by Amy Love
“When really you were the one doing that,” Gryff muttered. “Killing innocent guys just to—”
“Oh, no one in that little club of yours is innocent.” Phillip scoffed. “Don’t make me laugh, Mr. Reeves.”
“Wasn’t trying to.” He tried to wriggle his hands free somewhat, only to fail, feeling like the tape just got tighter each time he tried. “Now what the fuck did you do to the dean? He’s a powerful man who—”
Phillip snorted. “I’d hardly call him powerful.” His beady little eyes darted to Gryff, as if waiting for more in the silence that followed, then added, “Darryl Truman is alive…” He then paused for dramatic effect. “Barely.”
“And what about Beth?” While he cared about Darryl’s condition because it would affect Beth, he worried more about her than him. “Is she hurt?” When Phillip only smiled at him, his temper broke, and he shouted, “Tell me, you bastard!”
Chuckling, Phillip strolled toward him and crouched down so that they were at eye level, then shook his head and made a tsk’ing sound.
“If you were so concerned about her safety, Mr. Reeves,” the man mused, the pity in his voice grating, “perhaps you should have brought all the drugs I asked for…”
Chapter 38
Beth Truman had never been on campus this late before. Sure, technically she lived on campus, but she had never been out and about at almost five in the morning, and never with weather this bad.
When she was younger, she’d never been one of those bar girls or clubbers who went out with all of her dorm friends to enjoy Blackwoods’s downtown, then stumble home in the wee hours of the morning high on laughter and a little sick with alcohol and fast food churning in her gut. Beth had been disciplined. High school was her time to fool around because she’d actually had a really good group of friends to fool around with. But college was different. Law school was different. Everyone was hyper-competitive for jobs and grades and internships, and she just never really felt that draw to anyone.
Well, no, that was a lie. The strongest connection she felt, the greatest pull of her life, was to a man she knew she couldn’t be with anymore. Gryff was determined to throw her father under the bus, and even if she had fallen for him, she knew her father deserved more from her than to hop onboard with Gryff’s ludicrous theories that her father, Dean Darryl Truman, was secretly running a drug operation and murdering bikers in his spare time. It simply didn’t make sense. Beth wasn’t naïve to her father’s true nature. He was strict, always had been, but he’d raised her on his own and pushed her to succeed.
Even if her idea of success wasn’t the same as his. Law school, while she was finally doing well at it again, just wasn’t for her. But the guilt of not finishing was just so great that Beth didn’t see any other option for her future. Her father had forced her to study, to achieve, and to excel on her own merit. He was her driving force. And he was innocent—she knew it from the very depth of her soul.
She’d already gathered evidence to show Gryff that he had it all wrong, that her father couldn’t have possibly been the one to commit the murders. Unfortunately, Gryff had poked holes in every piece she’d dug up. He’d challenged her, but not in a cruel way. At the time, of course, it had felt cruel, as if he didn’t value any of the time or effort she put into her sleuthing, but now that she’d had some distance from that night, she realized that he had a point. If she’d presented her hold evidence to a judge and jury, the opposing lawyer would have shredded her defense in seconds.
So she needed something better. Without demeaning her or threatening her or belittling her, Gryff had made her realize that she needed to step up her game if she wanted to prove her father’s innocence, and tonight, that was exactly what she’d done.
Very seldom did Beth actually take advantage of the fact that she was the dean’s daughter. In fact, if she could help it, Beth tried to hide her last name as much as she could, to avoid any external bias from classmates and professors. But with the security office that housed videotapes and recordings of almost every inch of the Blackwoods University campus, Beth flaunted her status as someone of importance—only to gain access to materials that were off-limits.
They’d put up a fuss at first, as they should have. After all, Beth was after videos of her father, and no one in their right mind, especially if they were privy to his wrongdoings, would just hand over evidence like that. But Beth had talked her way in somehow, and before long she was going over footage from all the nights her father was under suspicion for…all the nights Steel Phoenix members were murdered.
And after hours of watching footage, lining up where her father had said he had meetings from his personal journals and where he’d actually been, Beth had come to the conclusion that he wasn’t involved. Or, at the very least, it would have been very difficult to tie him to any of the murders given his various—recorded—alibis. What would come next would be looking at the university’s financial movements, but given the time, Beth opted to tackle that another day. In just a few short hours she was supposed to have class, but as she trudged out of the admin building, she decided that she was going to sleep until noon, then skip class to continue on with her investigation.
Time was of the essence, after all.
With her hood up and coat wrapped snuggly around her, Beth braved the elements as best she could, teeth chattering as she navigated her way back through campus. On a Saturday night, there were bound to still be people around, but seeing as it was the middle of the week in the middle of a storm, the grounds were dead. Dead and dark. Normally familiar sights sent a chill down her spine, statues of famous alums seeming warped and grotesque in the shadows.
She wanted to go home, shed this wet outer layer, and curl up under her quilts and blankets. Warm up. Sleep the day away. Forget for a little while that all of this horror was going on around her. But just as Beth was headed for the path that would take her to her dorm, she stopped. Something had caught her eye. Something not quite right.
There was a light on in her father’s office. Now, it wasn’t unusual that he worked late, but this was very late, even for him. If he’d fallen asleep at his desk, she figured she ought to wake him and send him home—or, at the very least, move him to the couch so he wouldn’t deal with back and shoulder problems when he woke in a few hours. Nibbling her lower lip, she paused for a moment, rain pummeling her, leaking through her clothing and trickling down her neck. What if it… wasn’t her father in the office?
His secretary would never leave the lights on before she left for the night. The cleaning crew wouldn’t either—or so she assumed. It was just recently that Beth had broken into the usually off-limits office of the dean, so was it really such a leap that someone else might have done the same?
What if it was Gryff?
Or someone worse?
She swallowed hard, and without another thought took off at an easy pace toward the building. It was still open, and she hurried to the upper floors as quietly and carefully as she could, trying her best to keep her pace steady. The light had been on. She swore it had. She saw it through the office windows. If it was suddenly off by the time she arrived, Beth would know something was wrong. Down the hall from the dean’s reception doorway, she paused and dug out her phone, then punched in 911 without pressing the call button. If someone was rifling through her father’s things, and that someone wasn’t Gryff, she planned to have the proper authorities there in moments.
The lights were off in the reception area, but just standing in the doorway she could see the lights on in her father’s office through the outline of his closed door. Nearby windows illuminated the pristine reception desk, the recently vacuumed carpet, the dust-free seating area. Her father’s secretary had clearly been in to tidy up and arrange things before she left. That must have been hours ago.
Gripping her phone tightly, Beth pressed onward. Each step was purposeful, deliberate, her breath held and released so painfully slow if only to keep any noises she made to a minimum.
Even her feet pressing into the thick, new carpet seemed too loud for all the silence around her, and she could feel her heartbeat in her ears, throbbing steadily and rapidly.
Before pushing the door open, Beth waited, listening for any sounds in her father’s office. She was used to the noises he made, given it had just been him and her in a house together for a long time, but nothing familiar hit her as she stood there. She should have been exhausted, but something about the moment kept her wired, kept her functional. Swallowing hard, she pressed her hand to the door, palm flat and fingers spread, and it was then she noticed a slight quake in her wrist.
The doorknob squeaked when she turned it, and the door itself creaked like some ungodly terror as she gently, gently, pushed it open. Her heart was just about ready to come flying out of her mouth—she half-expected to find some thug rooting around her father’s things, and she was ready to flee the second she saw a stranger.
But she didn’t see a stranger. Not even close.
She saw her father.
Only in the condition she found him in, he certainly looked like a stranger. Familiar yet not. It was the man who had raised her, but right then and there, he looked nothing like Darryl Truman to her.
“Oh my god!” she cried, rushing into the room and practically falling over herself to get to his desk. “Oh my god…”
Tears obscured her vision, as she tried to take in the carnage, a trembling hand coming to rest on her father’s shoulder. He was coated in blood, and given the extent of the injuries to his face, she assumed it all belonged to him. Someone had beat the holy hell out of him; there was no other way to describe it. Dried and crusted blood gathered around his nostrils. Both bottom and top lips were split. Bruising had already started to take place around his eyes, and blood dribbled down from his hairline and into his eyebrows.
For a moment, Beth was too stunned to react. How does one react to seeing a parent so badly brutalized? The parent is supposed to put the bandage on the child. When you fell and skinned your knee, your parent fixed you up.
How was she supposed to fix this?
“Dad?” she whispered, voice quivering. Fat tears rolled down her cheeks, and she forced herself to look away for a moment, taking in the state of his office. His desk was a mess. Blood splattered the computer screen. His journals were gone.
A raspy breath, loud yet weak, brought her back to him, and Beth crouched over him when he whispered her name. At least he was conscious, but she couldn’t imagine the horrible agony he must have been in. His face had been bludgeoned, obviously, but what else was broken and beaten?
“Dad, t-try n-not to move,” she stammered, a hand on his shoulder as she unlocked her phone. Where was she supposed to touch? Was anything broken? “I-I’m going to call for help.”
“What are you doing here, Elizabeth?” her father murmured. A hand suddenly settled atop hers, and her eyes widened to see the knuckles so bloodied and damaged. He’d fought, at least. Her father, always the fighter. “Y-You should be s-sleeping… What time is it?”
“Try not to talk too much,” Beth urged. In that moment, she knew she had to be the calm one, the rational one. Right then and there, Beth knew she needed to be the parent, the one who cleaned up the mess. “I’m going to get us some help so we can get you cleaned up, okay?”
“Elizabeth, you should go. They might come back.”
She ignored him—and the fear his statement brought that clawed up her throat like an unwanted scream—and dialed for the emergency services. The second the responder answered, she cleared her throat and said, “Yes, I need the police and an ambulance to Blackwoods University. There’s been an attack in the dean’s office…”
Chapter 39
Gryff had been in darkness so long that he’d lost track of the time. After Phillip Crest and his squad of meandering goons hinted at Beth’s dire situation, they’d left him to stew in his guilt and in his anger. With no windows anywhere around the warehouse, darkness had been his only companion, and he’d lost track of just how long he’d been tied to that fucking chair.
All he knew was that he needed to piss, but he wasn’t going to give any of those fuckers the satisfaction of wetting himself. When the pain became too much, he forced his mind elsewhere, somewhere far away and comfortable so that he wouldn’t focus on the agony in his bladder, the fracture in his nose, and the throbbing ache pounding slowly and constantly across his face. Forgetting it all was the best he could do. It was the only thing he could do.
Forget and picture Beth’s face, though imaging her face reminded him that that scumbag had his hands on her in one way or another, and then the cycle of guilt and rage started up all over again.
He’d lost the feeling in his hands. They might not have been tied up and over his head, but the tape had cut off his circulation a little while ago, and every time he moved his fingers, that pins-and-needles feeling skittered through each digit. Another thing to try and forget.
When the door eventually cracked open and let in a beam of sunlight so blinding that it physically hurt him, Gryff did his best to seem unfazed. He doubled over, eyes pressed shut, then straightened up as soon as the door swung shut. Bright spots danced across his vision as he blinked rapidly, squaring his shoulders and readying himself for battle.
Moments later, the bright white lights overhead flickered to life, bringing with them an incessant buzzing sound that irritated his ears. He’d grown accustomed to the silence. It hadn’t been a comfort, but it had let him focus on what he needed to—on forgetting. Now, his brain was swirling out of control, gaze jumping from place to place around the warehouse, until it eventually settled on Phillip Crest.
The man was wearing something different than he’d been the last time they talked. A polo shirt and khakis with an off-white jacket hung over his arm. If Gryff hadn’t known any better, he would have thought that asshole was on his way to play a very stimulating round of golf with other academic types.
Maybe he was.
“And how are we feeling, Mr. Reeves?” Phillip asked as he approached, once again stopping just out of reach of Gryff’s long legs. As if he would try to kick him. What good would that do? They’d left his ankles loose to fuck with him. If he wanted to, he could have gotten up and tried to run. But it would have been a fruitless endeavor—a waste of fucking time. His hands were bound so tightly that he couldn’t even wiggle his arms away from the chair. He would have been running with a fucking chair attached to his body.
Like he’d get very far before someone saw him, someone who probably worked for the asshole grinning at him with a perfect set of bright white teeth.
“Doing just swell,” Gryff insisted, his voice even, conversational. “Got a good night’s sleep for once since, you know, it’s dark as Hell in here. Really. Thank you. I’ve never felt better.”
“Really? Because you look like you’ve been hit by a train.”
“Probably because one of your guys clocked me in the face, remember?” Gryff cocked his head to the side, smirking. “Or did you forget you had them do that? Jump me when all I’d done was follow directions.”
“Ah, but you didn’t follow directions, did you?” Phillip said lightly, raising a finger at Gryff to stop the impending rant. “I asked for a specific amount of cocaine, and you only delivered half, all the while knowing that I had the power to hurt the woman you love.”
“I don’t love her,” he snapped, but the words tasted false, even on his tongue. The way Phillip grinned at him made his hands curl to fists, the pins and needles fighting back full-force. Licking his lips, Gryff simply looked away, knowing this was a fight he couldn’t win. “Is she okay?”
“I’m not at liberty to say, unfortunately,” Phillip told him, “but I can assure you she will be okay when you make good on your promise and deliver the other half of the drugs you owe me.”
“I don’t owe you shit, Crest.”
“I’m afraid you do,” Phillip mused, “if you want her to survive the day, you’ll
deliver the rest to me in a timely manner with no further delays.”
He bit the insides of his cheeks to keep from snapping. The rational side of his brain knew exactly what Phillip was doing. The guy was goading him, pushing and pushing at Gryff’s triggers until he finally snapped. It was obvious by now that Beth and her safety was the only thing that mattered to him. It would have been better if Phillip knew nothing about her, but it was too late for that now. He knew, and he’d use it against Gryff without hesitation.
Gryff just needed to be stronger. He had to be tough. He had to survive this and save her.
“If I go back in today and get the rest of the coke, the guys will know something is up,” Gryff reasoned with a slight shake of his head. “People saw me get it last night. They know I’m not the guy who does the runs. It’ll look suspicious. Maybe I’ll be tailed—”
“Oh, Mr. Reeves,” Phillip said, chuckling. He then let out an unnecessarily dramatic sigh. “You really are a disappointment. Given your reputation, I thought you’d be better than this.”