Tiger Queen: A Reverse Harem Romance

by Cassie Cole

  I sniffled and tried to smile. “Half of them are tears of happiness, I promise. This is the best parting gift anyone has ever given me.”

  We celebrated that night by opening a bottle of champagne that had been sitting in the back of the fridge for God knows how long. Anthony and Jake complained about David taking all the credit, and how the two of them had given him the idea in the first place. While the three of them argued over whose idea it was originally, I smiled and sipped my champagne and tried not to think about how there was a time limit to our happiness.

  When I slept, I had nightmares about leaving. In all of the dreams I left the zoo too early, abandoning the animals in their greatest time of need. In the warped dream world, the animals were all right on the edge of starvation or sickness and my departure was the final straw that pushed them over the edge.

  I woke up in the middle of the night, drenched in a cold sweat. I went to the bathroom, dried myself off, and drank a glass of water.

  When I came out of the bathroom, I noticed that the door at the end of the hall was cracked open. The door to Crazy Carl’s bedroom, the one none of the boys had wanted to touch since we all arrived here. I knew they had been putting off going through his personal effects until the animals were taken care of, so maybe one of them had decided they were finally ready.

  I didn’t want to go back to sleep, and they might need emotional support while going through their dead father’s belongings, so I wandered over to the door and slipped inside.

  Carl Haines’ bedroom was just how I remembered it from a month ago. Large, musty, and filled with boxes. Within the maze of boxes was a path to the four-post bed, and another path leading over to the bathroom and dresser. There was noise over there and the glow of a light, so I made my way in that direction. Anthony’s laptop was on the bed, glowing faintly at the login screen.

  It was dark in the bedroom. The person inside was crouched down by the dresser, aiming a cell phone flashlight at the iron safe. A tattooed hand twisted the dial, and then it unlocked with a loud KA-CHUNK. Anthony didn’t have tattoos. That confused me.

  “Jake?” I asked, squinting at the harsh light. “What are you doing in here with Anthony’s laptop?”

  The man who stood and turned on the dresser lamp was not Jake. It wasn’t David or Anthony either. The weird thing was that he looked kind of like each of them. The blue eyes of David. The long eyelashes and cheeks of Anthony. The amused grin of Jake, and the scruff along his jaw. He was totally jacked like the two older brothers, and wore a t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off.

  But the cherry-red mohawk was unlike anything I had seen in his sons, and there was a mad sparkle in his eyes. Eyes which looked at me like I was the prey he had been waiting for.

  “Carl?” I gasped. “Crazy Carl?”

  41

  Rachel

  My brain rebooted itself at the sight of Crazy Carl. He was supposed to be dead. Yet here he was in the house, his house, opening his safe. It was such an impossibility that the first thing I thought was that it was a ghost. The ghost of Crazy Carl Haines had returned to haunt his house in death.

  When he pulled the gun out of the safe and aimed it at me, all thoughts of a supernatural explanation disappeared.

  “You’re that bitch who’s dismantling my zoo,” he growled. His voice had a bit of Carolina twang, but not as cartoonish as it was in the commercials I had seen. “If you scream, you die.”

  I clamped my mouth shut. Screaming was exactly what I had been about to do.

  “You… you’re dead. A plane… a plane. A plane crash. In the ocean.”

  He snorted derisively. “If there ain’t no body, honey, there ain’t no death. Easy as shit to fake that! Thousand bucks to the right Costa Rican and they’ll fly over the gulf, call out a Mayday, turn their transponder off, and come right home.”

  Before I could think of what to do, he crossed the distance between us and clamped a sweaty hand over my mouth. He twisted me around and jabbed the barrel of the gun into my back.

  “We’re gonna walk out of here nice and quiet,” he whispered. His breath smelled like sour beer. “Grab that laptop on the way. Good. Remember, no noise. You make so much as a peep and I’ll put a bullet in your spine.”

  With the gun pressing painfully into my lower back, I didn’t need the reminder.

  I clutched the laptop to my chest and let him lead me out of the bedroom and into the hall. The floor was normally creaky, but tonight it was magically silent, as if the house itself was one of Carl’s accomplices. I stared at the door to Anthony’s bedroom, then David’s. He was normally a light sleeper, so maybe he would hear us. I focused on the door and silently willed it to open, for one of them to come to my aid…

  Down the stairs we went, then out the front door. Carl closed it behind us softly, and then we were going down the porch and across the path toward the zoo. My bare foot stepped on a particularly sharp rock and I yelped, the sound muffled by Carl’s palm. Only when we were halfway to the zoo did he remove his hand from my mouth.

  “Where are we going?” I whispered.

  “I said shut up,” the crazy man snapped.

  The night was alive with the sound of crickets and cicadas. I was terrified of what Carl intended to do with me. He had accused me of dismantling his zoo. The business he had spent his entire life building.

  Was he going to kill me?

  I remembered how on Tiger King everyone suspected that Carol Baskin had fed her first husband to her tigers. That was super unlikely because tigers had to be starving to eat human flesh… But maybe Crazy Carl didn’t know that. Maybe he wanted to give it a try anyways.

  “All my fucking animals,” he grumbled as we entered the zoo itself. “Closing the zoo down and shipping them away from their home.”

  “Is that what this is about?” I asked in a trembling voice. “The animals transfer?”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. “Destroying my entire empire overnight. Comin’ in here and forcing my sons to abandon their heritage.”

  Of course that’s what this was about. He had worked his entire life building this zoo, his legacy, and we were systematically shutting it down and sending his animals away. Despite the gun he had on me, and despite all the other bad stuff Carl had done, I almost felt sorry for him.

  “I wasn’t trying to destroy your legacy,” I said. “I’m only trying to do what’s best for the animals! We’re giving them better homes, at a national park in Kenya where they will have room to roam and—”

  “Shut up.”

  Carl led me into the visitor’s center, then into the back office. He shoved me into the chair, took Anthony’s laptop, and opened it on the desk.

  “Login,” he demanded.

  “I don’t know the password to his laptop. What do you need from it?”

  He picked up the laptop and hurled it across the room. It smashed into the wall and fell to the floor with a clatter of plastic keys. Then Carl pointed at the office laptop that was already on the desk.

  “Login to the office computer, then. Or are you gonna lie about that too?”

  I did know the password for that computer, so I did as I was told.

  “Now login to that donation website. Go Pay Me or some such.”

  “GoFundMe?”

  “I don’t care what it’s called!” he snapped. “Just fuckin’ do it!”

  I went to the website and logged in. The account balance appeared in the top-right corner. Carl chuckled maniacally.

  “One-point-two million! Oh baby! That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” He fished a piece of paper out of his pocket and slammed it on the desk. “Withdraw it all to that account.”

  I stared up at him, too shocked to obey the instructions. “This is about money?”

  “Hurry up. I ain’t got all night.”

  “This isn’t about the zoo, or the animals, or anything else,” I said incredulously. “This is just about money?”

  He waved the gun. “Withdraw the fucking m
oney or I’ll shoot you.”

  A trickle of courage filled my chest. “If you shoot me, I can’t transfer the money.” I clicked on the next screen. “It requires the password again.”

  Madness sparkled in Carl’s blue eyes as he pressed the gun into my knee. “Didn’t say where I’d shoot ya.”

  That small bit of courage disappeared, and I hurried to transfer the money. But after a few clicks I ran into a new roadblock.

  “Before withdrawing the money, I have to add this bank account as a new external account.”

  “So do it, then.”

  I pointed at the screen. “I tried. But it sends a verification email that we have to click on to confirm the new external account. It sent it to Anthony’s email address.”

  His jaw clenched. “Then login to his email.”

  “I… I don’t know his password,” I stammered.

  “LIAR!” he screamed. “You’re a fucking witch. You’ve wrapped my boys around your little finger, whispering poison in their ears so they’ll do whatever you please. I don’t believe for a Carolina minute that you don’t know their passwords.”

  Anger rose up inside me in a surprising way. Maybe because I cared about his three sons deeply, and here Carl was accusing me of manipulating them.

  “You don’t care about your sons,” I shot back. “You don’t care about anything. You faked your death and didn’t even tell them. You let them believe! And now you sneak back here in the middle of the night to steal some money? Seriously?”

  My accusation caught him off guard, and he recoiled from me. “Had to fake it to avoid bankruptcy. Start over fresh somewhere new. The boys didn’t need to know, at least not for a while. Had to get the feds off my ass. They’ve been watching me, undercover agents sneaking around lookin’ for me…”

  “Oh right, the feds,” I said sarcastically. “Everyone’s after you. And it’s totally not paranoia. No way.”

  “They are after me,” he insisted. “They’re sneaky. Insert agents into every level of my organization. Hell, you’re probably one of them!”

  I laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. “Meanwhile, your sons are in tremendous pain because they think their dad is dead. And you’re selfishly worrying about yourself! You’ll come back here to steal a million bucks, but not to tell your sons the truth? What kind of a father are you?”

  A dark expression fell across his face. He slammed the laptop closed, unplugged it, and put it under one arm. Then he aimed the gun at me.

  “Get up.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I said get up.”

  The look in his eyes made it clear that I was about to cross a line. Another word and he would shoot me out of anger. I got up and walked out of the office, then out of the visitor’s center.

  “Turn left. That way.”

  As we passed Caesar’s enclosure, he approached the fence and snarled at us. I had never seen such a reaction from him before. He wasn’t the only one. The two females in the adjacent enclosure watched us silently too, tails flat with anger. The chimps screamed and bounced around their cage, and the birds made extra noise when we passed.

  The animals knew that Crazy Carl was back. And they did not approve.

  Carl led me to the food preparation building. He unlocked it with the master key and shoved me inside.

  “What are we doing in here?” I demanded.

  He swung his hand, pistol-whipping me in the temple. My vision went white and I crumpled to the ground. Yellow and red particles floated across my eyes as I stared at the concrete floor and the metal drain inches from my face. There was a small piece of cow rib, about the size of a dime, that had failed to wash down the drain. My dazed brain felt vaguely embarrassed about that. I don’t why I had not noticed that. Because I had been so busy preparing the animals for transportation, I guessed.

  While I groaned on the ground, Carl was busy over in the dry cabinet. He returned with a ball of butcher’s string, which he used to bind my wrists together. I was too dizzy and disoriented to fight back. Not that it would have mattered since he had a gun, too.

  He grabbed me by the hair and dragged me over to the preparation table next to the band saw. The office laptop was open.

  “Login to Anthony’s email,” he said in a voice that was dangerously soft. “And approve whatever it is you need to approve.”

  It was difficult to put words together to form a sentence. I was probably concussed. “I don’t know his password. And even if I did, he probably has two-factor authentication. A text gets sent to his phone.”

  “I don’t care if he’s got five-factor authentication. Do it.”

  I shook my head. “Carl, you have to believe me. I don’t know it.”

  And then I heard the worst sound in the world. A sound like a thousand angry insects all buzzing at the same time.

  The sound of the band saw turning on.

  He grabbed me by my hair and pulled me around to the feeding side of the band saw, then shoved my face against the stainless steel table. The band saw was a blur two feet in front of me, moving so rapidly I couldn’t even see the razor-sharp blades.

  “Tell me what his password is!” Carl shouted over the sound of the saw.

  I began to weep. I felt so helpless. “I don’t know! I’m telling the truth!”

  He let go of my hair, and for a moment I thought maybe he believed me. Then he grabbed my bound wrists and slammed them down on the table in front of the saw.

  “Had an employee long time ago who had an accident,” he said in a conversational tone, barely audible over the loud saw. “Was running the band saw, cutting meat and some such, when he slipped on somethin’ on the floor. Except instead of falling backward, he fell forward. Threw his arm out to stop himself. Instincts, ya know. This very saw cut clean through his arm just below the elbow. I never seen so much blood in my life, and I’m a man who works with tigers. It was spraying out of his stump like a garden hose! What I’m tryin’ to say is that it’s gonna be messy in here in a minute. I don’t want to get blood on my nice shirt, so you’d better give me what I want.”

  With one hand on my neck and the other holding my wrists, he began pushing my arm toward the saw. I stared at the blade with the same fixation as people who watched car accidents, unable to look away from the horror that was about to come. I had seen this very blade cut thousands of pounds of meat, but the meat was always frozen. That made for a cleaner cut. Anyone who had ever cut frozen chicken breasts instead of raw ones knew the difference. I wondered what the saw would do to my arm. I doubted the cut would be very clean. Human muscle was stringy, and the blade might catch on my arm and pull us forward.

  I was focused on all of this with a strange, detached fascination. It was funny what a person thought about when they were about to be dismembered.

  “Last chance,” Carl said.

  “I don’t… I swear…”

  Suddenly a voice cut through the noise of the blade.

  “Dad?”

  42

  Rachel

  We swung our heads toward the voice. Anthony stood in the doorway in his boxers and a t-shirt. His face was a theater of shock as he stared at his father. Then hope filled his eyes.

  “Dad? Is that really you?”

  Carl let go of my arm, but kept the pressure on my head. “Anthony. Son. I’m glad you’re here.”

  Anthony blinked. “What are you doing to Rachel!”

  Carl turned off the band saw, then pointed at the laptop on the other end of the table. “I need you to login to your email. There’s something very important I need you to do.”

  His voice was different when he addressed his son. It was almost gentle. Anthony showed us the phone in his hand. “That’s why I woke up. I got the email notification that someone was trying to add a new external bank account to the GoFundMe account.” He looked at me. “You weren’t in bed, and I couldn’t find you anywhere in the house, so I traced the login to the visitor’s center…”

 
“Son,” Carl said roughly, “we can talk about it later. But first, log into your email so we can approve this new account and transfer the money over.”

  “But dad, how are you…”

  “Do it and I’ll let Rachel go.”

  Hearing the threat out loud rather than simply seeing it got through to Anthony. He blinked, and his jaw dropped, and he realized what was actually going on here. Pain twisted on his face as he realized his dad had returned only to steal the donation money. Not for any other reason.

  My heart broke for him in that moment.

  “I’ll give you whatever you want,” he said, so soft it was almost a whisper. “Just don’t hurt Rachel.”

  He used the laptop to log into his email account. His phone buzzed as he was sent a two-factor authentication code, which he then punched in.

  “Okay,” Anthony said, emotionless. “The external account is added.”

  “You do it,” his father snapped. “Transfer the money over. All of it.”

  “Dad…”

  “DO IT!” Carl roared.

  Tears ran down Anthony’s cheeks as he typed. A few seconds later he said, “It’s done.”

  Carl kept the gun aimed at me and walked over to the laptop. Anthony rushed over and embraced me, and it took everything I had not to break down and sob in his arms. Carl laughed happily as he verified the transfer on the screen.

  “I don’t understand,” Anthony said. Tears still ran down his face. “You were… the plane… Dad, we had your funeral. We buried an empty casket over in the Blue Lake cemetery. Next to grandma and grandpa.”

  For a split second, Carl looked regretful. Like he realized the pain and suffering he had caused his family. His eyes widened and I thought he might tear up like his son.

  Then he grabbed Anthony’s phone off the table, and then the laptop. “I’m sorry, son.”

  He aimed the gun at us while backing up toward the door, then turned and vanished into the night.

  As soon as he was gone I let out a relieved sob. Anthony held my head to his chest and made shushing noises.