Eyes Wide Open: The Blackstone Affair, Book 3

by Raine Miller

  “My pretty awakens,” he whispered from beside me, his hands moving over my body purposefully, his breath at my neck.

  “No . . . please don’t do this, Karl. Please . . .” I begged him, trying to push him back with my hands.

  “But why not? We’ve fucked lots of times in the past. You loved it back then. I know I did,” he crooned, “and I was just a kid before. I know what I’m doing now.” He slid his hand up my top and over a breast and squeezed. He slathered his mouth over my neck and tried to kiss me, but I curled my lips and turned my head.

  He gripped my chin roughly and pinched, turning me back to him. “Don’t think you can play hard to get with me, Brynne,” he said in a cruel voice, before he slammed his mouth over mine, his tongue pressing in and trying to invade me.

  “Karl, I’m pregnant—no, please—stop, please!” I begged between gasps for air.

  “Ugh . . . that bastard’s spawn growing inside you is not the nicest thought, my dear, especially when I’m trying to fuck you. You really know how to cock block, you know,” he complained, “but fine, have it your way. I can wait.”

  Karl heaved himself off me and leaned on the wall, his eyes roving over my body with lust. He adjusted himself at the crotch and sneered at me.

  “Are—are you going to kill me?” I tried not to think about his motives and what would happen if he succeeded. I fought to stay calm and not run. I needed Karl to trust me a little for what I hoped I could manage to do. Not running from him would be the first step.

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe I will and maybe I won’t.” He grinned evilly. “If you decide you want to fuck sooner rather than later, let me know. That just might work in your favor, babe.”

  I tried to ignore his comment. “Did Senator Oakley hire you to kill me?” My heart was thumping so hard it hurt under my ribs.

  He tipped his head back at the wall and laughed. “The senator is a sock monkey who couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag if the thing was torn in half. Um . . . no, my dear, Senator Oakley didn’t hire me.”

  “Then why? Why do this, Karl? You were always so . . . nice to me.”

  “Fuck you to hell and back, you little slut. In seven years you’ve never known anything about me,” he snapped, looking half insane. Make that wholly insane. “I’m not the nice guy you remember from high school,” he told me smugly, grinning now as he talked, his demeanor completely changing from crazy to cheerful in a matter of seconds.

  “So tell me what changed you, Karl. How come you’re not the nice guy I remember?” I asked the question and then stayed quiet. I studied my surroundings the best I could, and tried not to think about Ethan, or what he was doing at that moment. Had he figured out my text message yet? Or was he still reeling from the pain of the words, and believing I no longer loved him.

  As if that could ever happen!

  If Ethan had decoded my hidden message, would I ever have opportunity to act on the only clue I could think to give him at the time?

  Karl started talking; rambling, really. Going off on a rant about how he’d killed Eric Montrose and made it look like a bar fight. I barely listened. I was trying to find a way to get to his phone, and knew what I’d do with it the moment I did. I would only need one. One moment of time. I could do it in one small minute if the opportunity arose.

  “Nobody else had to die, you know, after Montrose,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It’s your fault that more people had to die. I’m not loving the killing part here, Brynne. It’s very distasteful to me.” He frowned and looked over my body again, no doubt thinking about something to pass the time alone in this bedroom he’d locked me in.

  “Karl, no . . . you’re not like them. You wouldn’t have done what those boys did to me at that party.”

  He narrowed his eyes for a fraction and said, “You’re right. They were pigs to do that to you. Raping a girl who is out cold is not my style.” He got off the bed and went to the window and looked at the darkening sky. “You’ll come around in time and be begging me for it eventually.”

  Umm . . . no I won’t, you maniacal motherfucker.

  “What do you mean about nobody else had to die after Montrose?”

  He turned and looked at me like I was an idiot. “I was here—in London. I had everything planned out. We would meet again and start back up right where we left off all those years ago. We’d make a pact to bring Oakley down with the story of that sex video his piece-of-shit son made,” he explained as if he were speaking to a small child. “Then sell out to Oakley’s team, or if he wasn’t interested, then the other side’s team, and go off to live a happy life somewhere nice and quiet.”

  “So what happened to change your mind?” I asked in a soft voice.

  “Your fucking boyfriend happened!” he snarled. “Out of all the guys you could have hooked up with, you had to pick security with connections to the fucking royal family and British military intelligence! Thanks for that, Brynne. Nice one!”

  “But I didn’t find him, he found me. My dad hired Ethan to protect me from . . .” The instant the words left my lips, the fog began to dissipate and the truth of my father’s passing became revealed to me.

  “I know,” Karl said simply, his dark eyes showing just how deep his madness was rooted.

  “You murdered my father, didn’t you?” I grappled with my hold on any shred of rational thought and action.

  I lost.

  ♠ “Where is she?! WHERE IN THE FUCK IS SHE?!” I yelled to no one in particular. I had Ivan, Neil, Len, and my dad all standing around looking to me for guidance. I didn’t know where to begin, though. It took everything I had not to fall apart and turn to quivering mush in fear and desperation.

  “Son, look at this. I think Brynne left you a hidden message in this text.” Dad was holding my mobile and studying it.

  “What? Tell me!!” I grabbed my phone from out of his hands and read it again.

  “The capitalization,” Dad said over my shoulder, “it’s only certain words excepting the I’s. Look at the others.”

  The words: Ethan, My, Old, Phone, Get, It, were the only ones with capital letters . . . except for the I’s. Dad was right. I couldn’t believe it. My girl had successfully delivered a message to me in code under duress of kidnapping. I closed my eyes and prayed for another miracle.

  “And other words that should be capital are left lowercase, like your name—”

  “Yeah, Dad, I get it!” I cut him off and ran for my desk drawer, fumbling around until I located her original mobile phone. I plugged it in with the charger and turned it on. The wait was torture while it powered up.

  There was nothing new on it. My excitement plummeted, but now there was some hope, at least. Some small odds for me to bet on. A layer I could start peeling back to guess at the cards held underneath. I understood those kind of odds. A message meant hope. A message meant she was alive. And if I had to bet on Brynne, I was confident she would fight to her last breath to win. My girl was like that, and there was nobody I had more faith in right now than her.

  “She sent me a coded message,” I said again, to no one in particular, still in amazement at her quick thinking during a terrible situation.

  I raised the volume settings and left her precious mobile plugged in on my office desk. I sat down and watched its light flash normally. I had to. My girl was going to ring me on it and tell me where she was, so I could go to her and bring her back. Come on, baby . . .

  What felt like aeons of time passed painfully slow. I recalled later that I never desired a smoke once while I waited for my girl to message me from wherever she was. I didn’t think about having one, or imagine the taste, or even feel the sting of nicotine deprivation. None of it. I’d never touch another ciggie in my life if doing so would bring Brynne safely back to me. Not much of a vow, I know. Pathetic, really. But it was all I had to wager with.

  I prayed to my angel for another miracle, and hoped she would hear me for the
second time in my life. Mum, I need your help again . . .

  Then the picture came through in a media message with the most wonderful sounding blip I’d ever heard. I opened the message and stared, my eyes absorbing what she’d just sent.

  Brynne was playing her hand in a kill-game situation, and had just upped the ante by betting huge stakes that could go either way. I loved her so much for doing it, I thought my heart could burst right on the spot. My girl played her cards with the instincts of an experienced ace. Of course she does, she’s my girl.

  “Dad?” I held the mobile out to him with a shaking hand. “Where is that bell tower? You must know where it is; take me there right now. Brynne can see it from where she just took that photo.”

  23

  ♥ My first instinct was to rip the lamp out of the wall and start bashing Karl on the back of the head with it. I don’t know how I didn’t. I wanted to hurt him, make him suffer in agony for a long, long time before he died. The evil my mind imagined for him was not fit for anyone to ever know. I’d have to keep it buried inside me forever. No problems there.

  It took some time, but we got there eventually. Karl got bored in our small prison and started texting someone or playing a game, I couldn’t tell. That’s how I knew he had his phone and where it was. I would have to get it from him at some point and use it to call the only phone number I could remember—the phone number I’d had since my move to London four years ago. I did not know any other numbers by heart but I knew that one.

  I thought about how I could get to Karl’s iPhone. In time I realized the only way was for me to dig deep into my psyche to where I was willing to go all in, as Ethan would say. To bet everything. To carefully leverage the risks—or the consequences. To try to win, or be willing to lose everything.

  Anger would be the vehicle to get me there.

  “You murdered my dad, you evil motherfucker,” I said quietly.

  He looked up from his texting and stared at me. “He deserved it. Even way back I hated him for not letting me see you after it happened. He kept you secreted away from your friends, and from me. I wanted to help you and to be there for you. Your prick of a father shut me down every time I tried to talk to you.”

  “He was protecting me by shielding me from further hurt. He was being a parent, you asshole!” I let my emotions build up inside me. “He loved me!”

  “Yeah, well he was in the way. Killing him made my plan work better. Oakley was shitting a brick at the funeral. Did you see him sweating?”

  “No,” I answered, “I was grieving for my father, you soulless shit.”

  Karl smirked at me and I wanted to gouge his eyes out with a dull spoon. “Not like your dad when I took him out. He was one cool son of a bitch, even when he knew what was happening.” Karl looked me over dismissively. “He said your name right at the last . . .”

  I couldn’t hold in the gasp, the agonized cry that poured out from my heart as I heard his nonchalant words, spoken almost as an afterthought. It was too much for me to accept. My father had died knowing what Karl intended for me.

  “Don’t look so upset, Brynne. I told your dad I’d take care of you,” he said in a cocky voice, and then he turned his back on me.

  Thank you, you fucking monster!

  They say that under the influence of an adrenaline surge, humans are capable of extreme feats of strength. Mothers lift cars to free their children and stuff like that. I didn’t know if the effect could apply to me, but I didn’t care. It was lamp-bashing time—my very best option for the choices within my grasp. A nice solid stone-component base that would do the trick if it didn’t shatter from the force I was going to use when I hurled it at him.

  Right. Fucking. Now!

  I took ahold of the damn thing and launched it with all my strength at the back of Karl’s head.

  I had done the shot put in high school, and I did it now. Contact coupled with perfect precision and brutal force. Karl went down like a rock in a pond. Maybe the stories about mothers lifting cars did apply to me.

  I was a mother, and Karl just got reminded of that very important fact.

  I grabbed his phone off the floor and did the first thing I could think of. I held it up to the window and took a picture of the skyline. Then I sent it to my old phone number.

  I hoped I’d killed Karl, because it was precisely what he deserved, but I couldn’t be sure and I didn’t want to stick around to find out. I was getting out of there.

  The door ate up a precious minute of time because he’d finagled a chain lock on the inside that took me a few tries to undo because my hands were shaking so badly. I knew we were up three or four stories, and that I had to get down to the street to find safety, but when I exited the attached flat, I found myself in a corridor. This place was a mess of architectural planning. Make that complete unplanning. I looked around for the best way out. The fastest way.

  The corners and stairwells reminded me of the Mission Inn in Riverside that I’d visited with my parents as a kid. You could follow different paths and end up going in crazy loops, up and down stairs and around secluded alcoves that turned you right back where you had been before. Where were the elevators in this place?

  I thought about Ethan and wondered again if he understood my message in the text, and how he would ever find me. Then I thought about the GPS stuff we’d discussed, and it came to me in a flash. Facebook! With Facebook you could check into places and post your location status with a built-in GPS application.

  I flicked through Karl’s phone and found the Facebook app. I logged into my account and clicked Places. I let the app do its thing and selected the first location that popped up on the list of possibilities. I almost had to laugh at what showed. Number 22-23 Lansdowne Crescent. The Samarkand Hotel. I typed on my Facebook status, I’m here, Ethan, come get me. I tagged Karl Westman in “Who are you with?” and pressed Post, continuing my desperate search for the elevators, needing to gain distance from this place.

  After what seemed like forever, I found the lifts and stabbed the down button, looking around for signs of Karl approaching, or of anyone for that matter. Why was this place so dead, and where were all the people? The doors opened for me and in I hopped. I pressed G for ground and didn’t take another breath until the doors shut me in and the lift began its lumbering descent.

  Freedom was in my grasp. Almost out. Ethan would see my messages on my old phone and on Facebook and know where to come for me. I could call him as soon as I found a safe place like a restaurant or a shop.

  The doors opened smoothly and I stepped out into a dim courtyard sort of service entrance. This was obviously the rear entry of the hotel, not the front as I had hoped. I went out anyway, and that is when I heard Ethan call out my name: “Brynne!” The sweetest sound my ears could ever know.

  I went toward the sound, focusing only on him. I could hear the urgency in his call, felt such relief. Ethan had found me; I was alive and everything was going to be okay.

  “Ethan!”

  I ran toward Ethan, to my love, and my whole heart, when I was snatched from behind by arms that grappled first, and then secured me tightly, entangling me like a fly in a sticky web.

  “Nooooo!” I screamed in devastation.

  “You didn’t think you could get away from me, did you, Brynne?” Karl’s disgusting drawl panted in my ear.

  My attempt at killing him had obviously failed, because he now had a sharp blade pressed up against my neck, shocking me with its coldness, forcing me to stop struggling. The disappointment I felt was a bitter pill to swallow, but even worse was the heartbreaking sight of Ethan’s face in the twilight. He stood not less than ten yards away from me. So close, but not close enough.

  Ethan’s flat-out run had come to a screeching halt, his arms splayed out in surrender, his head shaking back and forth in a silent plea to Karl not to cut me.

  This . . . would be Ethan’s undoing. His fear of the blade would propel him into any kind of negotiation to free me. I kne
w it. Ethan would sacrifice himself to keep me from having my throat slashed. Karl could not have chosen a better trigger for Ethan’s fear in all the world.

  ♠ Events and sequences had come together in near perfect harmony, but near was not enough for my needs right now and wouldn’t be until I had her safe in my hands again.

  My dad had known exactly where to find the bell tower the second I showed him the photo from Brynne, as I knew he would. Nobody knew the city of London better than my father. St. John’s Notting Hill parish church held the tower she could see from the window. Dad said she had to have taken the photo from Lansdowne Crescent.

  Elaina called Neil in the car as we raced through side streets, confirming Brynne’s location at Lansdowne Crescent in Notting Hill . . . and who had taken her. Karl Westman? I did not see that one coming, and had to fight the panic that rose up inside me. The only thing helping me to function at the moment was knowing that Westman had once felt an attraction to Brynne. If he wanted her for himself, then there was a better chance she would remain alive. At least that’s what I now prayed for with everything I had.

  Elaina also relayed the message Brynne typed out on her Facebook post to me, and I had to dig deep in order to hold myself together. I’m coming to get you, baby. Again, Brynne’s brilliance in problem solving blew me away. Talk about grace under pressure. Maybe she’d missed her calling and should be working for MI6 instead of conserving art.

  I even spotted her coming out of the building as we skidded up. She ran toward me and called out my name. My girl was alive and running into my arms. I was about to have her back where I could touch her again, and kiss her, and tell her how she was everything to me.