I also knew that the prodigal daughter of the senator was alive. A fact that very few knew.
Everyone that cared (or gave a half of a shit) assumed she’d met some tragic end—a product of her wild child, adventurous lifestyle… or a symptom of her father’s notoriously shady one.
Either way, Audriana was presumed dead. And if she was, then that would mean…
I turned to Sienna.
“She gets everything.” The words dropped from the edge of my tongue like lead. “Somebody, pull up an Internet browser. Quick.”
Sienna’s brow furrowed as I scrambled around. I grappled for my phone, pressing my fingers to its flattened surface.
The first thing I typed was “the Probate Laws of New York.” I wanted to find out more information about the rights of a New York citizen’s will and heirs.
I spent the next few minutes scrolling, and what I did find made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
She had done it.
And although Senator Fletcher remained hopeful, I’m sure, the online court records on my phone were as clear as day, and I read them with a shiver slinking down my spine.
Danity Fletcher and Robert the Fraud had, indeed, petitioned a Probate Court to presume Audriana Isabella Fletcher dead in absentia.
Deceased. Gone.
The senator’s massive estate would no longer pass to his beloved offspring.
It now all belonged to Danity.
And as long as the senator was living, Miss Ice Queen could not collect. I decided right then and there to make sure that she did not get that chance.
I called Fletcher’s office, praying that the right person would pick up. I crossed my fingers while the phone rang.
“Wait a second… What the hell is going on here?” Sienna demanded while I paced the floor.
For the time being, I ignored my slowly panicking secretary as she muttered to me and then to herself.
I started scrambling for the keys—the ones I’d hidden here yesterday. Grabbing them from Sienna’s sugar jar in her too-small-to-be-cozy kitchen, I rushed over to release Scotty from his cuffs, fumbling as I twisted metal inside metal, unclamping the heavy wristlets.
Sienna yelled at me as soon as the shiny, reflective restraints hit the floor with a thud. I ended the call I’d been making and extended a hand to the man on the floor.
“Hey!” she hollered. “What the hell?”
“I’m sorry, Si, but we have no time. We need to get to the senator as soon as possible. He’s in danger.”
“What?” She leaned forward, incredulous. “The man’s a louse. Let his ass die.”
“Why? So I can have another human being’s blood on my hands?” I spun on her. “No. I won’t do it. Not even to him.”
Scotty lifted up, rubbing his wrists, unfolding himself up off the ground as he stood to his feet.
“Fooking hell, my ass smarts.” He looked down at his pants and then me. “You got me released from jail just so you could lock me back up again. Sorry fooking partnership this turned out to be.”
“Who the hell said you were a partner?” I reached into my bag, pulling out several of the hundred dollar bills Jackson had given me. “You’re barely an employee.” I put them in Scotty’s greedy hands. “So, how many of the Senator’s goons do you know?”
The Brit grinned. “All of ‘em.”
“Good. Do you trust them?”
He shook his head. “Not a single sod.”
“Perfect.” I nodded. “Let’s go.”
I hustled him out the door, and Sienna quickly followed. She gawked at me.
“Miss Castalano,” she whispered. “This guy is low down. Do you really trust him?”
“Nope…” I looked at her. “But I’m learning to trust me. For the first time. When your gut tells you something, you go with it. My gut led me back to Jackson. And it’s my gut that’s going to save him. Besides…”
I shut her shitty studio door behind us.
“You heard what he said. The senator’s thugs are sods… and it takes one to know one.”
***
Seven years.
It took seven years for a missing person to be declared dead in the United States.
Before seven years… anyone who wanted you declared legally dead had to offer evidence that you were not alive. But after you’d been missing seven years, anyone who wanted you declared alive had to offer evidence—evidence that you were not dead.
But maybe I had been for all these years. No one had reported me, but for the last seven years—hell, more than that—I don’t think I could have considered any piece of me truly alive.
It’d be easier if a coroner had pronounced it.
And no, my body hadn’t died—it was too stubborn for that—but it sure as hell wasn’t alive.
At least… not until Jackson.
Not until he came. Not until he made me come and I came around, learning to love again, feel alive again, trust again.
Trust was such a funny thing.
In business, we learned to compromise without trust. In romance, we trusted without compromise.
But one was empty without the other.
They were as essential to each other as air and breathing. And for so long I hadn’t been breathing.
I wanted to breathe again—to exhale.
And it was a very good chance that Jackson and I would never get that chance, if the woman who was framing Jackson and plotting to murder the senator had her way.
You didn’t stop one evil by bolstering another.
Luckily, it didn’t take us seven years to make it to New York Presbyterian. But seventy long minutes later, through traffic, past my nerves and around the corner from doubt, we walked into the Manhattan hospital.
I had an uncanny feeling that not all of us would be walking out.
We hit the button on the first floor for the elevator.
Our mission? Find the wife.
Put her cold-blooded ass on ice in a jail cell where she belonged instead of Jackson.
Still receiving treatment for minor injuries, the murdering Mrs. Fletcher was still hospitalized, admitted as an in-patient on a ward one floor below her husband’s.
It took us more than half an hour to locate the senator’s whereabouts, but you couldn’t miss his two beefy men in suits. They paced the length of the grey and white fifth floor hall with jaws more square than the tiles on the shiny linoleum floor.
One man dawdled on the far end of the hall, his head hung as he studied the tips of his shoes with unnatural fascination. The other stood “post” outside of a closed door, his expression serious, his stance even more so.
I didn’t recognize the man down the end of the hall, but I did recognize this one. With a face only a mother could love, his enlarged and oddly bent nose was as oily as his slickened hair.
He had minor scrapes and scratches along his hairline and neck. A recently-stitched cut pierced the skin below his widow’s peak, and a bruise, dark and purple, had deepened below his prominent jaw.
His face was full, softly curved around his cheekbones. I disliked every single thing about that face.
I rather enjoyed watching Jackson punch it.
I knew what I wanted to do the second I saw him. Mr. Greasy Face from the bar.
I leaned into towards Scotty and Sienna.
“You,” I looked at Sienna. “Take the guard who’d rather be anywhere but here.”
Sienna peered down the passage, looking at the guard that couldn’t keep his tired eyes off the floor.
“And what am I supposed to do with him?” she asked, her thick brown eyebrows rising sky-high.
“You’re a smart girl, Si. A pretty girl. Make sure his attention is on anything but this damned door.” I gave her a pointed look.
With her loose auburn curls framing her face, Sienna nodded. She sauntered in the direction of the bored suit. I thought about the way she attacked Jeff/Giovanni/Whats-his-fucking-face and smiled.
My
girl could take care of herself.
I turned to Scotty, a wild card. His eyes were softer than I’d ever seen them. He looked at me.
Would he betray me, though? Us? Would he run back into the senator’s clutches, if given the chance—the very man who had abandoned him, or would he stand on the right side of justice?
The side of justice that we were trying to show him?
I decided to send him to the safer bet. I motioned towards the elevator doors.
“Scotty?”
“Yep?” he responded.
“Find his wife. She’s in here somewhere. Bedridden, but alive. Too alive. I hear she’s a bit shaken up from the opera meelee. A few broken bones. But bones heal quickly. She’ll be up and at ‘em in no time at all. We need to keep an eye on her.”
“Sure.”
I glared at him. “And you’re that eye.”
He nodded gravely.
“At least until we can get her to make a mistake—‘fess up,” I added. “But first I need to check on the senator’s condition. His death could mean Jackson’s. If he dies, we will never free Jackson. We’ll never get him back, and I can’t afford to…”
Lose him again. I wouldn’t say it to Scotty. I wouldn’t let him know the extent to which my heart was on the line… riding along on the tightrope on which the senator’s health walked.
I changed my train of thought. “I can’t afford to let the senator just walk either. Critical condition or not…”
Scotty nodded. With a tip of an imaginary hat, he headed back to the elevators. His head hung, he held back a response to my request—I could feel it. But I didn’t press him.
Maybe I should have…
The elevator shaft’s door closed on him quickly, and before it disappeared, I could see the slightest dent of a smile form on his face.
But my attention was too far gone—too focused on Mr. Greasy Face to double back. The shiny-suit, shiny-nosed miscreant was heading towards the opposite end of the hall.
Headed right for the restrooms.
I had a tiny window of opportunity. One that was getting smaller by the second.
My only thought was WWJD.
“What would Jackson do?”
I couldn’t believe it.
I’d probably spent these past fifteen years trying to avoid playing by Jackson Neverson Reed’s rules. And today I was making one of his calls, ripping a page or two or ten out of his wayward playbook.
But when life changed the rules, when it threw curveballs and called trick plays and audibles, you could give in, hang up your cleats, leave the story unfinished and never pick it back up.
Or you could rewrite the storyline.
I was rewriting mine.
Chapter one of the never-ending saga…
Trust my man. Trust the process. Trust myself.
I followed the fleshy-faced man as he strolled down the hall. One eye on him, another searching for spontaneous inspiration, I find my chance. I dip inside the closest room I find, wrapping my fingers around my makeshift weapon.
Mister Fuck-Was-He-Ugly rounded a dimly lit corner… with me on his tail. It was a short distance now to the restroom door.
I seized my chance.
My hands fiercely gripping the neck of the white ceramic vase I’d stolen, I struck with great force, broadsiding him and smashing it against the side of his face—flowers, petals and all. Water went flying all over the place and down went Mister Ugly-Fucker, along with the remnants of some poor hospital patient’s Get-Well orchids scattering in tatters across the floor.
The sound was brief, muffled among the normal hospital noise that rumbled down the passageways.
We weren’t very far from the bathroom door.
With strength I didn’t know I had, I dragged the man I’d just knocked unconscious the few feet to the swinging restroom door. Pulling him inside, letting his shiny suit slide along the linoleum, I pulled out the cuffs.
The old faithfuls.
The ones Jackson had used to cuff me two months ago. The ones we used to cuff Scotty last night. The ones I was going to use to restrain ole Greasehead.
I slung his oily ass into the last stall of the restroom, slapping one restraint to his fatty wrist and another to the chrome-colored handlebar in the handicapped booth.
With a click and a groan, Greasy Head was hooked. And I was off the hook.
The senator’s room was unattended now. Or so I was hoping it’d be.
When I went back into the hallway, the ambiance outside of the restrooms had barely stirred. The hustle and bustle of the long white passageways were as normal, except two very stoic men in suits were conspicuously absent.
I had taken care of one.
I surmised that Sienna had taken care of the other. But what “taken care of” actually meant… I shuddered to think. She nearly took Jeff’s head off the last time she thought she was “taking care” of something.
I smiled at the violently fond memory.
The smile slid off my face when I realized what I was faced with…
A face-to-face with Senator Fraudulent himself.
I wasn’t ready.
But I made myself put one foot in front of the other. In what was one of the longest walks of my life, I traversed the length of the long hall, putting myself in front of his now deserted doorway.
I turned the handle… and marched to his bedside as if preparing to face a firing squad.
In all actuality… it was a very real possibility that I could be.
It had all seemed too easy.
I almost convinced myself that I was being prepared for some sort of set-up… until I stood at the foot of his bed—all alone—looking down at Robert Fletcher.
New York’s twisted “Henry of Troy”…
The face that had launched a thousand bullets.
He was a large son-of-a-bitch, muscular for his fifty-four years of age. Even unconscious, he was intimidating, his countenance no softer now, as he was fighting for his life, than when he was ending other people’s.
The structure of his face was no less severe. His dark brows sat low on his face, and the salt and pepper in his thick hair did little to make the hulking man in front of me seem any more distinguished.
He was in a medically induced coma—too stubborn to slip into one on his own, of course, and, still, the sleeping man in front of me was more beast than beauty.
He was no easier to behold, no sight for sore eyes. His critical condition was not becoming of him.
I hated him… and yet I was saving him… to save Jackson. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me, and I couldn’t help but get the feeling that God and the Devil were somewhere joining together against me—laughing.
Nothing in my rulebook had ever prepared me for this.
A natural disaster in human form, the man in front of me was the very definition of a plague. He had caused more strife in the lives of people I loved than any epidemic ever could.
He was a parasite, a poison.
The people around him, anyone who had ever touched him, died a slow death, rotting from the inside out, being corrupted to the core by his awful influence, his damning embrace—his toxicity.
Everything he touched turned to ashes… and, being the demon that he was, he simply reveled in the flames.
I knew I could end it all. End him.
Asleep, comatose in this hospital bed, he was more vulnerable than he’d ever been. Mobsters, CEO’s, criminals and politicians of the world alike hadn’t been as close to him as I was right at this second.
I stood over him, letting the feeling of absolute power over this powerful man wash over me.
I was the angel of death… or life, and the previously snickering deities of heaven and hell were sitting patiently on my shoulders, waiting…
Waiting for me to make a move.
I held my breath, waiting, too. And time stood still.
It wrapped me in silence, blanketing my world in one long abated breath… until
there was no noise, no sounds.
Just me. Me… and him. Him and me.
I looked at Robert Fletcher. The fraud. The father. The force that couldn’t be reckoned with.
And then, I breathed.
Everything I’d thought I wanted, I realized wasn’t what I wanted at all. I took one last glance at him and then…
I took one slow step. I stepped back and tossed the pillow I’d been holding in my hands into a chair beside his bed, and I kept stepping away until my feet finally carried me to the door. I exited his room, heading out to find Sienna, feeling lucky that in the face of all this overwhelming challenges, I was finding myself.
Damn. I liked this version of me.
Sadly, the revelation from my self-discovery was short-lived.
The second I left the senator’s door, chaos slammed into me like a surging tsunami.
A nurse bumped into me. Then another flashed by.
The rumblings of realization were hitting the hospital staff, one-by-one, and as I watched them, as some piece of news—some secret—spread from ear-to-ear, I tried to follow what was going on, listening intently as each staffer whispered to one another, arousing their interests.
They were all riled up.
But what was riling them, I had no clue. My feet reacted and followed before my head could stop them. Intrigue pulled me to the stairs and down them where I immediately trailed a nervous nurse who was scurrying from her post.
I trailed her to the fourth floor below.
And the situation grew even worse.
The employees were scrambling. A merging of animated gossip was making the hallway hum, and as I squeezed myself between the hisses and whispers, I caught wind of what was actually happening.
The revelation made my heart drop and come alive, all at once.
I couldn’t believe my ears.
“His wife,” they murmured. “She’s unresponsive.”
A small crowd was starting to form. Bystanders were starting to notice, and the doorway to Danity Fletcher’s room was flooded with on-lookers who were shushed and shoved away as doctors rushed in.
I stared on, mouth ajar.
Hushed rumors stretched from the busy room to my ears within minutes, and as the surrounding hospital goers swarmed in for a peek, I stepped slowly away.
Up in Smoke (Kisses and Crimes Book 2) Page 20