by Vivian Gray
“Hello, Anton.”
I recognized Brendan’s throaty voice immediately. He spoke slowly, savoring every word, and my stomach dropped. Something had happened to Bailey. I didn’t know what, but I had no doubt that Brendan had done something to her. In the last week, he had lost his girlfriend in a poker game, tried and failed to have me thrown in jail, and then been rejected by his ex-girlfriend twice within twenty-four hours. The guy had nothing to brag about, yet he sounded proud of himself.
So fucking proud. It made me sick.
“What did you do with her?”
“Do with who?”
“Bailey, you son of a bitch.”
He laughed. “Did you see me grab her from in front of your building or are you just guessing I’ve done something to her?”
Grab her? Before I’d asked, I hadn’t had a clear idea of what Brendan may have done, but never once did abduction cross my mind. He was insane.
“Where is she?” I asked. I had already slipped on my shoes and was headed for the door. Wherever she was, I’d be there in an instant. I’d kill Brendan without hesitation, and I’d save her.
“I’m not telling,” he said in a sing-song voice, antagonizing me.
“What do you want?”
“Money,” he said flatly. “Obviously.”
“I’m not giving you shit.”
“Well, that’s good because what I really want is money,” he said, releasing a burst of fake laughter. “Sorry, I had to.”
“Where is she?” I growled out.
He sighed. “How many times do I need to repeat myself? I’m not telling you.”
“Is this some kind of sick joke? Do you actually have Bailey?”
“Yes, I have her.” It was the first time his voice had grown serious, and all at once, I believed him. “And I’ll hand her over for a price.”
“Why should I pay you anything?” I asked, trying to swallow my rage and sound casual. If he had any idea how badly I wanted to save Bailey, he’d draw this out. He’d demand more and more. I had to stay calm.
“You took her from me in the game, and now I’d like to be paid.”
“I didn’t take her from you,” I said with a bark of laughter. “You bet her, and I won, and now you are pissed and embarrassed that she doesn’t want to be with you anymore.”
He took a measured breath, and I could tell he was trying to stay calm. “Yes, she rejected me,” he said, his anger boiling beneath the surface. “But I deserve something for the months I fed and sheltered her. I hope to receive that payment from you. I need it within the hour, or she suffers.”
I wanted to ask him what that meant, what he would do to her, but he had already hung up.
I slammed the phone down and tried to think. Brendan didn’t have any money. If I kidnapped someone, they could be kept at any of a dozen different warehouses or safehouses across the city. Brendan didn’t have those kinds of resources.
I froze. Could it be that simple? Could Bailey be at Brendan’s house?
I was calling the driver before the elevator doors even opened.
The driver knew exactly where to go because he’d been there that morning when I’d sent my men to follow Bailey. Suddenly, I was grateful for that decision. Of course, if I hadn’t sent anyone to follow her in the first place, then none of this would be happening, but that was too convoluted to think about. I needed to stay focused.
Everything inside of me wanted to strangle Brendan. I wanted to rip his teeth out one by one and make him swallow them. I wanted to pull his fingernails off and jab them into his eyes. I wanted him to feel pain in ways no human had ever felt pain before. But if somehow, he had doubled his IQ in the last twelve hours and was keeping Bailey somewhere other than his house, I would never find her if he was dead.
So, I would pay him, take Bailey, and send men to destroy him later. The priority was Bailey and only Bailey.
As soon as the car came to a stop and the driver pointed out Brendan’s house, I jumped from the car and ran up the cracked sidewalk to his front door. I pounded furiously, praying Bailey was behind the door. Praying she was safe.
When the door opened, Brendan’s nervous head popped out. His forehead was swollen and a nasty purple bruise colored most of his scalp. Flakes of dried blood clung to the sides of his nose and ran down his lip. I almost laughed, but then a terrifying thought struck: if he looked that bad, what did Bailey look like?
“Where is she?” I asked, grabbing him by the shirt collar and pulling him onto his front porch.
“Put me down, or you won’t ever find her,” he said, sounding exhausted.
All of his usual bravado was gone. Whatever had happened, he was no longer making jokes. Which was great, because neither was I. I set him on his feet and took a step back, making sure I was at least an arm’s distance away from him.
“Where’s the money?” he asked.
Brendan had failed to mention a specific monetary value, so I’d simply grabbed a wad of one-hundred dollar bills out of my safe before leaving. I handed them over now. I would have given him everything I owned, business and all, if it meant seeing Bailey with my own eyes.
He reached for it greedily and stepped back, eyeing me warily as if he expected me to rip it from his hands.
“Where is she?” I asked.
Brendan didn’t answer. He was too busy counting the stack, his eyes growing bigger with each bill.
I didn’t have time for this. I leaned around him, yelling into the house. “Bailey!”
Brendan jumped backward, clutching the money to his chest.
“Bailey!” I stepped inside.
“Whoa, you need to get out,” Brendan said, pointing towards the door.
“I gave you the money. Now, tell me where Bailey is,” I demanded.
“
Go back outside and I will.”
He was acting strange. Something wasn’t right, but I knew one thing for sure: I was not walking out of his house with answers.
I stepped towards him until we were almost chest to chest. “No, I’m staying right here until you tell me where she is.”
His eyes danced nervously. I could tell he was trying to decide what to do. I pressed my chest against his, making his decision for him, letting him know I wasn’t going anywhere.
He sighed and shrunk as the air rushed out of him. “She isn’t here.”
I leaned back and glared down at him. “What do you mean she isn’t here?”
“I mean what I said. She is not here,” he said, repeating it slowly as though I were dumb.
“Where the hell is she?” I yelled, spit flying out of my mouth.
He threw his arms out to the side and shrugged. “Hell if I know. That bitch clubbed me over the head and ran away. By the time I came to, she was long gone.”
I took another look at the massive lump on his head and burst out laughing. “Bailey did that to you?”
Brendan didn’t say anything, but the flush in his cheeks was all the answer I needed.
“So, she isn’t here because she escaped?” I asked, the beginnings of relief flooding through me.
His lips tightened, then he gave one curt nod. Before he could do anything else, I reached out and snatched the money out of his hand. He managed to keep hold of a few bills, but they all but shredded in the struggle, falling to the floor like useless flakes of snow.
“You better watch your back, Brendan Jacobs,” I sneered out, pointing at his chest.
“Is that a threat?” he asked, trying to puff out his chest. Still, after everything I’d just seen, with blood on his face and a bruise the size of my open palm on his forehead, he was trying to intimidate me.
I laughed at him. “It’s a fucking promise.”
Chapter Eighteen
Bailey
It wasn’t until I was in the back of the cab and driving back towards the city that I felt like I could finally relax. Brendan wasn’t following me or coming after me anymore. I’d escaped. I felt like I should pr
obably go to the police, but that felt exhausting. In the last twelve hours, I’d been attacked by Brendan twice, broken up with Anton, and become homeless. What I needed more than an interrogation by a police officer were a shower and a good night’s rest. Anton had given me an emergency debit card soon after I’d moved in, and despite my protests at the time, I was grateful for it now.
“Just in case,” he’d said, sliding it to me across the kitchen island like it was a drug deal, which was the same way I chose to slide it to the clerk behind the hotel check-in desk.
Leaving Anton’s that morning, I’d planned to stay in a free shelter until I could come up with a better option, but after the day I’d just had, I needed to be alone. I needed a private room with a locked door. I needed to take a few deep breaths in relative peace, something no homeless shelter would offer.
“Twin or full-size bed?” the receptionist asked, looking around the lobby to see whether I was alone.
“Full,” I said, wondering what kind of adult would willingly choose to sleep in a twin-size bed?
“Smoking or non-smoking?” she asked, flipping her long ponytail over her shoulder.
“Non-smoking,”
“Any pets with you today?” She smiled, practically blinding me.
I sighed. “Nope, just me.”
“The pool is down this hallway and to your right.” She leaned across the desk to gesture to the end of the lobby. “And the workout room is down that same hallway to the left. Each floor has an ice machine and vending machines, but for your convenience, we also have a twenty-four-hour store where you can buy—”
I held up a hand to stop her. “I’m sorry, but I will not be going swimming or eating snacks or working out. I’m exhausted, and I just want the key to my room. I want to go to sleep. By myself. Nobody else. No pets. Just me. Please.”
Her smile flickered and then faded. “Okay.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. I really was.
Usually, I made it a habit to be abundantly kind to people in the customer service industry. They dealt with enough jackasses on a daily basis, and I didn’t want to be another one. However, I felt as though I could collapse right there on the wildly-patterned lobby carpet. I wanted to rinse the day from my skin and crawl into stiff, over-bleached sheets.
She nodded, clearly doing everything in her power not to roll her eyes at me, and handed me my hotel key. I held it up in thanks as I moved quickly across the lobby, up the elevator, and down the insanely long hallway to room 312.
The hotel was several steps above what I would have ever been able to afford, but one million steps below what Anton would have chosen. Any hotel he chose would have had chandeliers in the lobby and a piano player and a water feature. I didn’t care about any of that though; I just wanted a clean shower and a soft mattress.
I used the hotel-provided soap bar and scrubbed at my skin hard enough to remove the outer layer, leaving me pink and sensitive all over. The tiny bottle of shampoo lasted long enough for me to lather my roots and wash halfway down the length of my hair before running out and there was no conditioner to speak of – a minor inconvenience that, still, meant nothing. I was grateful for the hot water.
The mirror was steamy when I got out, and I wiped a circle clear with my hand, looking at myself for the first time in what felt like days. Dark smudges were etched under my eyes from lack of sleep, and my lips were swollen from the nervous biting I’d been doing in the cab to the hotel.
Otherwise, I looked relatively normal. I’d expected to look in the mirror and be appalled. To be coated in bruises and blood and grime. But that was on the inside. From the outside, I looked the same as ever.
I put on the hotel-provided white robe and practically dove into the bed. It was firmer than I expected, but that didn’t stop me from drifting into an almost instant sleep.
When I woke up to knocking at the door, my body’s immediate response was to jump out of bed and take up a fighter’s stance. I had been attacked enough times recently that my body was beginning to expect it. After a few seconds, though, I took a deep breath, realized it was probably a maid or someone from the front desk and walked to the door.
However, one look through the peephole told me I was wrong.
Anton.
I opened the door immediately, throwing it wide open, even though I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about seeing him. We’d broken up – sort of – and he hadn’t contacted Brendan about the ransom. He didn’t care about me. Still, he was as close to a friendly face as I was going to get, and I really needed a friendly face.
“Hello,” I said.
His eyebrows shot up. “Hello? That’s what you have to say to me after everything that has happened tonight?”
I shrugged. “What do you want me to say?”
Was I supposed to be thrilled to see him? Did he realize that a large part of the “everything” that had happened today was him having me followed and then throwing me out of his house? That experience didn’t exactly create warm fuzzies down in my soul at the sight of him. Though, annoyingly, I couldn’t stop myself from noticing how handsome he looked. Even with his untucked button-down flapping open over his tanned chest while wearing his house shoes instead of dress shoes, he looked perfect. Hot mess chic.
Anton stepped into my room and grabbed my shoulders, looking me up and down, his fingers digging into my skin. “I want you to tell me that you are perfectly unharmed. That you are safe. I want you to tell me how in the hell you managed to hit Brendan over the head and escape.”
“How did you know about that?” I asked, stepping out of his grip. Brendan told me Anton wasn’t coming. That he’d decided not to save me. How did he find out about my escape?
“I went to Brendan’s house to find you,” he said as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“You tried to find me?” I asked, repeating the words quietly, almost to myself. Trying to believe them. He did care about me. He came to find me.
“Bailey,” he whispered, saying my name like a promise, “of course, I did. Did you doubt that I would?”
I didn’t answer because the truth embarrassed me. For so long, I had been tossed aside, discarded in favor of something better, shinier – another woman, money, power. So the idea that the wealthiest man I’d ever met, the man who could buy anyone or anything he wanted, had tossed me aside, not only seemed possible, it made sense to me. I didn’t doubt it for a second.
His face fell, morphing from confusion to pity. “Oh, Bailey.” He reached out for me, pulling me into his chest. “Of course, I came for you. Of course I did.”
I let myself be held by him for a second, the rhythmic beating of his heart settling the wild beat of my own. Then, I pulled away. I wasn’t ready to believe him. Not yet.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes. “Brendan isn’t exactly a criminal mastermind. And I knew he didn’t have the means to be keeping you at a secondary location. So, I went to his house.”
“That makes sense,” I said, almost laughing. “The idiot locked me in a room with all of his discarded weightlifting equipment.”
“Yes, you are going to need to explain to me in exquisite detail how you attacked him. I’ve been daydreaming about beating his ass since the moment I met him, so I’m a little jealous that you took care of it for me.”
I told him about my plan – how I spread the equipment around the room, briefly fought with Brendan, and then smashed the bar down over his head. I told him how I ran through the house and escaped, ultimately calling a cab and coming to the hotel room.
Anton listened eagerly, gasping at all of the right parts and shaking his head in disbelief. “You are amazing, Bailey. I showed up at Brendan’s ready to tear down the house to find you, and then I saw Brendan all bloody and bruised. You didn’t need me to save you. You don’t need anybody.”
I knew he meant for his words to be complimentary, but they crumpled something vital inside of me. I didn’t
need anybody? That didn’t feel true. Especially in the last week. I felt like I needed someone more than ever. Someone to help me through the hard days, to help stave off hopelessness. Someone to love me and care for me in the way I knew I deserved.
However, he was right in one way. I didn’t need just anybody. I needed him. I wanted him.