I willed myself to shut it out.
And still I found myself standing behind her, looking at the image over her shoulder, trying to imagine what it was she saw that she thought deserved that grin. It was of the five of us guys—Donovan, Weston, Nate, and Dylan—all of us dressed in our best suits and puffing cigars.
“I never pictured you as a cigar smoker,” she said.
Probably because I’d been a cigarette smoker when she’d known me. I’d quit more than a decade ago, but strangely I found myself jonesing for a cigarette now. Funny how people from the past brought you back to the person you were when you knew them.
I wondered if she’d quit as well or if she had a pack buried in that oversized purse of hers. It was tempting to ask just to have her dig it out and hand it over, just to feel my lips on something that she’d touched.
“We were celebrating,” I said, trying to rein in my wandering mind.
“Celebrating what?”
“The opening of this office.”
“Was this the first location you opened? You said you were in Tokyo.”
I found the words spilling out before I could stop them. “We planned to have three locations from the beginning. New York opened first, then Tokyo three months later, and London a few months after that.”
“A global phenomenon.” She sounded proud, and I liked that.
I hated it at the same time. She had no right to be proud of me. She had no right to care how I’d turned out. She had no right to smell the way she did—familiar and new all at once, a scent that made my head cloud and my pulse race and my chest feel like it was breaking in two.
She turned her head toward me, and we were so close I could make out the spattering of freckles on her cheeks, the ones she’d always hated. The ones that formed a constellation in my sleep. “I always knew you’d end up someone important,” she whispered.
I had been someone important. I’d been hers.
And that hadn’t been enough for her.
Abruptly, I moved back. “How about you tell me what it is you need from me, Julianna?” I said her name pointedly, proud that I hadn’t tripped over it when it crossed my lips.
She turned to face me, her tongue sweeping across her lower lip. “Actually, it’s Jolie now. I didn’t change it legally, but I may as well have. It’s what I go by.”
As difficult as it was to think of her by any other name, this new bit of info pissed me off. Unreasonably so. I’d been the only one to call her that once upon a time, and while I didn’t expect to still get to indulge in that honor, I sure as hell wasn’t happy about discovering that the honor now belonged to everyone.
I definitely wasn’t calling her that now. “Whatever you want to go by, I have that wedding to get to, so if we could hurry this along…”
“Right. Sorry.” She still had that ability to close off in an instant. Like someone pulling down the blinds. One minute you could see deep inside her, the next she was shut up tight.
For the best, I reminded myself.
But damn if I didn’t need a cigarette.
She walked past me and sat primly on the edge of the chair, the way her father had always professed that proper young ladies should sit, her hands laid casually in her lap. I followed after her, circling behind the desk, but instead of sitting, I stood, my arms folded over my chest, a posture her father would most certainly have found disrespectful.
It was a belligerent stance on my part, one that Langdon Stark probably deserved more than she did, but in a lot of ways, Jolie and her father were inseparable in my mind. The complicated feelings I had for one of them more often than not extended toward the other.
Except that I’d never loved Headmaster Stark. That emotion had belonged to Jolie alone. Still did, I supposed, since there hadn’t been anyone I’d said the word to since her.
Which was why I needed closure.
I nodded toward her, a silent prompt to get on with it.
“You probably want to be sitting for this,” she suggested.
“I’m fine like I am.”
“All right.” She let out a sigh. “I, um. I need to ask you for your help.”
She hesitated, so I prodded her on. “Something only I can help with, you said. I have to be honest—I’m curious. It’s hard for me to believe I’m the only one you can turn to when I haven’t seen or heard from you in close to two decades. Surely there are other men you’ve strung along since me. What could this favor possibly be?”
The barb did the trick. She stopped hedging and spit it out. “I need you to help me kill my father.”
Two
She was right—I should have been sitting down.
I sat now with a chuckle as I ran my hand over my beard. I was hearing things. “I’m going to need you to say that again. For a second there, I thought you said you wanted me to help you kill your father.”
Her expression stayed even. “That’s what I said.”
I held her gaze, impossibly trying to read somebody that I used to know. She looked sincere.
But, hell, I’d thought she meant the things she said to me back then, too.
I pressed back in the chair as much as it would give. Donovan apparently preferred sitting straight and tall. I was more of a lean kind of a guy, but when the woman from my past was sitting in front of me asking the outrageous, the lack of mobility was a nuisance that barely registered. “What is this? Some kind of practical joke?”
“It’s not a joke.”
“You want to kill your father.”
She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “You don’t have to keep saying it.”
That almost had me laughing again. “You can’t even hear it, and you think that’s what you want. Nice try.” Condescending, yes. I could be an ass, really without even trying.
Teenage Jolie wouldn’t have stood for being patronized. Adult Jolie was a whole different organism. “It’s not a decision I came to lightly.”
“Well, that’s heartening. A good murder plot really should involve at least one night of restless sleep.”
She gave a sarcastic smile, then immediately dropped it. “Go ahead, get all the wisecracks out. I’ll wait.”
“It’s not a wisecrack. This is not something to joke about.”
“But you aren’t taking me seriously.”
I studied her for several seconds, sure I was still missing the punchline, but she remained somber, not a trace of humor anywhere in her countenance.
She was dead serious, no pun intended.
And I was thrown harder than I’d been thrown in years. “Fuck, Julianna. What do you expect me to say?” I was pretty sure that I couldn’t even Google an appropriate response.
“It’s Jolie,” she corrected. “And you’re right. It’s brazen of me to be here at all, let alone to ask for you to help me with something so diabolical. But I hoped—I hope—that you will realize I wouldn’t be here if I thought I had any other options.”
“I’m a last resort, then.” She’d basically laid that out in her email. And still, it stung. Stupidly. Like what answer would I have preferred? That she’d reached out because she needed me, and no one else could meet that need?
Obviously, I should have done a better job at managing my expectations.
She must have heard the bitterness in my tone. “I didn’t mean…”
“No, I got it.” Last thing I needed was a pitying platitude. Too fucking little, too fucking late. “I would never assume it was anything else.”
Her mouth tightened, and as curious as I was to find out what comment she was biting back, I was more interested in controlling the conversation. Her silence gave me the reins, and with them, I took a hard turn. “Why?”
“Why...which part?” She crossed one jean-covered leg over the other, and I wondered if she knew how sultry she looked with the simple action or if she was completely unaware.
More likely it was the former. She’d known how to weaponize her femininity when she was just a kid. All these ye
ars later, I imagined she’d probably honed the skill.
I needed to remember that. That she’d never been innocent.
“How about we start with why you think you want your father dead?” I pointedly used the D word. I wasn’t fucking changing my language to make her feel better. If she really was considering murder—which she couldn’t be. Not really. The girl I knew wouldn’t have been capable, and people didn’t change that much—but if she was bold enough to be here talking about it out loud with a man who was, for all intents and purposes, a stranger, then she needed to be able to deal with the fucking terms.
Maybe she realized that, because though she cringed, she didn’t remark on my choice of words. “You really have to ask?”
“Yeah. I really do.”
“You, of all people, know what a monster he is.”
“I know what a monster he was. Seventeen years ago.”
“And you think he’s changed?”
No, I didn’t think he’d changed. Just like I didn’t think she’d changed. But the fact of the matter was…“It’s not my problem anymore.”
She tsked. “That’s not you. You’re not that dismissive.”
I wasn’t sure what pissed me off more—her presumption that she knew shit about anything or her attempt to use it over me. “Don’t pretend you fucking know anything about me. Do it again, and this conversation is finished.” I managed to keep my voice low and steady, but there was no question that I’d drawn a line.
I half expected her to fall over herself with apologies or to take a step back. At least, try another tactic.
But she was Jolie fucking Stark, and backing down had never been her style. “It was an observation based on your actions. You tried to press charges against him a couple of years after…” She cleared her throat. “After you left.”
It surprised me that she knew, but I refused to let on. “If you know that then you know that there was no case to be had. Might have been a different story if there had been someone to corroborate.”
“They wouldn’t have believed me any more than they believed you.”
“I’m not sure how you could know that for sure without—”
She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Which is why he has to be dealt with in other ways.”
I could have argued the point further, but she was right. Not about murder, but about the limits of the law. The main reason my case was thrown out was because the accusations looked like an attempt at retribution against a man who hadn’t wanted me anywhere near his daughter. Any charges Jolie brought up would have faced the same scrutiny.
And besides, she’d tried to report him once. Before I’d appeared on the scene. From what she’d told me, it was a mistake she had vowed not to make twice.
Once upon a time, that might have been reason enough for me to consider offing her old man. But all we’d had to do was make it to graduation to be free of him. We’d done that. We’d survived.
Then when she’d had the chance to walk away, she’d chosen to stay.
“So, next why—why now? You’re an adult. You aren’t living under his roof anymore. Not subject to his discipline. Surely you aren’t just now concerned about what he might be doing to other students—”
“He didn’t,” she interrupted. “What he did to me—he wasn’t like that with his students.”
“Oh, right. It was just me.” Lucky old me.
It wasn’t completely true that it was just me and her who suffered. He might not have left physical marks on anyone else, but Headmaster Stark knew how to fuck with people in other ways. He was a true sadist—not particular about what methods he used to bring about agony, and I had no doubt that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of students who had suffered under his tutelage since our class.
Unfortunately, the mind fucking was even harder to prosecute than the physical abuse.
“I’ll repeat the question—why now?”
For the first time since she’d dropped her bombshell, she looked away. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It sure as hell does. You want me to have this conversation with you, you at least have to have a motive.”
Her head turned back toward me. “Isn’t it better if I don’t? No reason to suspect me.”
“Yeah, that’s not how it works. There obviously is a motive or you wouldn’t be here, and I don’t want to hear about it first from a cop who comes knocking at my door asking questions, so you might as well tell me now what they’d try to say.” Not that I was seriously entertaining any of this.
“I guess they’d say I’d finally traced the source of all the shit in my life. Everything that has ever mattered to me, everything good that I’ve ever lost, it’s been because of him.”
God, she was good. With all the innuendo and subtext, wanting me to think she was talking about us. That she was talking about losing me. That right there was class A emotional manipulation.
Like father, like daughter, right?
“Have you lost something recently? Because if not, I’m going to ask once again—why now?”
She blinked once before answering. “It’s complicated.”
The fuck with complicated. It was a word I’d heard all my life—from my mother, from Jolie, from the lawyer who had tried to represent my case. I was tired of complicated being an excuse to end a conversation. I’d been tired of it so long that I had purposely set my life up to be simple. No ties. No obligations. Even my contract with the guys had a clear escape clause. Whatever I did, whomever I did it with, there was always a clear path out.
I didn’t do complicated anymore, and if I was in my right mind, that would have been the moment to show her the door.
If I was in my right mind, I wouldn’t have even answered her email. Out of the blue, after all these years? It might as well have said “complicated” in the subject line.
Against better judgment, I was here.
Which led me to the most important why. “Why me?” I sat forward, suddenly afraid of the answer, and asked something better. “In fact, why anyone at all? You want the man gone, why not just do it yourself?”
“I can’t figure out how. A registered gun is too easy to trace back to me, and I don’t know the first thing about how to get one on the black market. I considered poisoning, but I don’t have access to poison him, not on my own. Beyond that, I’m not creative enough to come up with a plan.”
In other words, she wasn’t a killer. Which I already knew.
“And when you realized you needed help, you thought, ‘Who do I know who is capable of murder?’ And then you thought, ‘Oh, I bet Cade Warren would be up for that. He always did have that rebellious streak.’ Should I be flattered?”
Really, I was surprised. Because I might have been trouble, but I hadn’t been a guy who could kill back then. I’d come pretty close a couple of times, when the low-life job I’d had before Donovan “rescued” me had found me in some pretty shady circumstances, but that had been after Jolie. There wasn’t any way she knew about that.
“I didn’t reach out to you because I thought you’d be…” She let out a frustrated sigh. “That’s not why.”
“Then why? Why me, Julianna?”
She flinched at the name. “I thought two heads were better than one, and like I said before, you had reason enough to hate him.”
“Reason to hate him? Yes. Reason to kill him?” I left that question unanswered because it shouldn’t need voicing. Sure, I’d imagined it enough times over my life. I’d imagined it in detail. I could write a book about all the ways I’d killed Langdon Stark in my head, but that didn’t mean I’d ever actually do it.
“And if I did want the man dead,” I went on, realizing there was another more pertinent part of this question, “why would I have waited nearly twenty years to do it? You couldn’t have thought I was just sitting around waiting for someone to give me permission. If I’d wanted that motherfucker dead, he’d be dead. I wouldn’t need you to tell me to do it.”
“I kn
ow,” she said solemnly. “I know I’m asking you to do this for no other reason than because I need someone to help me. I know I have no right. I know, Cade. I know.”
“You know, and yet you’re still asking.”
“I am.”
There was one more why—why did she think for one minute that I’d agree? But I didn’t have to ask. The answer was right there, evident in her hopeful eyes and her pleading tone and her unsaid words. She thought I’d agree because she assumed that now, as then, I would do anything for her.
“You know what, Julianna? Nope.”
“Nope?”
“Nope.” After breaking her promise? After standing me up? After pushing me away, ignoring my attempts to reach out? After disappearing? After seventeen years? “Nope. And fuck you for even asking.”
She drew back slightly. “I deserve that.”
Yeah, she did. She deserved a whole hell of a lot more, as far as I was concerned.
“While we’re at it”—I stood up, wanting the full advantage of my height—“fuck you for disappearing like you did. And fuck you for showing up out of the blue thinking that I owed you something—”
“I don’t think that,” she interjected.
“Then fuck you for thinking there was any chance in hell that I would do your dirty work for you—”
“Not for me. I’d do it with you.”
“And fuck you for trying to sell that lie. To me. Of all people. You can’t even squash a beetle under your shoe, and you expect me to think you could have any part of ending someone’s life? It’s bullshit. All of this is bullshit. I’m not going to be your fall guy—” She opened her mouth, and I put up a finger to silence her. “And I’m sure as fuck not going to be your knight in shining armor. I tried to play that part once, and I got burned. You don’t know anything about the man that made me, so I’ll lay it out—I’m not anyone’s hero. But if I were going to start being one today, it sure as shit wouldn’t be for Julianna Stark.”
Wild Rebel Page 2