Tangled up in Hate

by Charlotte Byrd

  I want to fight it.

  I want to pull away, but I don’t have the strength.

  At least, not in my mind.

  My body has other plans.

  My feet keep taking one step after another.

  My hands keep burying further inside of my coat.

  My skin keeps getting colder and colder in the frost.

  “Do you know why he did this?” I ask Martin. They are both surprised, not so much by my question but by the fact that I am even talking to them.

  “No, I don’t.” He shakes his head. I stop and examine his facial expression. It’s blank. But perhaps it is always like that. I do not know him well enough to make a decision one way or another. So, I have to be satisfied with whatever he says. I am not.

  “You have to tell me the truth. It’s not going to change anything, but it’s going to make me feel better.”

  Julie squeezes his arm. He looks at her and then at me. We both wait.

  “I don’t know anything,” he says, sticking to his story. I ball up my fists with anger, but I am too cold to take them out and throw a punch.

  We are now walking in unison, all three of us across the pavement in a row, like an obnoxious group of tourists.

  Julie and Martin talk among themselves.

  They hold hands.

  They snuggle up against each other and brace themselves against the wind. I take a step away from them, keeping my distance.

  I don’t want their love to rub off on me.

  I don’t want to feel worse, though that hardly seems possible.

  Staying next to them is necessary.

  I couldn’t walk in front of them much longer. It reminded me too much of Parker. They were right behind me, watching me.

  Observing me.

  Stalking me.

  Now, being next to them, it feels normal. Like we are just a normal group, friends, even. But inside, I feel anything but normal. I doubt that I’ll ever feel normal again.

  When I get home, I open my computer for the first time since it happened. Much to my surprise, and perhaps dismay, the world did not stop turning. In fact, people continued to buy my books.

  I sold almost four hundred copies.

  I stare at the number.

  It doesn’t quite make sense.

  Can this be real?

  Did three-hundred and eighty-four people really buy my book?

  I click on the Facebook Ads Manager.

  The cost per click is around twenty-five cents, which is pretty good. People are clicking and buying my books.

  I make some more images and start new ads. This process doesn’t take me long anymore. I’ve been somewhat of an expert. I have a system and I know exactly what I need to do. The only thing that takes time are the images and the copy.

  How absurd is it to look up images of sexy guys to sell people on the idea of love when that’s the last thing that I’m feeling right now?

  As I work, my mind becomes occupied and suddenly the pain that was consuming me loosens its hold.

  It no longer feels like an invisible hand is strangling me. It’s just holding onto my throat, lightly.

  I breathe a little easier and I continue to work.

  When I’m finished with the marketing and advertising aspect of the business, I open the document that I was last working on.

  There are notes below for what’s to come in the next chapters. I read them and the story seems completely foreign to me.

  Like someone else wrote it. More than that actually. It’s as if it were written in another language altogether.

  I can’t possibly write when I’m feeling like this, I decide.

  But my fingers touch the keyboard and my mind, thirsty for something other than sorrow, starts to form words.

  A few words form a sentence and one sentence follows another. Quickly, I am transported to another world and I am not so consumed by the troubles of this one. Occasionally, I glance over at Martin and Julie.

  They eat dinner.

  I write.

  They do the dishes and have dessert.

  I write.

  They climb into bed and wrap themselves with a big comforter.

  I write.

  With each page that I write, the grip around my throat loosens more and more and finally I can take a full breath again.

  16

  Jackson

  Wrapped in gray…

  Everything is a blur of a blur of a blur. I work but it’s more like pretending to work. What I’m really doing is waiting.

  I’m waiting for them to make their move. They made their threat, I walked away and now it’s up to them.

  I want to do something other than wait, but I don’t know what.

  As days pass, I lose myself in oblivion.

  My security team keeps telling me that everything will be alright, but I don’t believe them. I know that something is about to happen, the only problem is that I don’t know what.

  Will they threaten my family again?

  Will they threaten someone else?

  How far are they willing to take things?

  What will they do to make me believe them?

  And then, of course, there’s that off chance that it might be okay. They might not push me any further.

  They have threatened me once and once I declined, they might give up.

  There’s a chance that might happen, right? Or am I just hoping for the impossible?

  I find their bodies on the sidewalk, right outside my door. It’s a week after I met with him for lunch.

  Seven days after I told him no.

  He does not make any further requests or contact. Instead, I walk out of the door and find two of my bodyguards shot dead on the street.

  Their lifeless bodies lie on the pavement, dark circles of blood pooling underneath them.

  The police are on their way.

  A crowd of onlookers is gathering. Everyone is pointing fingers and gasping.

  I just freeze in place and stare.

  They are both lying face down, shot in the back of the head. They never saw their assassins coming. But I did.

  This is all my fault.

  Now, two people are dead because of me. I should have known. No, I knew. This was the only thing that was going to happen. When the Lindell family wants something, they get it.

  Now, I’m going to have to sell half of my business to the bastards who killed my friends.

  These men have eaten breakfast, lunch, and dinner in my home for weeks. They told me about their wives and girlfriends.

  They told me about their favorite places to fish and fuck.

  I knew things about them others don’t know about their best friends and now they are dead.

  Fuck you, Alexander Lindell! I want to scream at the top of my lungs. Fuck you!

  But people are watching.

  The cops arrive.

  They ask questions. Interview people. Interrogate me. I invite them inside and tell them as much as I can.

  I don’t know much. I’m sure that the man they hired is a hired gun, a professional hitman.

  A ghost.

  There’s no point in telling the police about the Lindell’s request or threats because their officials will not be able to prove anything anyway.

  If the FBI can’t stop them and the CIA is working with them, what hope does the New York Police Department have?

  They take me down to the precinct and I again tell them about Parker. Other detectives are brought in to review the case.

  They suspect that it was him who killed them even though he has no history of murder. I’m tempted to tell them more.

  I want to explain. I want to share.

  But I bite my tongue to keep my mouth shut. Keep quiet unless you want more people bleeding on the sidewalk.

  When I finally get home, the following day, more bad news.

  I think that she went home to Woodward, her future ex-boyfriend, but then I get a call. I’m too tired to pick up, but her name keeps
flashing on my screen and I finally answer.

  “Jackson? Jackson!” she shrieks into the phone and then someone takes it away from her.

  “Aurora?” I call for her. My heart rate speeds up. She is the unflappable one. She is the one who can laugh off anything. I’ve never heard her this…distressed.

  “What’s going on? Where are you?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Aurora!” I yell again and shake the phone, as if that is going to make her come back. “Where are you?”

  “She’s fine,” a male voice says. It’s low and menacing and has a slight thick accent, but I don’t quite recognize its origin.

  My phone makes a dinging noise and I glance at the screen. A request to video chat. I press on the accept button.

  The first thing I see is Aurora’s eyes. Wild and crazy, they are practically bugging out of her head. There’s a gag around her mouth, spreading her lips apart. She can’t talk but she makes a horrific, screeching noise.

  “Aurora has not been a very good girl,” the man says, petting her arm. “She has been lying to us.”

  I don’t want to know what that means and I’m too afraid to ask.

  “Let her go! Now!”

  I hear the man laugh in the background.

  My body begins to shake. I fold my arms across my chest to warm up, but it’s pointless.

  The cold is coming from somewhere deep within me.

  “You have to let her go.”

  “Do we, really?” He pulls on the gag in her mouth and her head jerks backward. I reach out to help her, but she’s on the other side of the screen.

  How did this happen? Wasn’t Woodward supposed to protect you? What happened to your security? My mind swirls around the regrets instead of focusing on the future.

  The man on the other side of the phone snaps me back into the present.

  “If you want this pretty woman back in one piece, you better do everything I say.”

  I nod and wait.

  “Minetta no longer belongs to you. Let Lindell Industries pay you a very reasonable amount for a fifty-one percent share and your wife will be returned to you unharmed.”

  “Fifty-one percent? Alexander said he wanted fifty.”

  “Now, he no longer trusts you. Now, he wants a controlling share.”

  “I can’t…“ I start to say.

  “You better think about it before you finish that sentence, son. The Lindells aren’t fucking around. The attorneys from both sides will be arriving at your home in ten minutes. They will bring all the necessary paperwork for you to sign.”

  “And…if I don’t?”

  Aurora gasps.

  “She’ll have the same fate as your security team. You remember what happened to them, don’t you?”

  17

  Jackson

  When I have to make a decision…

  I can’t trust him, but I can’t afford to not trust him either. He has Aurora. I couldn’t live knowing that I could’ve saved her and didn’t.

  The next ten minutes pass in a blink.

  Before I can make a decision one way or another, four attorneys arrive at my front door.

  They introduce themselves and we shake hands. They are all dressed in nearly identical black suits, which they wear like their armor. They each carry a dark suitcase with gold buckles and they quickly spread out their papers around my dining room table.

  Knowing what I know about attorneys and business meetings, I know that they are expecting me to provide them with coffee and bagels. I just sit down at the head of the table and wait.

  The attorneys who are supposedly on my side briefly hand me the paperwork to look over.

  There are pages and pages and I go through each one carefully.

  I am used to reading legalities, and this looks to be in order and up to the standards except, of course, that I will be signing it under duress.

  “And if I want to take this document to my own attorneys back at Minetta?” I ask. All four of them stare at me for a moment.

  “That is not really an option here, Mr. Ludlow,” one of the attorneys assigned to me says. “I am sure that you are aware of the situation that your ex-wife is in at this moment.”

  So, this is the guy who is supposedly on my side. I wonder what the other guy is going to say, I think to myself sarcastically.

  I don’t need to take it to Minetta to know their response.

  They will freak out.

  Giving away fifty-one percent of the company means that it’s no longer in my control. It means that the Lindells can do whatever they want with it in the future.

  My attorneys hand me additional paperwork that I have to sign first. It’s the official contract saying that they are representing me.

  With a heavy hand, I pick up the pen and sign it. What other choice do I have?

  As I watch my signature dry, I try to come up with one possible alternative to the scenario that they have presented with me.

  What if I don’t go through with this?

  What if I call them on their bluff?

  One of the lawyers on the other side pushes the main contract toward me. There are five places to sign at the bottom of each page and a number of additional places to initial. It’s about double the size of a traditional real estate contract and I pick up the pen and begin.

  When it’s time for me to sign the second page, I hesitate again.

  Some wealthy families have a policy.

  They never pay ransom requests. It comes from the philosophy that the US government follows.

  The government also never pays ransoms for kidnapped officials. They believe that by paying for ransom requests they will just encourage more people to kidnap their officials and employees.

  I once had a meeting with a security team about Lila when she was just born urging me to agree to the same terms.

  Apparently, kids of the wealthy are often at risk of being taken. I worried about this for a while after I signed that policy, wondering if I could actually go through with it if someone had taken her.

  It’s one thing to put your name on a piece of paper and it’s a whole other thing to actually go through with it.

  But after her death, I haven’t given anything like this anymore thought.

  Until today, that is.

  The fear in Aurora’s eyes comes back to me. I should’ve sent Aurora away just like I had sent Harley away.

  The reason they took her is that she was someone near me who they could take. Everything that happened to her is my fault and now it’s up to me to save her.

  I know what the Lindells are capable of and I am certain that they will take out their anger on her.

  She may be married to a royal in Europe, but that won’t matter.

  They’ll just make her disappear and no one will ever hear from her again.

  I put my initials in every space and sign and date the bottom of every page until I get to the last spot. This will seal the deal. I lift the pen from the paper and wait.

  “I need more time,” I finally say.

  “You do not have more time,” the lawyer from the other side says.

  “You are almost there. Just one more signature and it’s all over,” my lawyer says.

  What if I were to sign this and then argue that it was all done under duress in court?

  That’s possible, right?

  It will be a long drawn out legal battle, but maybe then I can get my company back and free Aurora.

  Usually, duress is really hard to argue unless they actually have a gun to your head, but this will qualify.

  They are making me choose between my company and saving someone’s life. It’s not really signing a contract willingly, or with a free and clear mind.

  “Mr. Ludlow, please sign at the bottom,” one of them says. I take a deep breath.

  “Mr. Ludlow, you do not want to make the situation worse. Mr. Lindell wants to have a good working relationship with you.”

  I roll my eyes and laugh.
>
  “Are you kidding me?”

  “He made you a fair offer before, but you turned him down. Then he was forced to take things to the next level.”

  “Forced to?” I shake my head. “I didn’t force him to do anything. Has he ever considered just taking a no and moving on?”

  “No, he hasn’t. Mr. Lindell doesn’t accept no for an answer.”

  I shake my head. “That’s because he’s an arrogant bully who only thinks about himself.”

  “You are, of course, entitled to your opinion, but that does not change your current predicament. We have authorization to show you this video if you choose not to sign the contract.”

  18

  Jackson

  When I watch the video …

  My heart sinks.

  He pulls out his phone and turns the screen toward me.

  It’s Harley.

  She’s walking toward her building with a bag of groceries. Martin, her bodyguard, is following closely behind.

  Suddenly, something else starts to creep onto the screen from the bottom. It’s long, black, and made of metal.

  As the camera pans, I see the 9mm handgun in the assassin’s hand.

  He’s standing only a few feet away from them. This is exactly how my bodyguards were murdered.

  A stranger walked up to them and shot them in the back of their heads.

  I clench my fists as my whole body tenses up. A mixture of anger, regret, and despair courses through me.

  I tried to protect her but they were one step ahead of me. I should’ve never broken up with her, I should’ve taken her somewhere far away from here like she wanted.

  I should’ve listened to her and then things might have been okay. But they’re not.

  I pick up the pen and sign on the last line.

  Nothing matters anymore.

  I don’t care that I don’t own Minetta.