Capital Risk

by Lana Grayson

  He claimed the child was his.

  Harming Sarah was crime enough. Taking my son? He would die for even considering it. He would die for the pain he inflicted, the nightmares he caused, and the life he attempted to ruin. The brutal, disgusting words he spoke of Sarah would be his last opportunity to insult her.

  A Bennett’s greatest suffering was not the final beat of a heart, but the world forgetting his name.

  My father would not be remembered. The tyranny he cast over my family would end, and Sarah and my son would share a life with me free of that pain.

  If she would have me.

  Sarah curled in her seat, staring out the window as the plane ascended and stole her from the comforts of her family, her home, her land. I permitted her silence. The few words we whispered during the night revealed far more than any momentary confession or pressured conversation would offer.

  She knew I wanted her. That I loved her. That I loved the baby.

  And she did too. Her hand curled over her tummy as she rested.

  “How’s Bumper?”

  The nickname grew on me. She smirked. Sprout and her Bumper Crop. Entirely too cute for a Bennett boy, especially as it took years before I accepted the shortening of my name to Nick. But our family traditions and conventions could change. They would change.

  “He’s okay,” she said.

  I didn’t want okay. I wanted great, fantastic, healthy. Once we rid the world of my father, Sarah would only need to worry about the sheer amount of toys, clothing, and baby equipment I planned to buy for our child.

  She’d only have to consider loving me once more. Accepting my offer of family.

  Staying with me. Always.

  The plane landed, and Sarah fell asleep in the limo on the way home. She wasn’t comfortable, but the confrontation overwhelmed her. I expected it.

  I feared it.

  My father’s insults were meant for me. He cared little about Sarah’s reaction, only that she continued to carry the child he considered more asset than family. But she bore his words with equal indignation and endured his torment with Atwood impetuousness, not Bennett patience.

  She needed no other reason to act out in violence. She simply waited for the opportunity.

  And we’d all suffer as a result.

  We returned to my penthouse. My brothers greeted Sarah the only way they knew. Reed offered her a bottle of water. Max, a seat and blanket. Neither could speak to her about the horrors she faced at my father’s hand. Still, they tried to help. I appreciated it.

  “What happened?” Reed asked. “Everything okay?”

  “Mom’s fine.” Sarah’s words tightened in frustration. “I need to rest. I have a headache.”

  I waited until the door to the bedroom closed before casting off my jacket and stealing the whiskey from Max’s hands. Noon was too early for either of us to drink. At least I had stopped at some point during the night. Hungover, sober, or drunk, Max’s eyes remained bloodshot. I could only imagine the condition of his liver.

  “What the fuck happened?” Max grunted.

  “Bethany wasn’t alone.”

  “Dad?” Reed guessed.

  “Waiting for us,” I said. “Bethany’s memory is ruined, and the dementia is getting worse. He threatened her with her medications.”

  “Why?”

  I gritted my teeth. “Because he expected Sarah to rush to her mother without me.”

  Max crossed his arms. “And then?”

  “He’s convinced the child is his.” I took a seat. Reed perched on the side of the sofa, but Max preferred to pace. “He’s planning to take Sarah and steal the baby.”

  “And if he succeeds?”

  It would never happen. “Either he’ll kill Sarah…or he’ll keep her to make another child.”

  “Fuck me,” Reed whispered. “Does Sarah know?”

  “He made his intentions clear.”

  “What do we do?”

  Max answered for me. “Just what we’re doing. Stick to the plan. We kill the son of a bitch.”

  “No.” I lowered my voice. “I kill him.”

  Reed frowned. “Like it fucking matters who points the gun.”

  “It does to me.”

  “We all want a shot at him—”

  I didn’t need to interrupt him. My gaze silenced Reed. “I will do it.”

  Max understood, which meant he would forever challenge my decisions. He glanced over his shoulder, ensuring the door shut tightly behind Sarah.

  “No, you mean she won’t do it.”

  I nodded.

  “You aren’t even going to tell her what you’re planning?”

  “No.”

  Reed waved his hands, grabbing another baby book from the stack he kept on the coffee table.

  “That’s it. I’m out. Unless you want her aiming for us too, you better let Sarah Atwood in on this plan.”

  “If I can spare her the trauma, I will.”

  “It’s not about trauma,” Max said. “You want the kill shot because Dad hurt her. Fuck, I want to do it too.”

  “It’s not about the rape.” The word soured on my tongue. I resolved never to say it again.

  Max never knew when to drop a subject. “Then what is it? Sarah’s been through enough trauma. This shit would be fucking therapeutic for her.”

  “Sarah is pregnant, and not by choice. She’s scared, she’s exhausted, and the asthma and stress will only make her weaker.” I pointed to Reed’s books. “What do those chapters say about a healthy pregnancy? I guarantee there’s no talk about assaults, beatings, and corporate takeovers between the benefits of cloth or disposable diapers.”

  “And you don’t think she’d take pleasure in murdering that asshole?” Max voiced the obvious. “She’s a goddamned Atwood. They’re raised from birth to want to draw our blood.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “She sacrificed her body when she believed we killed her father. She expected to be hurt and beaten and humiliated, and she accepted it for the chance to avenge her family. And now? The real crime has been done to her. She’s the one who was hurt.”

  Reed rubbed the rawness around his neck. “So…what? Sarah’s always been a little…intense.”

  “It’s not intensity,” I said. “It’s obsession.”

  “You would know best.”

  I stiffened. “Yes. And that’s exactly why I’m doing this. Why it has to be me. Why we need to do this on our own. I understand her, more than she realizes. I don’t want her to suffer as a result of taking a human life.”

  Max grunted. “He’s hardly human.”

  “I won’t let her regret in ten, twenty, thirty years the revenge she wants now.”

  “She deserves that revenge.”

  “And she’ll have it, even if it comes from my hand.”

  “Nick, you can’t decide that for her.” Max’s jaw tightened. “You’re killing a man. It’s done. It’s happening. But don’t take that choice from her.”

  “I’m protecting her.”

  “You’re robbing her of the chance to end things on her terms. You’d steal the only choice she has in her life right now. You’d be no better than Dad.”

  Reed exhaled. I didn’t dignify it with a reaction.

  “He harmed her. I am stopping her from harming herself.”

  “You’re fucking delusional,” Max laughed.

  “And the lives you took? The crimes our father asked you to commit? Hasn’t your perspective recently shifted?”

  “Don’t fucking change the subject.”

  “What about her brothers?” I hated speaking of it when she rested in the other room. “How do you feel now that you’ve met and loved Sarah Atwood?”

  “I didn’t know it was Michael and Josiah in that fucking plane.”

  “No, but you did what he asked of you, realizing it would hurt another person. Now we face the consequences of that decision.”

  “Fuck you, Nick.” Max hissed the words. “You have no idea what that shit has put
me through.”

  “And that’s why I would spare Sarah. We don’t know what will come of it in the future.”

  The drink talked for him. “How goddamned magnanimous of you.”

  Reed cleared his throat. “Just drop it, Max.”

  Max refused. “How fucking lucky that you’re there to spare the woman you love. That you’ve taken this fucking curse upon yourself. That you’ve never had to get your goddamned hands bloody when it mattered!”

  Reed lowered his voice. “He’s trying to protect her.”

  “That doesn’t give him the right to make me the villain.” Max pointed at me. He chose a dignified finger. “You never had to decide between right or wrong, Nick. You never made the choice between spilling blood or never coming home again.”

  “I own my regretted decisions.”

  It insulted Max. “You think I liked doing Dad’s dirty work? I did those things—I murdered that poor girl’s family—because I thought it would endear me to that fucking monster. You’re right. I feel like shit. But you’re the one who gets to kill him. You’re the one who saves the girl and starts a family. Me?” he sneered. “I get to live day after fucking day, knowing Sarah would forever hate me if she knew what I did. That she’d toss my carcass in the same shallow grave where Dad would rot for eternity.”

  They were my fears too. I nodded.

  “She won’t ever know,” I said. “This is the last we speak of it.”

  “Until the next time you drag me through the fucking mud.” Max rubbed his face. It did little to sober him. “Don’t pretend you’re innocent. I proved my worth to the family, same as you. Only now, you know what it feels like to be me.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Max pointed to the scars on Reed’s cheek and the wounds over his neck. “Completely and utterly disposable. Dad’s not gonna stop if he wants Sarah’s heir. He’ll kill us and take her for himself.”

  “He won’t touch her again.”

  “You better fucking hope.” Max sunk into the sofa. “Because he thinks he’s won. He thinks it’s his son.”

  Reed shrugged, flipping through the baby book. “If it’s a boy.”

  The words stilled my heart. “It is.”

  Reed’s grin turned cold. “Don’t tell me you’re that goddamned arrogant, Nick.”

  “Arrogant about what.”

  “That the baby is a boy.”

  Son of a bitch. I intended to end the conversation, but Reed spoke anyway.

  “Every time Sarah says he or son, it’s more a prayer than a certainty,” he said. “Only you and Dad are convinced she’s having a boy.” His eyes had hardened over the months, seeing far more than I gave him credit for observing. “And we better hope to Christ it is. Dad’s a bastard, and he’d rape her again without question, but he doesn’t have the patience for another pregnancy. If your baby is a girl…” His fingers crinkled the cover of the book. “They’re both in danger.”

  Silence.

  Not that I hadn’t considered it, but the thought terrified me.

  My son or my daughter, it didn’t matter.

  I didn’t want an heir. I wanted a family. I wanted her, happy and smiling and proud to carry my child. I’d save her from further bloodshed just for a chance at that perfect-ever-after.

  I paused, pulling my phone and calling for her guard to meet us downstairs. Max frowned as I gave him the instructions.

  “Robert hasn’t been guarding her,” I said. “He’s following her.”

  Reed tensed, but Max expected it.

  “Dad’s probably paying for him to stay close,” I said. “Find out how much he spent.”

  Max nodded. “And then?”

  “If you want to earn Sarah’s forgiveness?” I said. “Keep her safe. Nothing will endanger her or the baby. I’ll check on her first, and then I’ll follow.”

  “What? You want to warm up with her bodyguard? Get a practice kill?”

  I didn’t need the practice anymore. The war had already begun.

  The toxicity website highlighted it’s warnings in bold, blocky letters. Pesticide poisoning was a cruel and harsh way to die.

  Headaches and cramps, nausea and shortness of breath. It read like an acute form of morning sickness coupled with the ugly weaknesses caused from my asthma.

  How fitting, punishing a man who had inflicted me with the same symptoms, the same pain, the same humiliations?

  I’d make Darius Bennett suffer, and the idea thrilled a dark part of me. Like an illness strengthening in each passing hour, the desire to hurt, to cause him pain, burrowed from the hidden fantasies. First it was simply a secret in the night. Now it burst into my waking thoughts. Visions of revenge suffocated my mind—crippling every desire, every honest joy, every moment of rest.

  Never before had I dreamt of harming another person.

  But he caused the vile thoughts. He forced me to demand blood for blood and pain for pain.

  And so I would deliver it.

  Darius threatened my mother and nearly overdosed her on the medications that kept her senses dulled and judgement clouded. He ordered his men to shoot Max, strangle Reed, and gun Nicholas down in the street like an animal. He raped me and promised either more torment or a violent death.

  He meant to take my child.

  Every minute he lived trapped me in a new agony. It ended now.

  And the irony of it—of using the Bennett Corporation’s own products to erode him from the inside out—delighted me.

  My father, a man just as cruel and barbaric as Darius, would have been proud. The first and only time he’d be honored by the daughter who sacrificed so much to avenge his name, safeguard his legacy, and protect our futures.

  He didn’t deserve my efforts.

  But I needed that peace. I needed something to dull the racing, jarring, enraged thoughts that stole every moment of rest from my exhausted and weakened body.

  I planned to murder a man.

  And no matter how many times I thought of him as a demon, a monster, an animal, I still imagined the blood on my hands.

  And it sickened me.

  And it excited me.

  And it would ruin me.

  It would finally free me from the Bennett nightmare.

  If I only could gather the courage to do it. If the implication didn’t lace me with shivers, smother me with panic, and coat me in the same filthy grime that created Darius Bennett.

  My father once said if revenge were easy, peace wouldn’t be so hard.

  I closed the website—the same specs I requested for the Bennett chemicals I used to treat my farm. The words faded, but it felt like the entire world saw through the innocence I once had. Like they knew the choice I’d made.

  I ran a bath and, for the first time in three months, actually enjoyed the bathroom without needing to cuddle on the tile with my sickness. The last days of my first trimester forged a truce between me and Bumper. I snacked on carrots and the occasional plate of mushroom lasagna, and he let me be.

  A bath usually calmed me, and Nicholas’s penthouse offered the sleekest, most modern bathroom, complete with a Jacuzzi tub, warmed floors, and selected aroma therapy candles. Dark granite and harsh angles wasn’t my preferred style, but it fit Nicholas.

  Would it fit me?

  After Darius was gone, after the baby came, after we controlled the Bennett Corporation and my farm, would I eventually think of the penthouse as a…home?

  The night with Nicholas did more than grant me confidence. It made me hope.

  I wanted him. I loved him. I needed him. But could I risk the danger? I doubted I’d survive the heartache of leaving him.

  The bath did nothing to soothe me, and thoughts of Nicholas only flushed me warmer than the water. That heat didn’t pass, even as I brushed the towel over my body.

  I glanced to the mirror.

  The towel dropped.

  I didn’t recognize the reflection.

  “That’s new.” I swallowed. My hand traced the bar
est swell of my belly. “Uh-oh.”

  I was used to the darkening of my nipples, the tenderness in my breasts, even the mood swings and fatigue. But…this was different.

  Real.

  I dressed quickly, tossing on a strappy shirt with a pair of thin shorts and snuck from the bathroom.

  My step-brothers crowded the penthouse. Five thousand square feet, and they all descended on the living room—Reed with the pregnancy books by the window, Max rummaging through the refrigerator, and Nicholas working remotely on a desk in the corner.

  I hesitated, earning their attention all at once. My cheeks burned.

  Nicholas closed the laptop. “Everything okay?”

  “Yes.” I bit my lip. “Kinda.”

  Reed tossed the book aside. He pointed to his abs, tight against his shirt. “More nausea? Round ligament pain? It’s common. Are you hurting?”

  “What? No.”

  Max pulled a bottle of water from the fridge and slammed it on the counter. “Drink it.”

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  “Sick?” Reed asked. “Tired? Are you feeling any tenderness?”

  “Reed, I’m fine.”

  That drew Nicholas’s attention. “What is it?”

  It was embarrassing. It was natural. It was everything that would continue to happen to me for the next six months. Why was it so hard to admit?

  “Bumper gave me a…bump.”

  They didn’t get it. All three lurched to their feet, each scattering in three different directions to gather my things. Reed seized my purse. Max my shoes.

  They thought I had to go to the hospital.

  Only Nicholas waited for the explanation.

  The confession.

  “I’m showing.”

  Reed and Max stilled. I squirmed as their collective gazes centered low on my belly, like they expected it to suddenly balloon up. I lifted my shirt. They didn’t react until I turned to the side. Their heads angled. Reed snorted.

  “That’s it?” he laughed. “Christ, I look like that after I eat a pizza.”

  I bit my lip as Nicholas approached. He made no such joke, didn’t shake his head like Max. His eyes narrowed in concentration, brightened with excitement, and studied the tiniest swelling with rapt attention. I stilled as his hand brushed my exposed skin. His palm covered the bump and hid the secret once more for us and us alone.