King’s eyes narrowed. Bianca’s mouth went dry and her stomach churned. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Not again.
She watched as King rose slowly, moving with dangerous grace as he turned deliberately toward her parents. They shrank away.
“Think very carefully about what you say next,” King warned.
“Of course.” Arthur coughed and tried a congenial smile. “That was insulting. What Winston meant to say was a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
“I can’t do this,” Bianca blurted.
It was too much.Everythingwas too much.
The next thing she knew she was on her feet, hurtling from the room, and dashing through the foyer. She bypassed the elevator, unwilling to waste time waiting for it to arrive. She didn’t know where she was going or what exactly she was running from, she only knew that she had to get out of that room and away from those people and words and decisions.
She threw her body against the bar of the exit door and skidded into the stairwell, ignoring the voices yelling behind her. She didn’t think, just flew down flight after flight until she found another promising door. The lockclunkedbehind her, and she found herself in the main hotel stairwell. Ahead, the inviting glow of an exit sign illuminated another heavy door. Bianca burst through it and into a rush of warm evening air. It was a shock after the air-conditioned building, but it was a relief to be outside.
Well, almost outside. She slowed a little as her feet hit concrete. She’d emerged in the hotel’s parking garage. Her footsteps echoed in the cavernous space, the fading sunlight offering little more illumination than the dim bulbs placed at intervals along the rows of cars.
Bianca slowed to a walk, gulping in the evening air, trying to calm her frenzied thoughts. Her breathing was far too loud in the silent garage. It seemed to echo around her as she descended the spiraling structure, still unsure where she planned to go.
The more she breathed, the more her head cleared, and the less she liked her chosen escape route. What would she do when she reached street level? She didn’t have her phone or wallet, and most of the people she knew were upstairs arguing. Maybe she could ask Dawn to meet her…if she had a way to contact her, which would mean going back to the bloody penthouse.
Bianca huffed in frustration, pulling to an abrupt halt. The echo of her footsteps didn’t stop.
The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Bianca spun around, scanning the shadows. A figure moved between two cars. It was familiar, in a very bad way.
“You’ve been following me,” she said, realization dawning on her at last.
“Following you? Oh, please. We’re not amateurs,” Robert scoffed stepping into view beneath a flickering lightbulb. He was more menacing than she remembered, all traces of the charming boy she’d once known now hardened into unfamiliar lines. There was an emptiness to his gaze that hadn’t been there before. “All we needed to do was crash one of your stupid fundraisers and get close enough to your idiot assistants to log in to their cloud without raising security alerts.”
“You hacked Amelia and Maude? Like some common criminal?” Bianca sneered, even as she backed away, surreptitiously searching for an exit.
An annoyed sigh sounded behind her, making her whirl around. Another familiar alpha emerged from a row of vehicles. He’d changed even more than Robert, as though he’d aged twice as much. His face had a pinched, hungry look to it, and his eyes were full of hatred.
“Hacking is such a reductive term. You never understood our work,” Frank spat, shaking his head. “God, Robert! I understand why you chose her. She was such an easy mark. But I’ll never understand why you actually liked her.”
“Because I’m a sucker for a pretty face and a sweet scent,” Robert answered, sliding his hands into his pockets as he strolled nonchalantly toward Bianca. “What can I say? I’m a romantic at heart.”
“You liked me because I was young and foolish and easy to manipulate, you damp squib,” Bianca retorted, balling her hands into fists. She couldn’t back away with Frank blocking the path behind her, but she didn’t want to let Robert get much closer. She squared her shoulders and fixed him with a glare. “You were a loser who believed the world owed you something, even though you had no talent and no drive. No woman your age would’ve considered you, so you duped a lonely girl who saw you the way you wanted to be seen, instead of recognizing you as an entitled blowhard with a lot of half-baked ideas and no inkling what to do with them. You love bombed me and secured your claim before I wised up, and now you’re stalking me online, following me, and hacking my assistants. Clearly you haven’t grown up at all.”
Robert’s face turned redder with each word Bianca spoke. She thought he would explode, but he managed to keep his voice even. “As Frank just explained, we didn’thackanything. We just needed a peek at your calendar so we could arrange another accidental meeting. You left so quickly that day we ran into each other and you didn’t take me up on my offer of coffee.”
“It would’ve been so much easier that way, but you’ve never made things easy for us, have youBinks?” Frank injected so much venom into Robert’s nickname for her that Bianca had to fight the urge to flinch. She could see now that Frank had never liked her and must have grown to hate her in the years they’d been apart. Every word he spoke held more vitriol than the last. “Even once we had access to your calendar, you made it difficult. All of a sudden, you’re skipping events and missing your stupid little fitness classes. Whenever we do manage to get near you, you’ve got some meathead trailing behind you. Seriously, Bianca? Twenty-four-hour security for a bimbo socialite? Your dads are just burningmoney for fun. Money that should’ve been ours. They’re practically rubbing our noses in it.”
Bianca felt an all-too-familiar rage begin to boil inside her. Today had been a fucking rollercoaster and she was tired of her dads and their money and all the bullshit that came with it. That included delusional, entitled exes who had grievances with the Bonnycastle empire.
“We saw that you were away this weekend, and thought it would be a good time to do some recon, since it was becoming obvious we weren’t going to catch you out and about. With you out of the building, we figured security would be more relaxed and we could get a good look around. We didn’t expect to get this lucky,” Robert continued with a smug smile. “Look at you, practically delivering yourself on a silver platter. It’s like you were drawn to us, like you understand you have an obligation to make up for what happened. Deep down, you know you belong to us.”
Another flash of rage tore through her. Robert and Frank had caused her so much heartache. They’d shattered her ability to trust others. More importantly, with the help of her parents, they’d destroyed her ability to trust herself. She’d spent years doubting her own judgement because of their rejection, and those doubts had been constantly reinforced in the subsequent decade of punishment and neglect by her parents. Robert and Frank had used and discarded her, leaving her believing she was broken and unlovable.
Now, they were back, making demands and trying to make her believe she owed them something. Her parents had just done the same thing, making her believe she should be grateful for the attention of a pack who cared only about her last name and her fertility. They all thought Bianca owed them her future, her happiness, her entire fucking life. None of them cared what she wanted, what she was owed.
Bianca had just found herself again, after years of being whittled down, molded into someone more palatable, more likable and appealing to high society. She was only just realizing what she was capable of, what she enjoyed, and what she wanted out of life. And she damn sure wasn’t about to let these two assholes take that away.
“So self-righteous!” Bianca crooned mockingly. “You’ve convinced yourselves you’re the victims in all this. You’ve been licking these self-inflicted wounds for years, haven’t you, Franklin? My god, you’ve somehow twisted things around in your feeble little minds to blame me for your failures. Well, let me remind you that, to my great shame, I was not the one who broke our bond. You gave me up. You rejected me. You took the money and ran and left me to deal with the fallout. You have no one to blame but yourselves, you daft cunts.”
“We suffered after your parents separated us too, you know?” Robert exploded, throwing up his hands and advancing angrily toward her again. “You were our ticket to the life we deserved, and we ended up with nothing! Your dads took advantage of us because we were inexperienced in business matters and accepted pocket change, when we were owed so much more.”
Bianca almost laughed. Perhaps if Robert had more backbone, they could’ve negotiated a larger sum. King had barely said a word and had already been offered three times as much as Pack Bonnycastle had given Robert and Frank. And yet, Bianca didn’t have to hear the rest of the conversation going on upstairs to know that Pack King wouldn’t accept one cent if it meant giving her up.
