by Jill Sanders
“What’s done is done.” Liam shook his longer hair out, sending rain all over the lobby floor.
He did the same and realized that his hair had gotten longer over the past few months.
“Guess it’s party time. Good thing all the guests are gone. I delivered the last of them to the airport shortly after breakfast. They actually tried to convince Elle to let them stay.” He shook his head.
“Riding out a storm is exciting and scary at the same time,” he admitted.
“I still remember a few crazy ones when I was a kid. The difference between those and the few I’ve sat through now is shocking. I used to be so afraid,” Liam said as they walked into the main dining hall. Then his eyes landed on Elle and he sighed. “Now I’m more concerned about the people I love than my own safety.”
He searched the small group of people and frowned when he didn’t spot Aubrey immediately. He slapped Liam on the shoulder and headed off towards the group to ask where Aubrey was.
He stopped beside Zoey and asked her.
Zoey frowned up at him. “She was heading out to help the two of you,” she answered.
“I sent her back in here half an hour ago.” He frowned and glanced around again.
Zoey pulled out her walkie-talkie. “Aub, check in,” she asked, and they both waited as static filled the air. “Aubrey, please check in.” Zoey’s voice rose slightly, catching the attention of a few others around them.
“What’s going on?” Elle rushed over to them.
“Has anyone seen Aubrey in the last half hour?” he asked the entire group.
Everyone immediately shook their heads.
“She was heading out to help you and Liam with the last boards,” Hannah explained.
“Aiden sent her back inside,” Liam answered.
“She could be in the back?” Zoey asked.
“Fan out. First one to find her, call it in.” Elle held up her walkie-talkie. “Stay in groups,” she called out. “I’ll search the third floor. Someone take the second floor.” Zoey and Dylan raised their hands.
“Kitchen,” Aiden said as he rushed towards the back of the building, not wanting to wait as everyone else organized where they were going to look.
His heart beat quickly as he raced through the dark rooms, flipping on lights and searching every corner. He could hear the wind and rain picking up force outside and cursed himself for not walking Aubrey back inside himself.
When he’d finished searching the massive kitchen area, he met a few others back in the lobby area.
“You don’t think something happened to her on her way inside do you?” Elle asked, anxiously.
“I’ll take the pathway.” He started to head outside.
“We’ll go in pairs,” Dylan said. “Liam, Levi, you two head to the left, we’ll take the right.”
The moment they stepped outside, Aiden knew that it wouldn’t be long before it would be too bad outside to see anything. Already, it was as dark as midnight outside and they were an hour from sunset.
“Shit, this is going to be a bad one,” Dylan called out to him. “If it’s already this bad now, what’ll it be like in a few hours when the bulk of the storm passes us?”
“Where would she have gone?” he asked. With the wind and rain so loud, he knew there was no way Dylan could have heard him.
They pushed through the heavy rain and wind until they ended up back at the last place that he’d seen her.
“She was right here,” he called out to Dylan. They both looked over to see Liam and Levi turn the corner and head their way.
“She wasn’t that way,” Levi said. “You don’t think she got turned around, do you?”
“It had just started raining,” Aiden replied.
A small tree cracked and fell a few feet from them.
“Shit, that was close,” Liam said. “We’d better regroup. Maybe even call backup for some help? Brett might still be around somewhere,” he offered.
Aiden no longer cared about anything other than finding Aubrey and telling her those three words he knew she hated to hear.
Chapter 27
She knew it had been a long shot that Aiden would let her help hang the boards. In all fairness, she didn’t really want to do the sweaty work. Even though the skies had turned dark and there was rain in the air, it was still in the high eighties. Her shirt was sticking to her and she’d been outside for less than five minutes.
When he’d sent her back inside to help out with the party preparations, she’d gladly complied.
She’d just turned around the building when she noticed a dark figure heading towards the boathouse and the dock area. Since the rain hadn’t picked up yet, she decided to make sure that whoever it was didn’t need help with something.
She knew that Aiden and the guys had successfully closed up all the other buildings on the grounds, so when she noticed the boathouse’s door had been left open, she frowned and stepped inside and called out.
“Hello?” She frowned into the darkness as she reached for the light switch.
Just then, the heaven’s opened up outside, and the sound of rain hitting the metal roof drowned out any noise inside the boat house.
“Hello?” she called out louder. She was just reaching for her walkie-talkie when a dark figure stepped out from behind a kayak.
She had to blink a few times before it registered who was standing in front of her.
“Martha?” she said with a shake of her head. She had to raise her voice to ask, “What are you doing here?”
The woman didn’t move. She just stood there as if Aubrey couldn’t see her. Aubrey took a step inside and yelled her question again.
Then she felt a sharp pain in her side and gasped.
“There you are,” a voice hissed in her ear. “I told you, mother, that she’d fall right into our trap.”
The knife Bridgett held against her dug further into her side, and she felt her skin tear open.
“Bridgett?” She tensed, knowing she would be able to take the woman down, even with the knife against her skin. But then Martha moved further out of the shadows, and Aubrey noticed the gun she was pointing directly at Aubrey’s chest and froze.
“You’ve ruined everything we’ve been working so hard for.” Martha started moving towards her, the gun steadily aimed at her chest.
“You worked for my father for almost five years,” Aubrey pointed out to Martha. “Why?”
“It’s called a long game,” Bridgett hissed. “We’d come up with this new angle after it was obvious that we weren’t going to get what we needed from Jean. Then he got sick. We knew all about his girls being friends with the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the world.” Bridgett chuckled. “So, I sent dear ol’ mother off on a new mission.”
“It was easy to fake my references. Bridgett’s father used to be so good at it. Before he ended up dead after losing the stash of coke he was supposed to sell.” Martha shrugged. “But you know all about that since your mother took the fall for that one.”
“My…” Aubrey shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“My maiden name was Evans,” Bridgett said as if that explained everything.
“I still don’t…” Aubrey shook her head.
“My father was Davis Evans,” she added.
Aubrey remembered hearing that name and finally pieced it together. Her father had just given her that name earlier, claiming that Aubrey’s mother had been seeing a man called Davis Evans.
“Yes.” Bridgett smiled when realization dawned about the connection. “When he’d heard about your father and mother’s very public legal fight over you, he came up with the idea to shack up with your mom in hopes of getting closer to some of Harold’s money,” Bridgett added. “He believed that your mother had been getting money from Harold all along. Of course, when he found out that your father hadn’t even known about you until a few months prior, he had to come up with a different plan.”
“Then your mother went and
killed herself and, when the cops swarmed the place, Davis’s stash was discovered. Davis always had a few money-making schemes going on in the background. I never approved of his selling drugs, but he’d run into a good deal on the coke and knew how to unload the product quickly enough.” Martha shrugged. “He paid the price for it that time though. Shortly after his product was confiscated by the police, we found him outside our place with his throat slit.” Aubrey hadn’t really given the woman a second thought in the city. After all, she knew that her father had a security firm who vetted all of her father’s employees. Now, however, seeing the two women so close, she realized just how alike they were.
Aubrey’s head was swimming at the new information. Bridgett’s father and her mother?
This family had been trying since Aubrey had been eight to get their hands on her father’s money.
That sort of thing didn’t happen in real life. Did it? They had to all be crazy. Sure, her father was extremely well known, but what were the odds that something like this could actually happen?
“What about Zoey and Scarlett’s father?” she asked. “How did you meet him?” She felt her stomach roll at the possibility that it was her fault that Bridgett had met Jean and ruined the family. Had Martha and Bridgett been watching her and known of her friendship with the Rowlett family?
Bridgett laughed. “That was fate. I ran into him shortly after I’d graduated high school. It was luck really. When I found out how much he was worth, well, I jumped at the chance to get my hands on it. Convincing him to divorce his wife and leave his brats then move to Vegas to be closer to mother was easy.”
“I’d been working a scam out there,” Martha added with a shrug. “A bar owner was giving me everything I wanted. It was paying off pretty well until he gambled the bar away. Then Bridgett married Jean Rowlett, and we enjoyed spending as much of his money as we could.”
“For a while,” Bridgett broke in. “Then one day he started complaining about our spending and threatened to cut me off completely. I’d just purchased a new Bentley. It wasn’t too much to ask to have nice things. Not after what he made me do with him.” She felt Bridgett shiver. “Anyway, we figured that we’d get more money if I divorced him.”
“It’s all quite the coincidence, don’t you think? Everything looped back to you and Harold.” Martha moved even closer. Now she was less than ten feet away from Aubrey. “For years we’d been trying to figure out how to get our hands on the great Harold Smith’s money. And now we have you.”
“My father’s cut me out of his will,” she said, unsure why she mentioned this at this time.
Bridgett laughed. “Oh, we’re not going to wait around any longer for the old man to die.”
A shiver raced down Aubrey’s spine at the heartlessness of the women’s attitude. Could someone really care so little about others? They were so focused on what they wanted that it didn’t faze them to hurt others.
Oddly, this reminded her of her relationship with Aiden. For the past three years, he’d only asked her for one thing. And she’d been determined to keep it from him because of her own selfish beliefs. She was no better than Bridgett and her mother. Not really.
“No.” Martha shook her head. “We’re just going to hold onto you until dear old dad pays the price we want.”
She held in a laugh as what they were doing sunk in. “You’re going to ransom me? That’s your plan?”
“He’ll pay it,” Bridgett hissed.
“No, he won’t,” she retorted.
“You forget, I’ve been around him for the past few years,” Martha said as her voice rose. “The man would do anything for you.”
“No.” She glanced at Martha and could see even more crazy behind the woman’s eyes than she’d seen behind Bridgett’s. “He wouldn’t.”
Aubrey knew she was running out of time. She didn’t know the women’s plan for where they were going to take her or how they were going to leave the grounds. At this point, she could hear the wind and rain increasing outside and doubted they’d get far before the weather would overpower them. If she was going to escape, she had to make her move soon.
“Harold Smith only cares about himself. Until last week, I hadn’t seen him since my eighteenth birthday,” she told them.
“That’s because I convinced Harold to invite you along to the party. I made sure to hint that your presence would make me happy.” Bridgett shifted slightly and Aubrey felt the hand she was holding the knife in relax slightly. “After all that your mother took away from us, I just had to see you suffer like we did.”
The more the pair talked, the less on guard they were. Aubrey knew that if she was going to have any chance at distracting them long enough to overpower them, she had to keep them talking.
“Why? It wasn’t as if I did anything to you.” She asked Bridgett.
“Because of you, I lost my father.” She practically screamed it. Aubrey felt the knife dig into her side even more. Okay, so it wasn’t wise to talk about Bridgett’s father.
“My father hates me. He told me that I was nothing but a disappointment to him.” She said, trying to change tactics.
“That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t watch out for you,” Martha replied. “Do you know how much he worries about you?” She laughed. “It was almost sickening hearing him constantly talk about you. He kept trying to figure out a way to get you back to the city, back under his control so he could try and change you, mold you into what he wanted his heir to be.”
Martha took another few steps towards her, and Aubrey saw her opening. Releasing a breath and relaxing her body so that muscle memory would take over, she prepared for the pain of the knife in her side as she got ready to kick out.
At that exact moment, her walkie-talkie buzzed to life as Zoey’s voice rang out.
“Aub, check in.”
Martha’s eyes darted away as the gun waved away from her chest and zoned in on the walking talkie that hung off Aubrey’s hip.
Kicking out and knocking the gun out of Martha’s hands was the easy part. Twisting and grabbing hold of Bridgett’s wrist and yanking the knife out of her hold proved a little more difficult.
They struggled for a moment, and Zoey called again.
“Aubrey, please check in.”
Bridgett yanked the walkie-talkie from her hip and threw it across the boathouse. It landed in the water with a plop, but it gave Aubrey enough time to knock the knife free of Bridgett’s hold.
She twisted Bridgett’s wrist until she heard a snap and the knife hit the ground. Then she focused on stopping Martha from racing to grab the gun on the ground.
Aubrey had practiced so much in her life that she didn’t have to think about what she was going to do beforehand. Her body moved, twisted, and avoided being hit by both Martha and Bridgett as if it had a mind of its own.
She’d practiced with multiple partners over the years, but none of them had actually been trying to kill her. She twisted her legs around Martha’s and had the woman facedown on the ground just as Bridgett jumped on her back and wrapped her arms around her windpipe.
For a moment, panic threatened to overtake her, but then she forced herself to relax and think through all the moves she’d perfected. She knew just how long she could go without oxygen and forced herself to think of a way out of the hold. She quickly shoved her fist into Martha’s jaw. Blood splattered all over her and Bridgett, and the older woman cried out in pain. When Aubrey felt Martha’s body go lax underneath her, she turned her attention to removing the woman who was cutting off her oxygen.
It seemed to take forever for her to twist out of Bridgett’s hold, but when she was finally free and had the other woman sprawled on top of Martha, holding her broken wrist and crying out in pain, Aubrey walked over and picked up the gun and pointed it at the pair of them.
“Now,” Aubrey said a little winded, “what do you say we take a nice walk in the rain and wait in the lobby for the police to come haul the two of you away?” At that moment, a t
ree branch landed on top of the metal roof and she winced. “Before we get blown away in this hurricane.”
Getting the women to cooperate proved more difficult than she’d anticipated. Since Martha was still unconscious, she tied up Bridgett’s wrists first, not really caring as the woman complained about her broken wrist. Then she worked on securing the older woman with thick ropes that had been holding up a small kayak. After Martha woke up, she tied the pair of them together, making sure to wrap the other rope several times around each of their hands just in case.
When they stepped outside, the rain was coming down almost sideways. The mother-daughter duo tried to dart away from her but slipped on the slick pavement of the pathway. She laughed and helped them stand again.
“Shall we try that again?” She shoved them to head down the pathway again.
She had to hold onto them and push them along the pathway the entire trip to the main building. The rain was coming down so hard now that if she hadn’t known the route by heart, she would’ve gotten lost.
She guessed that the power must be out since all the lights along the pathway were dark. It didn’t really affect her, since she’d practiced for years walking down the dark pathways, sometimes even with her eyes closed just to see if she could, just like she’d practiced at home and in school. She wanted to know that if it came to it, she could maneuver around River Camps without fear. The only difference was, she’d never imagined she would need to escape the camp and had only practiced it so she could remember every path that she loved. At this point, she was confident that she could maneuver the entire camp blindfolded.
Still, it took the three of them a lot longer than usual to make their way across the grounds. The moment they stepped into the dark lobby, Zoey cried out and rushed forward to greet her. Then she stilled when she noticed Bridgett and Martha and that Aubrey was holding a gun on them.
“What?” Zoey shook her head quickly then moved around and wrapped her arms around Aubrey. “You’re safe.” She sighed. “We were so worried about you.”
“Where is everyone?” Aubrey asked with a frown as she motioned for Bridgett and Martha to take a seat. The three of them were soaking wet and looked like drowned rats with their hair tied in knots from the wind.