by Layne, Ivy
“You really want to get home,” I said, bemused at the sight of him so domestic.
Turning from the sink, he crossed the room to pull me into his arms. “I really want to get you home. Are you ready?”
“Just let me grab my things.”
I texted Kristi once we were on the road, letting her know all was good, that we’d straightened up the cabin and put the key back where it belonged.
Thanks, babe. Call Pete tomorrow or his head will explode.
Tell him to cool his jets. I’ll call tomorrow.
I laughed as I hit send.
“What’s so funny this time?” Cooper asked.
“Nothing. Pete wants to kill you.”
A smirk. “He can try.”
“You’re not mad?”
“That he was looking out for his sister? Hell, no. I’d think there was something wrong with him if he didn’t want to kill me.”
“I can look out for myself,” I said, a little peeved that Cooper and Pete thought I needed looking after. Never mind that Pete was involved because I’d needed his help. That wasn’t the point.
“If you had a little sister you wouldn’t look out for her?” he asked, sending me an arch look. I didn’t bother to answer. Instead, I reached out and threaded my fingers through his. I wasn’t going to argue about my overprotective brother.
I was too happy to be annoyed at anyone. I was going home with Cooper. We were moving in together.
I was still on edge about going to work, about facing Lacey, but Cooper's hand holding mine was an anchor. I could handle the rest of it with Cooper at my back. Of that, I had no doubt.
If I'd known what the rest of it would entail, I would have grabbed Cooper’s hand and taken off for a bunker in the desert. But at that moment, speeding toward home, it felt like the rest of my life was spread before me, filled only with possibilities and happy endings.
It was too easy to forget that real life awaited.
Tsepov. Maxwell. The FBI’s investigation.
Cocooned in Cooper's car, our tires eating up the miles between North Carolina and Georgia, real life seemed far away.
Too bad it didn't stay that way for long.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Cooper
I wasn't ready for the sound when it came.
Bang.
Bang.
A fist pounding on my door.
I looked at the woman in bed beside me, her nearly-black hair a sharp contrast to the white of the pillow. Even in the dim light of the room her lips were red, her lashes dark fans on her cheeks.
If whoever was banging on the door woke her up I was going to kill them. If she woke up, she might remember where she was. She might leave. I wouldn't let that happen.
I liked her right where she was. Asleep in my bed. I preferred her in my arms, where she'd been a moment before the asshole at the door interrupted.
Pulling on a pair of pants, I grabbed my weapon from the bedside table and strode through my apartment. With a stab of my finger at the panel, I woke up the screen to see the face of the man I was about to kill for disturbing my sleep.
I had to blink at the image that flicked into view.
Are you fucking kidding me?
It couldn't be.
I had to be hallucinating.
As a teenager, his betrayal had sparked a flicker of rage in my heart. Nearly a year ago that spark ignited, the flames growing hotter day by day. I saw his face on the screen and those flames erupted into a raging inferno.
In an instant, my control evaporated. All I could see was red.
I was going to fucking kill him.
I wrenched open the door and stared into the ice-blue eyes of Maxwell Sinclair. My father.
My father who’d faked his death five years before, leaving us to grieve with no answers.
My father who'd stolen money from the mob, making his family and the people we loved into targets.
My father who had broken so many laws I couldn't keep count.
My father who moved through life thinking only of himself, leaving destruction in his wake.
My father who stood at my door, wearing the cocky grin I'd learned to hate.
I did the only thing I could, the thing I'd dreamed of doing for far too long.
Lunging at him, I swung, my fist connecting with his jaw in a solid thunk, sending a shockwave ricocheting up my arm.
My father flew back to sprawl on the carpet in the hallway, his head lolling to the side, blood trickling from his mouth.
My chest heaved, lungs tight with adrenaline and rage.
A slender yet strong arm slid around my waist. Sky-blue eyes looked up at me, concern and amusement battling in their depths.
“I think you knocked him out,” was all she said.
We both froze at the rustle of feet on the carpet. A small figure came into view.
She looked up at me with a familiar pair of ice-blue eyes, then down at Maxwell and said, “Daddy?”
From beside me, Alice muttered, “Oh, shit.”
Exactly.
The small figure in front of me dropped to her knees beside my father, shaking him with frantic desperation, her little fingers curled into his rumpled button-down.
Her light, clear voice was so fast the words spilled over themselves, but I thought she was saying Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, the sound slightly accented in tones that brought to mind Eastern Europe.
What. The. Fuck?
My father groaned and rolled his head to the side. Dramatic. Typical.
Alice broke through her shock before I did, diving forward to scoop up the little girl and take her into the apartment.
I heard sobs and Alice's voice, gentle and low, asking if she liked ice cream. That was one problem solved.
Glad I didn't have any nosy neighbors, I leaned over and wrapped my hand around my father's arm, hauling him to his feet. I didn’t regret hitting him. I regretted not hitting him harder.
“Fucking asshole,” I muttered under my breath as I shoved him into my place, pushing him past the kitchen to the living room, where he dropped on to my couch with a groan.
“Hell of a way to greet your old man, kid.”
“Don't even start with me. I'm not in the mood for your bullshit, Dad.”
“When you can't go anywhere else, you go home, right? Isn’t that the saying?”
“You’ve worn out your welcome everywhere else. Did you know Mom's downstairs in the safe house?”
My father had the grace to look away for a second before meeting my eyes with his trademark combination of disregard and defiance, seasoned liberally with charm. “I figured she would be. Always stuck by me, your mother. She's a good woman.”
I didn't know what to say to that. Neither of them was good people. The list of reasons why was so long I had no clue where to start. I was tempted to toss my father out on the street and be done with it. I couldn't.
So many reasons I couldn’t kick him out, that list almost as long as the list of reasons why he was an asshole.
We needed to convince him to help the FBI nail Tsepov or the company would go down with him, my brothers and I along with it. We’d worked too hard to let that happen. I wasn't going to let Maxwell destroy everything we’d built despite his best efforts to sabotage us.
And then there was that little girl. Based on those familiar ice-blue eyes, I had to believe she was a Sinclair. Someone had to look out for her. I doubted that someone was my father.
Raising my chin toward where the girl sat at the kitchen counter with Alice, I asked, “She's yours?”
My father let out a deep sigh, his chest rising, then falling, sinking, like a balloon losing air until he looked deflated. Defeated. To my utter shock, tears swam in his eyes. He pressed the heels of his palms against them, wiping the
moisture away and nodding his head.
His voice low—I would've said repentant if I didn't know better—he said “Petra. Her name is Petra.”
“Where’s her mother?”
My father shook his head, his eyes opaque with something that looked like grief. I couldn't figure out if he was putting on an act. He looked over his shoulder at Petra, her mouth open as Alice fed her a spoonful of ice cream.
His face twisted with pain, he said, “She looks just like you at that age. That hair. Her eyes. But her smile is her mother’s. Mila.”
“And where is Mila?” I pressed.
“Dead. She's dead.”
“Who was she?”
“She was one of Tsepov's.”
My stomach clenched as I watched Mila’s daughter swallow a bite of ice cream and give Alice a sweet, shy smile. One of Tsepov’s. I knew what that meant. One of the women he trafficked. Essentially a sex slave. Probably taken from her home at a young age and moved here and there for profit.
Knowing that was bad enough. Worse was knowing how my father had met Petra's mother. He hadn't been there to save her. She’d been a job, just one of many women Maxwell had helped Tsepov hurt.
That little girl was my sister. I owed her more than to turn away from my father's crimes. I owed her dead mother more.
“What happened?” I asked, wishing I didn’t have to know. I couldn’t think of many things I wanted to hear less than the story of how Maxwell had met Petra’s mother.
Maxwell looked past me. “Can I get a drink?”
“Fuck, no. Tell me what happened and then I’ll think about giving you a drink.”
“Asshole,” he muttered. The feeling was mutual. All signs of grief wiped away, he let out a huff before he started to talk.
“I was moving some girls for Tsepov. Mila was from Croatia. The Russian branch of the Tsepovs had problems with her family. They owed him money. A lot of money. They sold her to him to write off some of their debt. She'd been with Tsepov for two years when I picked her up with the others. I don't know why she was different. She just was. She was Mila. I looked at her and—”
“—you fell in love?” I asked, not bothering to hide my sarcasm.
My father’s head sagged, eyes wet and broken. I wasn't child enough to believe his fictions. Maybe he’d fallen in love with Mila. And maybe she'd been a beautiful young woman at his mercy and he'd convinced himself he was doing her a favor. She was dead. All I had was his word for it.
“Please, tell me she wasn’t a minor.”
He shot me a look of wounded disgust. “Of course not.”
“How old was she?”
“Twenty-two,” he admitted, his eyes on the wall across the room.
Only forty years younger than him. Maxwell looked good for his age, but no matter how I twisted it around in my head, I couldn’t turn it into a pretty picture.
Maybe Maxwell had been in love with Mila, maybe he’d convinced himself she was in love with him, but my guess was Mila wanted to get away from Tsepov and was willing to sleep with Maxwell for the promise of safety.
Yeah, there was no way to sell this that made my father anything but a user and a creep.
“Look,” he said, dodging my eyes, “I know I always told you boys love was for pussies. Don't let a woman tie you down. I was wrong. I didn't know. I met Mila and everything changed. Everything. I was supposed to deliver her to a man in Rome and I— I couldn't do it. I stashed her somewhere safe, delivered the other girls and then—” He cut off and glanced over his shoulder at Petra again.
I could put the pieces together well enough, and I wanted to punch him all over again. He’d delivered the other girls. Clearly, falling in love hadn’t given him a crisis of conscience over his fucking job.
“She's why, isn't she? This girl. Mila. She’s why you faked your death and took off. We grieved for you, you asshole.”
“I know. I know. I'm sorry. But you didn't need me. None of you boys needed me. Your mother does fine on her own as long as her credit card works. You don't know what it's like. For the first time in my life, I was in love. I lost my head. There was no way Tsepov would let me have her, and I couldn't live without her. I had no choice, Cooper. No choice.”
Responses swirled in my head. I didn't know what it was like to be head over heels in love? I fucking damn well did. And I knew that the woman I loved wouldn't want me to burn down the world just so we could be together.
I didn't blame Mila. She’d been a victim. I knew who deserved the blame, and he was sitting right in front of me.
“So, you fell in love, you faked your death, and you and Mila took off, lived on the run. After you stole millions from Andrei Tsepov. Or did you forget that part?”
“That was probably a mistake,” Maxwell conceded in the understatement of the century. I would deal with the missing money in a minute. First, I wanted to know about my little sister.
“Did you marry her? Mila? Because Mom is still alive.”
“Don't be a smartass, Cooper. I know your mother's alive. This has nothing to do with her.”
I couldn't hold back the snort of laughter at his absurdity. He ran off with a girl he stole from a Russian mob boss leaving my mother to mourn his supposed death, but this had nothing to do with Lacey. Sure. Only in Maxwell Sinclair's world did that make sense.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Cooper
So, what was your plan? Were you and Mila going to run forever?”
“I didn’t have a plan. I took the money and we headed to a small village in Thailand. Lived quiet. Simple. Then she got pregnant. I was working all the time when you boys were born. I was there, but I wasn't there. Mila was so excited. Wanted to name her after her grandmother. Petra. When the doctor put my daughter in my arms, I knew I had to do better. I had to keep them both safe.
“I had my side stuff going, popped over to the States here and there to deal with Leanne Gates and Trey Spencer. A dollar still goes a long way in Thailand.” He looked down at his feet, his fists clenched at his side.
“I got cocky. Careless. He found us. One night, Tsepov's men broke in. Slit Mila's throat. Tried to take Petra.”
He swallowed hard as if struggling to go on, and I almost believed his grief was real. I wanted to believe it, wanted to believe my father was human, that he had a heart, as misguided as it was.
I looked at the little girl who’d climbed into Alice’s lap, a bedraggled stuffed rabbit clutched under one arm, face smeared with strawberry ice cream. For her sake, I wished my father had loved her mother, but wishes were a waste of time.
“How long ago?”
“Six months. Since then, we’ve been hopping all over the globe. Staying one step ahead of Tsepov. He’s almost had us a few times.”
A chill spread through my gut, up my spine, and into my brain, icing me over with cold calculation.
He’d almost had them a few times?
I looked at my little sister, at Petra, taking in that dark hair and her Sinclair eyes, the bow of her red mouth and her soft child’s skin. She was so small, even compared to Alice.
I shuddered to think of what would happen to her if she fell into Tsepov's hands. Knowing Maxwell, her mother had undoubtedly been beautiful. Petra sleepily rested her head on Alice's shoulder, eyelids drooping. She was so vulnerable. Defenseless. And for six months, she’d had only my father to keep her safe.
Except my fucking father—her fucking father—had put her in danger in the first place. Whatever happened tonight, he wasn't taking Petra with him.
Taking in the hard line of my jaw, the anger in my eyes, Maxwell looked for a diversion. Surging to his feet, the charm back in full force, he turned to watch Alice wipe Petra’s sticky face with a wet towel.
“Alice will put you to bed, sweetheart,” he said to Petra.
Alice stiffened.
>
Oh, fuck no.
Maxwell was not giving orders to Alice.
Not to my Alice.
He could go fuck himself first.
He didn't run the company anymore. Alice wasn’t his employee, she was my woman. I crossed the room to stand beside her.
“Alice doesn’t work for you, and she isn’t the nanny. You can put Petra to bed in the guest room. Then we’ll talk.”
Maxwell's eyes narrowed on me, flicked to Alice and back to me. Without a word, he strode forward and took Petra from Alice's arms. Petra reached for him. “Sleepy, Daddy.”
To Alice, I said, “Will you follow them to the guest room? See if he needs anything to put her down while I secure the exits and call the control room? When you’re done, meet me in the kitchen.”
“On it, boss.” She rose to her toes and pressed a kiss to the side of my jaw before following Maxwell down the hall. I was right behind them, headed not to the guest room but to the fire door that led from the back of the apartment to the roof and the back stairwell.
I dialed the control room in the office as I checked to make sure the lock was secure from the inside. Without the code or a key, Maxwell wouldn’t be able to open it. He was trapped with me until I was done with him.
The control room was staffed twenty-four hours a day, ready to handle anything that came up after hours. Lindsey, one of our newer recruits to Lucas’s hacker team, picked up on the first ring.
“Cooper? Everything okay?”
“My father turned up. He’s in my place for now, but he’ll be staying with my mother on the second floor. Make sure all the exits are covered. Bring in extra staff if you need to. I want everyone carrying a Taser along with their weapon. Go for a stun before a shot, but if he tries to run, stop him any way necessary.”
“Understood. Do you want me to update your brothers?”
“Yes. Loop in Griffen, too.”
Lindsey hung up and I headed back down the hall past the guest room. Alice had already left Maxwell with Petra. The low rumble of his voice and Petra’s answering words were muffled through the door as I passed it.