Unless they were still furious at her for what she’d done and wouldn’t talk to her tonight. They might go back to their rooms and let her stew. She wouldn’t blame them. She’d basically told Dane that she didn’t love them. She’d put him in a horrible position.
Oh, god, she couldn’t die like this. She couldn’t die when they thought she didn’t love them.
Everything she’d suffered before seemed to fade away. She’d spent so much time holding her pain close to her that she hadn’t embraced the love they gave her. Tears blurred her eyes.
She had to keep Yasmin talking. The balcony doors were open to her left. Her bedroom was to her right. If she got the chance, she could bolt one way or the other. Yasmin loved to talk about herself. “Why didn’t you just have them kill me? Why have them take me to a brothel?”
She glanced back at the door, but then turned back, the gun held casually in her manicured hand. “I didn’t care where they took you, but I laughed my ass off when I found out it was a brothel. I had a blast thinking about you taking it up the ass from anyone with a couple of pesos.” She frowned. “They were supposed to ransom you. I was going to get a twenty percent cut as a finder’s fee and for working Talib on this end. The assholes decided to squeeze me. If you hadn’t been found when you were, I was going to be in serious trouble. They were going to turn me over to Talib.”
“And you don’t think Tal is going to be mad that you killed me now?”
She shrugged a little. “I’ve set everything up so it looks like you killed yourself and poor dumb Oliver. You couldn’t handle the truth. Everyone knows you helped your kidnappers torture those girls. No one will be surprised you couldn’t handle the guilt. And Oliver was having an affair with you. I’ll tearfully testify to that. His brother already thinks very little of him. When he hears about this, he’ll think even less. He’ll open the checkbook to me.”
“Is this about money?”
“It’s about everything, Alea. I’m not about to just accept my place in the world. I fight for more, unlike you.”
Her heart was racing, pounding in her chest like a barreling freight train. She was so mad, but that anger had to come second to survival. Which safe haven was closer? The balcony. But the doors to the balcony were made of glass. She would have to climb down the trellis. The bedroom was the safer bet, but it was much farther away and lacked cover. If Yasmin was any kind of shot, she would hit Alea in a second. What should she do? She had to make the right decision. Her baby was counting on her. And she wasn’t the only one with a baby.
“What about your baby, Yasmin? How could you kill the father of your baby?” Keep her talking. She could still see the faint movement of Oliver’s chest. He was still alive. She had to hope that he stayed that way.
A nasty laugh came out of Yasmin’s mouth. “Are you kidding? I’m not pregnant. I’m not some dumb animal who’s going to allow a parasite to suck me dry and make me fat. I pretend to be pregnant every so often and then I tragically lose the baby. To soothe me, he’ll buy me whatever I want for a while. I’m not wrecking my body for some disgusting infant.”
So pleading to her maternal side wasn’t going to work. Alea drew a deep breath. Her cousin was lost, truly without any redemption. She wasn’t sure how it had happened, but there was something missing in Yasmin that had allowed her to become a true sociopath. Nothing Alea could do would save her. The childhood they had shared had been a lie. The face Yasmin showed the world had been a mask.
Yasmin sighed as though the whole exercise bored her to tears. She reached into the pocket of her pants and pulled out a second pair of gloves. “I need you to put these on.”
Yasmin tossed them her way, but Alea allowed them to hit the sofa that came between her and Yasmin. The black gloves hit the cushions and fell to the floor.
“Why?” It was obvious, but Alea would do just about anything to put off that time when she had to make the decision. Her men just needed a little more time. They would be here. She just knew it. She let her eyes roam the room for anything she could use as a weapon.
“Because if you don’t, I’ll shoot you here and now.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Oliver move slightly, his head coming up. He was trying to change positions, turning very slowly.
“It’s not going to work,” Alea said quietly.
“It is. Men in this country can’t believe a woman would do anything terrible. I used to get away with a lot when we were kids. I’m just moving on to murder. And after this, I’ll be set. The truth of the matter is, I got lucky when those mercenaries found you because they killed anyone who could have identified me as the person who set you up. I really owe them a lot. And now I’ll get an even bigger slice of the pie because I’ll get Oliver’s insurance money, since you’re going to go crazy and kill him.”
“I’m not going to cooperate.”
Oliver got to one elbow. She could see blood on his hands as he pushed himself up. He was behind Yasmin, his stare finding her back and his fists clenched, red dripping from his palms. How much had he heard? Did he know she wasn’t carrying their child? Did he know she’d never loved him, wasn’t capable of love?
Yasmin frowned. “Yes, you are because I’ll shoot you otherwise.”
Another thing Yasmin rarely did was to really think something through. All throughout their childhood, Yas had come up with outrageous plans only to run up against a wall of logic anyone with half a brain could have seen a mile away. She needed Alea to cooperate, but there was no real incentive to, beyond making Yasmin’s job of getting away with double homicide easier, and Alea just wasn’t in a giving mood.
“You’ll shoot me anyway, so I don’t see why I should help you out.” Besides, if she moved, she left the relative safety of the sofa. It was an antique with a high back that reached the middle of Alea’s chest. It had been a piece from her mother’s childhood, handed down from generation to generation from the seventeenth century. It would survive a bullet better than she would.
Yasmin huffed a breath from her mouth in a frustrated sigh, but a grim light hit her eyes, and she leveled that gun again. “Fine. I’ll put them on you afterwards.”
Oliver was still fighting, now almost to his knees. “Am I supposed to have shot myself in the head from ten feet away? You know the rest of the world watches TV. Everyone knows that the police can figure out the distance a gun was fired from. You need to be closer. You need to make this look like I shot myself in the head and my arms aren’t that long, Yas. You always sucked at math.”
If there was one thing Yasmin loved more than her clothes and shoes and money, it was complaining about how terrible things had been for her.
Yasmin’s face went a dull red. “Well, how could I compete with the egghead? I just went to school. I didn’t have an army of tutors to do my work for me.”
Yasmin had gone to the world’s most expensive private schools, but that had never been enough for her. There was something deeply empty inside her cousin, something no amount of money or fame or possessions could ever fill. Even if Yasmin succeeded, she wouldn’t be happy. She would find all the flaws in life and hold them tight to her because she believed the world to be against her. She saw herself as a victim. It was how she excused everything she did. It was how she managed to live with herself. What a miserable existence. But it was all Yasmin understood.
Alea realized that she could have become just like Yasmin if she’d kept trekking down the path to empty bitterness. She would have shut out anyone who could have loved her, and resentment would have ruled her life. Her men had saved her from that. The island had saved her, and now she wanted life and love in the real world, too. It wouldn’t be easy, but nothing worthwhile was. That simple truth was what Yasmin had never understood.
“This isn’t going to work, Yasmin. No one is going to save you from your short sightedness this time. Put the gun down, and I’ll talk to Talib about sending you to a place where you can get some help.” A psychiatric hospital would
be a good place for Yasmin. They could figure out if she was a complete sociopath.
For the first time, Yas looked a little uncertain. “I can’t. I’m not going down for this.”
“I disagree, bitch,” Oliver’s words were guttural as though forced through sheer willpower from his chest.
Yasmin screamed and turned, her gun firing wildly, hitting the balcony doors and sending glass flying out. The sound filled the room and her ears, making her heart pound again. Now she had to decide which way to run toward safety.
Oliver shoved at Yasmin, toppling her and sending her to the floor. His dress shirt had turned a horrible muddy red and she could see the gray cast to his skin. His hands shook as he reached for his wife’s throat. Yasmin scrambled, the gun still in her hand. She kicked out and got to her knees.
The bedroom was too far away, and Yas had a direct line of sight. If she could get a shot off, it would likely hit Alea in the back.
Another little ping zipped through the air as Yasmin fired wildly.
Alea dashed to the doorway, sprinting as she looked back, trying to see what was happening with Oliver and Yasmin. Yasmin kicked out, catching Oliver’s chin and sending him flying. Alea heard his body fall, then another little ping.
She made it to the balcony before Yasmin turned. Alea forced herself to not breathe as she moved around the glass at her feet.
“Where did you go, bitch? Do you think I won’t find you? I don’t care about anything now. I just want to kill you! You wrecked everything! Everything!”
Alea clung to the marbled walls, inching away from the door. She had to get to the trellis and hope that she could still make it to one of the trees that were planted close. When she’d been a child, she’d been able to make it to the ground by jumping from the railing to the tree and shimmying down. Her aunt and uncles had been horrified. Talib had called her a little monkey. Who knew the skill might come in handy now. God, would the branches even hold her?
She heard a door slamming open. No doubt Yasmin was searching for her in the bedroom.
This was her one chance. She stepped across the glass, crunching it under her shoes and stepped up on the terrace railing. Shit. It was a long way down.
“Lea! Lea!”
“Lan?”
Landon stood on the ground beneath her, a gun in his hand. He quickly shoved it into his holster and held his arms up. “Jump, Lea. Jump and I’ll catch you. I swear I will. Jump, darlin’.”
“Got you,” Yasmin snarled as she came through the doors.
Alea jumped. No question about it. She would rather die trying to get to Lan than face down a bullet. She heard herself scream as she made the short trip from the second story.
Her breath huffed from her chest as she landed in strong, warm arms.
“I can kill you both.” Yasmin stood on the balcony, her gun in her hand.
Lan moved fast, turning so his back was to the gun, and he pressed Alea to the ground.
A loud report filled the air. That hadn’t been Yasmin’s gun with its silencer. Then whose?
“Thank god,” Lan whispered and pulled Alea upright.
Yasmin’s gun fell to the ground, her body slumping over the balcony railing. She hung there for a moment, eyes wide, as Dane and Cooper charged through, both with a semiautomatic in their hands.
Alea gasped in horror as Yasmin teetered, her body unbalanced, then tipped over the railing. She fell through the air, her blonde hair flipping with her body before she hit the ground with a sickening thud. A glance told Alea that Yas’s neck hung at an unnatural angle. She was dead.
Dane looked over the railing. “Is Alea okay?”
“I’ve got her,” Lan yelled. He scooped her up, holding her to his chest.
Alea stared at Yasmin’s dead body as he carried her away, brutally aware of just how close she’d come to a very similar end. She clung to Lan and cried.
Chapter Fifteen
“How is Oliver?” Piper asked as she poured out the tea and waited for the servant to step back. “Thank you so much. That will be all for now. We should be finished in an hour or so. Until then, I’d like to be alone with my cousin, please.”
The servant frowned, but nodded and bowed as he left the room.
They were finally alone. It seemed like Alea was never alone these days. “He’s recovering but very slowly. His brothers arrived a couple of days ago. When the doctors say he’s stable, they want to move him back to England.”
She’d met Callum and Rory at the airport and escorted them to their brother’s side. She’d felt a horrible pressing guilt the whole time. Oliver had been a target because of her. She’d apologized, but the brothers had hugged her and assured her they placed no blame on anyone but Yasmin. Callum had mentioned that if Oliver had followed his initial instincts and pursued Alea instead, none of it would have happened.
Yasmin had already been cremated, her urn placed in the family crypt by her grieving mother. Alea had felt so badly for her aunt. Though Yasmin had been horrible, her aunt had loved her only daughter. Her grief was complicated. She’d been horrified by what Yasmin had done.
So much sadness. And there had been so much rage in Oliver’s eyes. Even through the pain of his surgeries, she could see the hatred there that burned for the woman he’d once called his wife.
“I’m glad to hear he’s going to make it,” Piper said, putting her tea down and looking at the door as it closed. Landon was standing outside the door, his silent figure a monument to his protectiveness.
Unfortunately, she wanted his figure to be a monument to sexiness and love, but that hadn’t happened. Despite the fact that she’d tried to talk to them about why she’d refused the marriage in the beginning, they didn’t seem to be listening. Oh, the wedding plans were going through. They were scheduled to be married in the garden next week, but Dane and Landon seemed to be going through the motions with grim determination.
“Are you all right?” Piper asked.
She nodded. “I’m fine. No morning sickness at all. I feel great physically.”
In fact, the doctor had said she was healthy and that sex wouldn’t be a problem at all, even sex with all her fiancés as long as they were careful.
But Cooper and Landon were the only ones who had slept beside her in the four days that had passed since she’d leapt from the balcony and into Landon’s arms. She’d tried to explain, and Dane said he understood, but he’d been remote.
They were circling each other like wary sharks, and she needed to break the stalemate. She wanted her wedding to be a joyous occasion, not something they all went through for the sake of the baby.
“I wasn’t talking about your health physically. How are you emotionally?” Piper asked. “I saw that two of the other women from the brothel called you. How did that go?”
Jennifer and Lisa. She barely remembered them, but they had given her so much strength. She’d been terrified at first, but they had drawn her out, getting her to really talk about what had happened. They had cried, all three of them. They had cried for each other, for themselves, and for the girls who hadn’t made it.
“I’m starting a new foundation. I’m bringing Lisa and Jen into it with me. It’s going to fight international slavery and push the United Nations and other countries to advance women’s rights.”
Tears formed in Piper’s eyes, and she put down her teacup and reached for Alea’s hand. “A long time ago, Dane told me that how we handle the pain we’ve been given is the way we’re measured in life. A strong person can take the horror and pain and use it to make the world a better place. Lea, I think that’s a wonderful idea.”
She was excited about it, and especially excited about the fact that Jen and Lisa were going to get some of the others together for a visit at the palace so they could meet and talk and help each other heal.
Alea was going to reach out to Brittany, too. She was letting go of her anger because it had no place in her life. It solved nothing, but forgiveness and understanding…those
could solve everything.
She was done with anger and bitterness. She was ready to move on, but she had no intention of moving on without Dane Mitchell.
There was the sound of a door opening, and Landon walked in. His blue eyes found hers, and she was shocked at how her heart pounded in her chest at the very sight of him. He nodded toward Piper. “Your Highness.”
“It’s Piper, Lan. In a couple of days we’ll be family, and no one in my family calls me Your Highness. Well, except for my sister, but it sounds more like Your High Ass. She’s a classy one, my little sis.”
Lan’s smile made him beam. “I’m excited to meet her. I’m also excited that Coop’s family is going to descend on the palace tomorrow morning. I think it might be the first time that monstrosity Tal calls a plane gets completely filled.”
Alea couldn’t wait to meet Cooper’s family. She just hoped she could remember all their names. There were six brothers and five of them were married with eleven kids between them. But first, she had a job to do. “Are you going to help me?”
Lan put a hand on her hair, smoothing it back. “Always, Lea. You’re sure the doc said it was all right?”
He was killing her, treating her like she was made of glass. “Lan, have you ever heard of pregnancy hormones?”
Piper shook her head. “Oh, honey. I have a load of those.” She also proved she had Alea’s back. “But it’s okay because your men are taking care of you, right?”
She was so glad Piper was on her side. She shook her head. “No. They’re not taking care of me. They’re very gently making love to me, but only once since we got back and only Cooper.”
Lan went a stark red. “Lea, baby, should we be talking about this?”
Piper stood up and wagged a finger at him. “How could you? Pregnant women need sex. Crazy, dirty, nasty sex. So, you liked having sex with her so much that she got pregnant, but now that she’s expecting, you’ve lost interest. Is that the way it is?”
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