” he tells me.
“I know,” I say. “That’s why I didn’t ask. I have that much confidence in you, Kayden. My mother had that kind of faith in my father.”