by Kasey Krane
“Your father is alive,” I said. Sabrina was glaring at me as if she didn’t believe me. “But there are some things you probably don’t know about him. Things you don’t have the full picture of.”
At those words, her brows furrowed in confusion.
“What are you trying to say, Spike?”
Just then, the door behind me was pushed open and I turned to see Drax stepping out. He had his arm around Mary-Beth and they both looked at us with giddy smiles. They had clearly been drinking.
“Ah, look at who decided to make an appearance!” Mary-Beth exclaimed.
“Apparently, he made quite the appearance some time ago. Eagle’s face could vouch for that,” Drax said and they both broke into loud drunken laughter.
I looked at Sabrina; she seemed sad and confused.
“We’re just going in,” I said and held the door open. That was my cue for her to follow me in. If she didn’t, we would be stuck here talking to these two for an indefinite period of time. We had to make our escape now.
Thankfully, Sabrina got the hint. She passed them a smile and then followed me into the clubhouse. Without another word, she followed me all the way up to the second floor where our personal rooms were.
She didn’t speak until we were finally inside and the door was shut.
“It sounded like you were accusing my father of something. What is it?” she snarled.
“I don’t know what is going on with your father because I don’t have evidence,” I replied while she glared at me with her dark accusatory eyes.
“So what is this all about?”
“I had to get you out of there because it seemed as if your life was in danger.”
“Yes! I know! There were gunmen in our home. Shooting the place down. But you were supposed to rescue my dad too. Isn’t that your job? You’ve been going on and on about your duty…”
“Sabrina, I went back there to rescue him.”
“So why didn’t you? Where is he now?”
“I heard him talking to the men. The shooters. Jim was there with him.”
She clamped her mouth shut in surprise. She stared at me more deeply.
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m telling you what I fuckin’ saw,” I growled and took a few steps toward her but she stepped back. She was shaking her head again as if she was in complete disbelief.
“What were they saying?”
“They were discussing you. About how I took you and hid you somewhere. Somebody made a comment about how I shouldn’t have been hired for your protection. That maybe I was keeping you too safe.”
Sabrina’s eyes pierced my face. I could see her hands fisted tightly. From her body language, I could sense she didn’t believe me. For some reason, Sabrina was shutting herself off to me.
“I heard them laugh, Sabrina. It did not sound like a conversation between attackers and hostages. Your father did not sound as if he thought his life was in danger.”
“Shut up!” she screamed and that surprised me. Sabrina was not the kind of person who screamed or yelled. She was soft-spoken, classy, knew how to remain poised.
“My daddy may be a busy man and yes, he has a warped set of expectations from me, but he is not the kind of man who would knowingly put his daughter’s life in danger.” She was hissing. The words made a whistling sound through her teeth. Her eyes looked bloodshot now.
“I don’t think you really know your father,” I said and her mouth fell open.
“How dare you? How dare you even suggest something like that.”
“I’m telling you what I saw.”
“And I’m telling you what I know. I am the one who has spent my whole life with him. Is this about tonight? Because of his reaction at dinner? He was in shock. He needed time to process the information. He will come around to the idea eventually.”
I breathed in deeply and took a moment to calm myself. This was not going as planned. I was trying to keep her safe, but I couldn’t force her into doing something she didn’t want to do.
“This is not about you and me. This has nothing to do with that. It’s about what your father has done and the man he is.”
“I know who my father is. You don’t,” she snapped.
I watched as she walked over to the window in my room. She was looking out at the cars and bikes parked outside at the back.
I was beginning to realize I was losing this battle. There was no way I would be able to convince Sabrina that her father was untrustworthy.
I didn’t have proof. He was her father. Despite the holes in their relationship and all that other shit, she still trusted him. She barely knew me. The last two weeks, we had hardly even spoken. Why would she trust me?
I wanted to protect her and keep her safe, and not just because I was hired to do it. I just wanted her to be safe, to have a life she could be happy in.
“You’re right, I don’t know your father, but I know what I heard.”
“So you didn’t actually see anything!” she snapped. She had her back turned to me as if she couldn’t face me. Didn’t want to face me.
“I would have exposed myself and risked everything if I’d stepped into that room. They were making plans of going in search of us. I had to get out of there instead of confronting him.”
Sabrina shook her head.
“All this time that we have spent together, you made it very clear to me what your priorities are. I have been an idiot. I thought I had feelings for you. I thought we could actually be together. I even came up with a plan for tonight. I thought if my daddy fired you from the job, maybe then things would change for us.” She turned to look at me now. I didn’t know what to say. I should have admitted my feelings for her too but I didn’t have the words for it. I had never done it before.
“I should have known it wouldn’t matter. You have some kind of twisted plan I don’t know about. What is this really about, Spike? Ransom? Are you going to keep me here till Daddy pays up? Were those shooters who attacked the house some of your men? How long have you been planning this whole thing?”
I had to clench my jaw to keep from shouting. To keep from punching a hole in the wall. I couldn’t believe she was going there. I couldn’t believe how low her trust in me actually was.
“Yeah, fuck that,” I growled and turned to go to the door. “You are free to leave this place whenever you want. I hope you don’t for your own safety, but I’m not holding you back. Go back to your daddy if you want. I’m fuckin’ done with this shit.”
I didn’t wait for her answer. I just left. Even as I hurried down the stairs to the bar, I knew I was making a mistake. I shouldn’t have given Sabrina the freedom to leave the clubhouse. But I wasn’t her keeper. I had no authority to hold her back from doing what she wanted to do.
18
Sabrina
I got in a car parked at the back of the clubhouse. Nobody had noticed. I didn’t know whose car I was in right now but it seemed as if it probably belonged to one of the girls. I zoomed out of the clubhouse premises and for a while, I wasn’t even sure where I was headed. All I knew was that I needed to go back to the house. I had to confront Daddy.
My head was wrecked. I didn’t know who to believe. What to believe.
Spike had so far done nothing to make me doubt his intentions, but Daddy…well, he was my daddy. He had his faults. I knew he’d been involved in more than one questionable project ever since he became mayor. But would he actually have manipulated the attack on the house?
For what reason?
I knew Spike hated me now for questioning his claims. Maybe I should have stayed with him. I knew he was trying to keep me safe. I shouldn’t have blamed him for hatching some devious plan. I got angry and said some stuff I didn’t mean.
However, at the same time, I wanted to prove to him that my father wasn’t as evil as he thought. In time, we could work around all the roadblocks. We could peacefully co-exist.
Besides, I knew I wouldn’t have made it t
hrough the night without knowing if Daddy was okay. What happened to him? Who were the attackers?
By the time I got to the estate, I saw things were back to being quiet. I had expected to return to a volley of cop cars, but all I saw was one of the guys on our household staff fixing the main door. The door that had been shot down by the attackers.
When I parked the car, Cherie came running out of the house toward me.
“Ms. Wyndham! Are you okay? We didn’t know where you went. We looked for you everywhere.”
I went up to Cherie, and for the first time since I was a child, I hugged her. I had always wanted to hug her. She had looked after me, been like a mother figure to me but I’d always held myself back. I knew Daddy would disapprove of me being affectionate toward the staff. But I didn’t care anymore.
“I’m fine, Cherie. Spike took me away, he wanted to keep me safe. Where is Daddy? What happened here? Were the shooters caught?”
We were walking into the house together. Cherie stopped in her tracks and I turned to her. I could tell from the expression on her face that there was something she wanted to tell me.
“Cherie?”
“Sweetheart! You’re safe!” Daddy’s loud voice boomed from the end of the hallway. I looked over and saw that he looked perfectly fine. He didn’t have a single scratch on him.
We walked into the living room together, away from the prying eyes and ears of the staff. The moment I closed the door behind me, I turned to my father. He was making his way to the couch, meaning to sit down. I could see he had changed into pajamas and his silk robe, and he was ready for bed.
“It was a bad business tonight, wasn’t it, sweetheart? I’m glad you’re okay. You look lovely.”
“Daddy, you need to tell me what is going on because I know something’s not right. Where are the cops? Where are the attackers? They shot bullets into our front door and all you’re doing is getting it fixed? I thought they were going to seriously harm us. I didn’t know if you even made it out alive.”
Daddy glared at me. I had never spoken to him the way I was doing tonight. First over dinner when I told him about Spike, and now I was confronting him about the attack. By now, he had figured out I wasn’t backing down. I wanted answers.
He sighed and rubbed his hands on his knees while he settled into the couch.
“They weren’t actually going to harm us, sweetheart. They were hired to give the appearance of an attack, that is all.”
I heard the words but they didn’t actually sink in. I didn’t know what to make of what he was saying.
“Give the appearance of an attack? I don’t understand what you mean.”
“My popularity has been dwindling. If you ask Jim, he will tell you all about it. I’m up for re-election but my advisors were sure that I wouldn’t get it unless I got the public sympathy somehow, in the next few weeks.”
“So you staged an attack on the house?”
Daddy stared back at me.
“Nothing would have happened to you, Sabrina. They would have held you for a few hours, just long enough for the tabloids to get wind of the attack and you would have been back in your room, asleep in bed by now. It was all supposed to be a small, harmless stunt.”
My hand rose up to my mouth. There was a lump in my throat. Spike was right. He was right about everything. How was I ever supposed to trust my father after this?
“And you were willing to put my safety at risk for your popularity? To retain your power and position?”
“I would never have let anything happen to you, Sabrina.”
“Why did you even bother hiring Spike? Why did you get him involved in this?”
“It was supposed to be a part of the ruse. The story would seem more sensational if you had a bodyguard…if something happened to your bodyguard.”
I felt my knees buckle. I needed to grip the back of a chair to keep standing.
“Your plan was to hurt Spike? So he was hired to be nothing but a casualty in your twisted plan? What about the brick through my window? That was staged too? Everything to make the story look more authentic? So that when they interviewed me in the media, I would give them the real story of what happened to me?”
Daddy was watching me closely as I spoke.
“I know I made a mistake. I should have involved you in the plan from the start.”
“You think that was your mistake?”
“I should have trusted you, sweetheart. I should have known you would do a great job at this. We want the same things, don’t we? You get to live this life, have all these nice things because I do what I do. You realize that, don’t you?”
My nostrils were flared with rage. I wanted to break something. I wanted my father to feel as hurt as I did.
“You are my father; you are supposed to keep me safe. Protect me. You should want me to have a happy and wholesome life.”
Daddy chuckled then. It was an evil chuckle.
“Wholesome? So what you’ve been doing with that brute. Spike. You call that wholesome?”
“You knew…you knew we’d been involved!”
“I have my eyes and ears everywhere, honey. I am the mayor of this town!”
“I have feelings for him. I actually have feelings for him. He is the only one who cares about me.”
“He is on my payroll. He was performing a service. Giving you what you wanted because he was being paid to do so,” Daddy snarled.
I gulped, forced the lump down my throat. For a second, I believed him. What if he was right? What if Spike felt nothing? What if he was a part of Daddy’s master plan too?
But my feelings…what I felt…they were real. And I wasn’t going to close this chapter till I had confronted him too. For the first time in my life, I had no intention of stopping until I had gone to the bottom of it. I wanted all the answers.
I turned from him and walked to the door.
“Sabrina! Don’t you dare leave this house! We have work to do. We have to come up with a different plan, and this time I want you involved. We will do it on your terms.”
I didn’t want to turn to look at him because I didn’t want him to see me crying. It felt as if I had lost everything in one night. Whatever shred of hope was keeping this relationship between Daddy and me going was broken now. And I had probably lost Spike too.
Maybe I’d been wrong about him all along.
I went out of the room and could hear my father’s voice thundering behind me, calling for me. Jim was out in the hallway and ran past me to go into the room. He gave me one of his caustic looks as he passed by and I rolled my eyes at him.
Fuck him. Fuck everybody.
I was going to go to Spike just to give him one last chance. After that, I was gone. This time, I wasn’t looking back.
19
Spike
I spent approximately fifteen minutes at the bar, amongst my brothers, trying to get my mind off everything that had happened at the Wyndham mansion, and everything that had happened with Sabrina. It took me fifteen minutes to realize that I couldn’t stand around there doing nothing.
I needed to go and check on her. I needed to stop her from going back to her house.
I threw my beer to the floor and ran back upstairs. When I reached my room, I found my worst fears had come true. Sabrina was nowhere in sight. She had left.
Fuck!
I growled with frustration and ran out of the clubhouse. I knew the others had noticed but I didn’t stop to explain. I needed to find her first. I rode directly to the Wyndham mansion. I didn’t know how she would have even made her way there but if there was something I had learned about Sabrina in these past two weeks, it was that she was resourceful.
Everything looked peaceful and normal at the Wyndham mansion. Someone had even fixed the door that had been shot down by the fake attackers.
I knew the security cameras had already caught me riding in. The front door opened when I stormed toward it, jumping off my bike. Jim was standing there. What was he going to do?
Block me?
I pushed past him without a word.
“Where is she?” I growled when I got in.
Some of the household staff came into the hallway to look.
“Sabrina!” I shouted her name and that was when Wyndham appeared.
He looked as if he was ready for bed, except he had a drink in his hand.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” he commented and took a sip.
“Where the fuck is she?” I growled, snarling at him. A streak of panic crossed over his face. Maybe he thought I would physically hurt him. Yes, I would have.
“She’s not here. She’s gone. For the first time in my life, I have no idea where she went,” Wyndham replied. I glared at him, clenching my jaws. One moment. Then two.
“You will never be good enough for her,” he said and he probably would have said more. I had no interest in waiting and finding out what more he had to say. I needed to find Sabrina.
I stormed back out of the house. I knew the rest of the household were peeping from the windows. I didn’t know where to start looking for her, but then an idea came to me.
I got on my bike and rode off in the direction of my apartment.
On the street outside my apartment building, I saw Mary-Beth’s car parked. So that was how she made her way around town!
I ran up the stairs, breathing hard. I really wanted her to be there. I couldn’t wait till I finally saw her.
She was sitting outside my door in the hallway. Her face was covered by her arms but she heard me and looked up. What I felt when I saw her was a mixture of relief and joy. I had never been this happy to see someone.
Sabrina had tears streaking down her cheeks but she stood up and we leapt at each other. I had her in my arms.
“Thank fuck!” I groaned and she kissed my neck.