“Boo-fucking-hoo,” I snarl and squeeze tighter.
“Onyx.” My old man’s voice cuts through as a warning. This is his way of telling me to dial it down a notch. I don’t care what anyone has to say, not when it comes to getting my Emily back.
I give Charlotte a shake and say, “If you want air, take me to my old lady. If not, I’ll just find her myself when you pass out.” Now I know that I’m way over the line, but I can’t stop myself. If she thinks I’m gonna cut her some slack because she’s rich and used to getting her own way, she’s sadly mistaken.
She begins stumbling forward. I stay right behind her, keeping my hand in place. When we get to a door at the back of her kitchen, I ease up a bit. She chokes out, “I lost the key.”
I toss her to Mica, who says, “Do you think we’re fucking stupid or something?”
I can’t wait for her to decide to do the right thing, so I ram into the door a few times with my shoulder, and it splinters around the lock. A nice strong metal door like we use at the clubhouse would have solved this problem.
The woman shouts, “Your lady friend is fine. We didn’t hurt her.”
I glance over my shoulder. “You had better pray that you didn’t.” I give Jasper a meaningful look and tell him, “Thebest thing you could do would be to call Detective Morgan. If anything happens to Emily or the baby, I won’t be responsible for my actions.”
The woman gasps. I guess she didn’t realize Emily was pregnant. Jasper just nods. These people abducted Emily and hurt Christina. In our world, that turns this situation into a blood feud.
I shove down all my anger and stomp down the steps to check on Emily.
I’m not sure what I’m expecting, but I’m greeted by a force of nature waving a metal shelf bracket in her hand. The minute she realizes it’s me, she drops her makeshift weapon and runs into my arms.
At first, I’m thrilled, then I see the dried blood at her hairline. When she throws her arms around me, I wrap one arm around her and use my other to move her hair around, trying to see what kind of damage they did.
“Are you okay? What happened to your head?”
She looks up at me with fear and anxiety filling her face. Bringing her hand up, she touches a spot in her hair. “It’s nothing. I bumped my head when they threw me in the back seat of their SUV.”
Mica asks, “Did you lose consciousness?”
“Yeah, but not for long. The big news is they tried to kill me.”
My body is vibrating with the kind of rage I have rarely felt in my life. “They fuckin’ did what?”
She pats my chest. “Calm down. I said they tried. They weren’t successful because I outsmarted them. I didn’t think my plan was going to work, but it did.”
My old man speaks up. “Start again. How did they try to kill you?”
She walks over and snatches a pillow off of a wine bottle. Gesturing to it, she explains, “They tried to poison me. I’ll bet it’s the same poison they used on the other women.”
“So, it’s true Charles Brennan didn’t kill the other women?”
She shakes her head. “Not from what I heard. Let’s get out of here and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Jasper says, “No can do. Detective Morgan is on his way. ETA is about ten minutes.”
That’s about the time that my eyes drop to her wrists because I notice raw, red skin there. This time, I’m more worried than angry.
I walk over and ask, “What’s this, Em? Did they restrain you?”
Pulling her thumb back towards a chair with rope hanging off it, she explains, “Yes, they had me tied up.”
I gaze down at her and ask cautiously, “Em, what’s going on here? You’re not normally quite this…resilient.”
“Somewhere along the line, I got tired of feeling like a victim. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned from hanging around with you and your family, it is you can either stand up for yourself and die fighting or just roll over and let people kick you around your whole life.”
Pride surges in my chest for this beautiful woman of mine. “So, you decided to fight back? I’m not being disrespectful, but did you forget the part about you not knowing how to fight?”
Her face lights up. “I decided to fight with my brain instead of my fists. When they tried to poison me, I spat the poison right back in their faces and did my best to convince them that Charles was the real problem, not me. They’ve been arguing about it ever since.”
