Billionaire Ever After

by Blair Babylon

  Rae was riding shotgun while Hester drove and was peppering her with questions. “Which hospital is she in? Why was she even up here, anyway? Do they know that it was a heart attack? Did they do an EKG? Did the doctor actually say it was definitely a heart attack? Could it just be indigestion? She’s had problems with her hiatal hernia. All those pregnancies, you know.” Rae rested her palm on her stomach. “Did she drink lemonade? She gets horrible reflux when she drinks lemonade. I’ll bet she drank lemonade.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” Hester said, her watery blue eyes dodging to the rear view mirror.

  “Lemonade or some other citrus. Old Mrs. Trout gave us a bag of grapefruit from her trees when I was about twelve, and Mom ate a whole bottle of Tums that week. I’ll bet it’s just indigestion.”

  Hester spun the steering wheel, and the car turned a corner into a Best Western Hotel. Five stories of cinderblock blotted out the sun as they drove around the building.

  Uh, oh. Rae said, “This isn’t a hospital.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Where’s my mother?”

  “She’s at home. She’s fine. Nothing’s wrong with her.”

  “Then what the hell, Hester?”

  Hester sighed and parked in the back of the hotel, away from the view of the street. “Reagan, we all feel like we need to talk to you about some things.”

  “No way. No flipping way.” Rae grabbed the hot door handle, but three of her largest cousins, including Craigh, her usually normal cousin, were already opening the car doors. The handle pulled away from her hands, scraping her fingernails over the metal.

  Rae struggled to pull her arms away from their hands, tight around her wrists, but they were much bigger than even she was. “What the hell are you doing, Hester?”

  Hester got out of the car and kept her head down. “It’s for the best.”

  “I am not going back home. I have a plane flight in five hours!”

  Craigh mumbled, “I don’t think you’re going to make that plane. This might take a while.”

  “I can’t believe you’d do this, Craigh,” Rae told him.

  He nodded and pressed his lips together, hunting through her backpack that he retrieved from the back seat. “I can’t quite believe I’m here, either.”

  Craigh found her phone and powered it off.

  Wulf and his security guys wouldn’t be able to trace it. “Come on, man!”

  He shook his head. “They just want to talk to you for a while. And stuff.”

  “They, who? What kind of stuff?” She twisted her arms, trying to break her cousins’ grip, but they hauled her toward the hotel.

  Rae was a nice girl, raised to be nice and polite and go along with everybody. Maybe she should have sat down on the asphalt or shrieked, but the tall, brick hotel blocked the line of sight from the cars speeding by on the street out front, and all the hotel’s windows and curtains were shut tight against the June summer heat. Air conditioning units on the roof roared like swarms of hornets, louder than any screaming she could have done.

  So she walked in with them, though she jerked her arms, trying to slip out of their bruising fingers.

  They jostled her through the back door of the hotel—glass, Rae noticed, not even bulletproof acrylic—and into one of the first rooms on the main floor.

  Well, good. When she managed to get away from her crazy family, she could dart straight for the lobby and tell them to call the damn cops. There wasn’t even a stairwell for her to fall down, klutz that she was.

  Inside the small conference room, the laminate conference table and chrome-plated dining chairs had been pushed back against the walls, leaving an open space in the center. A pillow and a blanket were crumpled in the center of the room.

  Rae’s father, Zachariah Stone, and several of her grizzled uncles flanked Minister Stoppard. Her father stared at his scuffed, Sunday-best shoes. The pastor’s black eyes raged at her, and he held a Bible clenched in his fist.

  A bell and a candle lay beside the pillow on the floor.

  Bell, book, and candle.

  “No freaking way,” Rae said. “Protestants don’t believe in empty rituals, remember? We don’t do exorcisms.”

  Minister Stoppard raised his Bible high in the air. The soft cover flopped open, and half the pages drooped. “By the power of Jesus Christ, begone demon!”

  “That is so not the way to start an exorcism,” Rae said. One of her psych classes had discussed historical treatments for mental illnesses, and she’d read the Catholic Rite of Exorcism just for fun and had been thoroughly creeped out by it. “You begin with a Litany of the Saints, not by jumping straight in and yelling at the demon. Here, I’ll start. ‘Lord, have mercy.’ Now y’all say that back.”

  Her father and uncles recoiled from the Catholicism.

  Minister Stoppard shoved the book toward her, even though he was all the way across the room.

  Chicken.

  He shouted, “I command the demon to begone!”

  “Seriously. This is not how you do an exorcism. It has to be in a church with an altar. Minister Stoppard,” Rae pointed at him, “you have to go to confession first. Otherwise, you’re in a state of sin and the demon can jump into you. Why don’t we call Father Manuel over at Our Lady of Perpetual Help and get a consult?”

  “Begone demon! Begone demon!” Stoppard screamed, his black hair flopping over his forehead. His black eyes were getting crazier with every shout.

  Maybe Rae should just foam at the mouth, spit at them for a while, maybe barf on Minister Stoppard’s pants—yeah, she definitely needed to vomit on him—and declare herself exorcised.

  She stole a glance at the clock.

  If she managed it right, she could still get to the airport in time to keep the flight schedule for Switzerland to get church-married.

  Okay, now she had a plan. That was good.

  And yet, she just couldn’t humor them. She had seen too much. She was, indeed, too worldly to even listen to this kind of repressive, angry, frightened, superstitious stuff anymore.

  She jerked her arm out of her cousins’ grasp. “This is stupid. This is utterly stupid. I’m leaving.”

  Stoppard called out, “Boys, lay her down.”

  Rae’s cousins grabbed her again and forced her toward the blanket in the middle of the room. Craigh held her right arm.

  “This is kidnapping,” she told him. “If you don’t let me go right this minute, I will press charges. I mean it.”

  Stoppard yelled, “That’s what a demon would say! Once she’s exorcised, she won’t want to press charges. She’ll be glad that she’s free of the demonic possession.”

  Rae rolled her eyes in her head, exasperated at all of them. “Oh, for crying out loud. What a crock.”

  They wrestled Rae down, and Craigh’s shoulder shoved into her stomach, right near the baby.

  Rae gasped. If they hurt her, they might kill that fragile bundle inside her. “Okay! I’ll lay down! Don’t push me!”

  Craigh backed off. Rae eased herself down to the floor, resting her head on the pillow. She rolled on her side and clenched her arms over her stomach.

  New plan: go along with everything so they wouldn’t hurt her or the baby.

  Maybe she should just tell them she was preggers. That way, they’d go easy on her stomach.

  They all must be pro-life. Stoppard preached on abortion at least once a month, and nodding was mandatory. She was ninety percent sure that no one here was so dead-set against her marriage that they would pull out a coat hanger.

  But Stoppard was more than a fanatic. His small amount of societal power and his entire income from tithes were in jeopardy, and Rae’s rebellion was the focus of that danger to him. If he thought her pregnancy would turn these people against him such that they might allow her to escape, he might beat the crap out of her, slamming his hard fists into her belly, a back-woods abortion. He would probably tell them that the demon was lying about the baby and that he was beating
the Jesus into her.

  She couldn’t tell them, not if she wanted to protect their child.

  Rae said, “Just don’t hurt me. I’ll do whatever you want.”

  Phone Tag

  Wulf sat in his office again, a dim, windowless room. His wide computer monitor surrounded the desk, dead and black. Electrically charged dust stung his nose, and he tried not to flinch every time Luca and Hans fidgeted and rustled papers on the extensions of the desk behind him.

  There really was nothing they could have done if Rae had been determined to go off on her own. Wulf held tightly to that thought rather than make any decisions concerning their employment.

  He tapped a contact on his phone and suffered through the rings.

  A click, and a woman’s gravelly voice chirped, “Theo Valencia’s phone! Wulf? Is that you?”

  “Yes, Lizbeth. It’s rather urgent. Is Theophile available?” Surely, a County Prosecuting Attorney would have some influence in a missing person case.

  “I’m walking back to his office now. What’s up?”

  Wulf’s voice held steady. “We can’t locate Rae. We were wondering if he could offer any alternatives.”

  “What? Okay, now I’m running to his office. Is she okay?”

  “We’re not sure.”

  “Shit. Theo!” she shouted, and there was more but Wulf couldn’t make it out.

  A man’s voice said into the phone, “Rae is missing? Isn’t she pregnant?”

  “Yes,” Wulf said. “Evidently, she has been missing for three hours, and her phone has been shut off. We’re very concerned about her welfare. I was wondering if there was anything that could be done.”

  “Nothing official. Hang on a second. Noah!” Theo Valencia shouted, and again there was muffled discussion, but with more than one male voice. “We’re going to call some friends. Do you have any other information?”

  Wulf told him the license plate number and description of the car.

  Theo said, “That’ll help. I’ll call you when we have something.”

  Wulf tapped the phone to hang up and immediately clicked and called another contact. A County Attorney was one kind of help, but Wulf might need someone a little more . . . mercenary.

  A man answered, speaking Alemannic, one of the Swiss dialects. “Durchlaucht, I am on the road to the airport. I will beat you to your plane and drink all your scotch.”

  Wulf drew a deep breath. “Dieter, there’s been a problem.”

  “On my way.”

  Exorcism

  Rae squeezed her eyes shut, enduring the men screaming for the demon to leave her body. She lay on the stale carpeting on her side with her arms clenched over her belly, even though her stomach was still approximately as flat as it ever had been. Her waist felt thicker around.

  Her cousins held the blanket over her, pressing the edges down with their fists even though she hadn’t struggled for the last two hours.

  Another damn tear leaked out of her eye, and she pressed her cheek to the pillow rather than let anybody see.

  They would get tired of this stupidity soon, she believed.

  They would let her go soon, she insisted to herself.

  Minister Stoppard, her father, her uncles, and her cousins yelled Bible verses about Jesus casting the demons who named themselves Legion out of a possessed man and into a herd of swine.

  Really, they couldn’t see the political parable there?

  Their male voices rumbled through the room, chanting verses that they all knew, or at least picking up the words and muttering through the ones that they didn’t, vibrating the wood paneling on the walls.

  Rae curled herself more tightly around her stomach, breathing slowly.

  They chanted, “Jesus commands you to get out!” which was close to the Catholic rite’s chant of, “For it is the power of Christ that compels you,” but not quite the same.

  Rae breathed deeply, trying not to shake or let herself get upset.

  This would be over soon.

  They would get bored or realize what a stupid charade it was.

  She turned her face to the pillow again, wiping away another tear.

  Craigh let go of the blanket and stood. “This is ridiculous.”

  Rae opened her eyes.

  Craigh said, “She’s not possessed. Look at her. The Devil can’t stand to hear Bible verses.”

  Rae’s father grabbed him by the arm. “Her soul is in danger! If we don’t cast this demon out, she’s going to Hell!” His voice rose, frantic. “I can’t let my baby girl go to Hell! She’ll be tormented for all eternity in the lake of fire! Look at her! Look at how she’s letting us exorcise her because she wants to be free of The Devil!”

  Well, compliance had backfired. Rae sighed.

  She pushed her arms against the floor, but two of her large cousins were still holding the blanket down, pressing the rough cloth over her arms and chest.

  Craigh shook his head, turning away. “She’s not possessed. I’m done.”

  Rae yelled after him, “Call Wulf and tell him I’m all right!”

  He walked out of the room, but he wouldn’t meet Rae’s eyes when he left.

  She put her head down on the pillow. He wasn’t going to call anyone.

  Her other cousins tightened their hold on the blanket, cramming it down on her. She could breathe, but she couldn’t wiggle. However, there were only two of them holding the blanket down now. If things started going wrong, she might have a chance of fighting her way out.

  Reverend Stoppard raised his hands, preaching loudly about how worldliness invited demons in by opening your mind to the Devil. He spoke for what seemed like days—more yelling, more screaming, more Bible verses and mangled theology—though the tiny clock high on the wall had only moved a total of three hours.

  She should have already been at the airport.

  Wulf must be frantic, probably in a very quiet way.

  Rae sucked in a deep breath. It would be okay. They could refile the flight plan and go tomorrow or the next day. The suppers and things could be rescheduled.

  Unless Wulf thought that she had ditched him.

  Unless the baby inside her died.

  Unless this went really, really wrong, and Stoppard and these large men killed her. She had read about that happening during amateur exorcisms. Her dry throat rattled when she coughed. Sometimes these types of exorcisms went on for days, and it was usually something like dehydration or asphyxiation when they shoved the blanket over their head that killed the person.

  She curled more tightly under the blanket, locking her arms and knees around her stomach.

  Minister Stoppard glared at her, incensed at something she had done. Veins bulged in his forehead and neck as he hollered, “The Devil is writhing in pain at the sound of the Word of God! Hold her down, boys! Get that blanket over her head and smother the evil!”

  Levi and her other ogre of a cousin flipped the blanket over her head.

  The air trapped under the thick cloth heated against her face. The sourness of fear bloomed in the suffocating blanket.

  Dread roiled in her head. This was it.

  As much as she didn’t want to die, imagining what her death would do to Wulf made her chest cramp. He would descend into his own icy cold, unmoving, until he just . . . stopped. “Let me up.”

  “What?”

  The growling voice that Rae heard through the blanket belonged to her cousin Levi, who was never the brightest of the clan.

  “Let me up. This has gone on long enough.” Exhaustion weighed her down almost as much as the blanket. She shoved her arms up and pried the blanket away from her face. Cool air washed over her cheeks. “Just stop this nonsense.”

  “Now the demon is talking!” Stoppard shouted.

  “That’s not a demon talking. That’s the sound of common sense,” she said.

  “Begone you devil from Hell!”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” she muttered.

  “Yes, praise his name!” Stoppard shouted.r />
  “Just stop this insanity! Just stop it all!” Rae grabbed the pillow and threw it at Stoppard. He dodged it. “You’re the evil one here! Maybe you’re possessed!”

  Her father gasped. “You shut your mouth. We do not talk to men of God like that.”

  Rae ground her teeth. “I’m not talking to a man of God. I’m talking to Stoppard.”

  She started inching forward, wiggling out of the blanket.

  Cavalry

  Wulf rode in the passenger seat while Dieter drove the black SUV. Summer sunlight glittered on the cars and trucks blocking them in and flashed bright sparks in his eyes. The clock ran through the time, so much time since Rae had walked away from her security.

  Life could change in a heartbeat.

  So many heartbeats.

  So much time.

  Theophile Valencia’s friend Noah had described the car that Rae had gotten into to his network, and he had gotten word back in under an hour that the car had been spotted in a parking lot of a hotel known for drug deals near the university.

  Wulf’s phone rang again, blinking Theophile’s contact number. He answered with, “Do we have more information?”

  Wulf watched the traffic out the front windshield while Theo said, “Noah’s contact says that a group with the last name of Stone rented a small conference room on the ground floor.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you have enough people? I can send a few.”

  Wulf glanced behind the headrest at the five men in the two rear seats behind him, including Dieter, Hans, Luca, and Friedhelm, and at the other SUV trailing them. Black duffels lay at their feet. Everyone except Wulf wore black fatigues.

  He turned back to the front, squinting in the sun’s glare off the chrome from the other cars packed around them as they sped through the hot afternoon. “I think we have sufficient manpower, but thank you again.”

  Get Thee Behind Me

  The large men on both sides of Rae crammed the blanket around her, swaddling it tightly around her shoulders, but she shoved and kicked to loosen it enough to claw the carpeting with one hand and crawl forward.