by Syn, Crimson
I nodded. “So when you get the call…”
“Then it’s all over for Joseph Montgomery.”
A tear escaped down my face, and he leans forward to wipe it away. “I’m sorry baby, I’m so damn insensitive.”
“No,” I shook my head and wiped away the rest of the tears that streamed down my cheeks. “He brought this on himself, for only thinking of himself. You know, I used to want to follow in his footsteps. I had my whole life planned out around how I could make him see that I had value. That I could be useful to him.”
“Baby…”
I held my fingers up to his lips to stop him from saying the obvious. “I know. I know what you’re going to say, and you’re right. My accomplishments are my own, and he can’t take that away from me. He can never take that away from me.”
He gripped my hand tightly, pressing it against his cheek. “You are the most valuable thing in my life, Sabrina Montgomery. I love every second I have spent with you since the moment that we met. And I promise you that not him, nor anyone, will ever tear me away from you.”
His eyes met mine and I knew what he wanted to say. I smiled at him and gently pressed my palm against his cheek. The muscle at his throat bobbed up and down and I knew he was fighting back tears, so I said what he so desperately was trying to say.
“I love you,” I whispered it. The look in his eyes gaining intensity. “I know you love me. I can feel it.” Deep emotion flowed through me as I placed a hand on my chest.
He kissed the palm of my cheek and sighed. “We’ll get through this. You and I, together.”
“I hope so, because I don’t really remember what it means to not have you in my life.”
17
Lucian
I received the call from Drake an hour later, they’d managed to get into the offices, and everything was set in place. There was only one little thing left to do.
“Did you check the back room?”
“We’re on it. Stay on the line, Max is working the lock.”
Joseph Montgomery was upstairs with Sabrina. She had wanted to be alone with him, to talk to him maybe for the last time. I hesitated, but she’d told me if something happened she’d alert the nurses. I made sure security was placed near her door, and she called it was because she might be in potential danger. I was manning the doors downstairs, making sure I knew when Montgomery walked out. I waited patiently for Drake to speak, to tell me what was going on. I heard Max’s voice first.
“Fuck!”
“That does not sound good,” I whispered and held my breath.
“Yeah, not good. There’s an entry into an office, a complete set up back here. Old blueprints and a laptop.”
“A laptop?”
“Yeah, hold on, I’m trying to access it.”
After a minute or so I heard him exhale. “Everything is firewalled it’s going to take me hours.”
“So, what do we do?”
In that moment I spotted Joseph Montgomery come out of the elevators. “Fuck! He’s walking out.”
Drake’s voice was quiet, but he sounded sure of his task at hand. “I’m going to copy the hard drive, it’s all I can do right now, and we only have a few minutes to get the fuck out of here. I’ll call you back.”
I made my way back up to Sabrina’s room and just as I was about to enter it, the phone rang. “What is it?”
“Meet us back at Ravenhead.” Drake literally got on my nerves sometimes. No explanation, no letting me know they got out safe, just a short command that grated on my nerves. Before I could even say anything, he had already hung up.
Stepping inside the room, I found her standing by the window. She was holding her hands around her and I could see her shoulders trembling. I wrapped my arms around and she turned, sobbing into my chest. I held her for a long while, not rushing her. Anything they uncovered would be waiting for me when I arrived.
* * *
Two hours later I was sitting in my office in Ravenhead looking at surveillance feed that Drake had gotten from both of the Manhattan offices. Sure enough, Joseph Montgomery had returned for the evening. But he’d snuck into the back office and was currently going through his files.
Drake hadn’t copied the hard drive. He’d rigged the system instead, and now we had remote access to view what Joseph Montgomery was viewing and believe me, it wasn’t pretty. Drake was currently monitoring and recording a conversation he was having in a chat room. They were bidding on weaponry. Questions on the new military grade weapons that needed to be built were coming through. They all seemed interested in the weapons, and the money sign kept going up.
“That’s why he wants in to your private offices. He wants access to the blueprints, to sell them on the fucking darknet!” I slammed my hand on the desk as we continued to watch the live feed.
Drake grabbed his phone and called Adam. “We got this fucker. We’ve got live feed right now of his computer, I’m recording as we speak.”
He placed Adam on speaker. “Send me what you got, and I’ll present it to my superiors. You guys really shouldn’t have done that.”
“He’s on my private property. Actually, it’s Sabrina’s property.” Both men stared at me in surprise. “She has every right to place cameras wherever she sees fit.”
“I’m talking about placing remote network access on his personal laptop.”
“Eh-eh,” Maxwell pointed at the screen. “If I’m not mistaken that’s a Ravenhead logo on that laptop. Meaning it’s property of the Ravenhead Corporation.”
Drake shook his head in shock. “We got him! Fucker used our own fucking devices.”
“This is ridiculous,” I felt defeated. All of this was happening under my very nose, with the one man my father trusted to run the corporation. I always knew there was something off about Joseph Montgomery. He had never been the type of man to take ownership of his faults, he considered himself superior to everyone and that had been his downfall in the end.
* * *
The next day I got word from Adam that Joseph Montgomery had been apprehended in his home up in the mountains. They had caught him by surprise, and he had no time to hide anything he’d been working on. Apparently, he’d taken over where Luminary had failed. He was the one to blame for everything. He had even made contact with the Russian mafia, the same mafia that had sent Victoria on a run a few months back.
It was all connected, the hackers, the threats on Drake and Cassandra, Maxwell’s threats, the Bratva coming to knock on our doors. The obsession with the old property, he wanted it, needed it to construct these weapons in secret. It all came together in one afternoon. I couldn’t believe that I trusted him, that the board would trust him.
He’d confessed to half of what he’d done, blaming my father, and blaming me in the end. But what ate at me, was that for months we’d constructed weaponry that had been exported to the wrong locations. Extra numbers, unnecessarily demanded, that had never arrived at our military bases and now were strewn all over the deserts of the middle east, and possibly China. It ate at me that Ravenhead’s symbol would be found on those weapons, and I felt like I had failed the Steele name in so many ways.
A few weeks later, I was seated in the living room when Sabrina walked in. I didn’t even notice her as I sat in the dark, contemplating the events that had transpired. They were now investigating several of the executives that had worked for Ravenhead for so many years. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“Baby, come back to bed, it’s late.”
“I can’t sleep.”
She ran her fingers through my hair, and I leaned my head against her breasts. She was still healing from the wound that had penetrated her pretty flesh. Opening up her silk robe, I traced my fingertips above the scar, her tummy dipping slightly.
I pressed a kiss to her plump breast and leaned my cheek on it. “Why are you so pretty?”
She laughed softly. “You need to sleep. You’re starting to see things.”
“I see a beaut
iful woman needing to be satisfied.”
She gasped as I dipped my hand inside the seam of her silk panties, sliding my finger along her velvet lips while sucking on her tit.
“You need to stop that,” she pulled away and closed her robe back. I groaned in frustration. Grabbing at the silk belt that tied her together, I tugged her back toward me and wrapped my arms around her, instantly finding solace in her embrace.
“It’s not your fault, Lucian. You can’t continue like this, you’re going to get yourself sick.”
“It is my fault. I should have seen this coming. How could I have been so blind?”
“My father was a treacherous man. He fooled his own daughter, remember?”
I hugged her tightly, feeling her shudder. “But it’s not your fault. Don’t ever think that. And you are not a bad man, nor did you fail anyone.”
“He had everyone against me. Every. Single. Executive.”
“Then they were stupid, or they were easily deceived.”
She cupped my cheeks and stared down at me. “You are the most amazing man I’ve ever met. And my opinion is all that matters,” she smiled teasingly.
“Joseph wants to see me.” I blurted out, taking her by surprise.
“What?” She took a step back from me took a long look at me. “And you’re going to go?”
“I need to go.”
“Why?”
“I need to know why he did it.”
“Because he’s selfish and cruel.”
“Sabrina,” my tone told her there was no fighting this.
I was going to go talk with Joseph Montgomery and see what he had to say to me. There was no out to this. This was something I needed to face on my own.
* * *
I was guided into a room where small metal stools aligned the floor. Booths with thick bullet proof glass were set up wall to wall. The room was empty, and I sat down in a corner booth and waited. A few minutes later I heard the buzzard and Joseph Montgomery walked through. His bright orange jumper opened at the chest to reveal a white t-shirt and he was handcuffed at both wrists and ankles.
He sat down in front of me and stared at me for a long moment. His eyes narrowed on me right before he lifted the head piece. It took me a moment to collect myself, and then I did the same.
We sat there in silence for a minute or two and then finally I broke the silence.
“What is it that you asked me here for, Joseph?”
He smirked. “You’ve always been a smug bastard.”
“If you asked me here to insult me…”
“You stole what was rightfully mine!”
I stared back at him. “What the hell are you talking about, Montgomery?”
“First Ravenhead now my daughter.”
“Listen to me, you crazy maniac, you fucking tried to kill your daughter. You’re lucky I didn’t put a bullet in your head before you got to rot in this hell hole. But maybe this is a much better punishment for someone as vile and criminal as you.” My blood ran cold as I spoke to him.
“Ravenhead was never yours, nor was it ever going to be. Instead of being on my side, you decided to take it upon yourself and fuck your life up. Don’t you dare blame me for your faults!”
I felt my blood boil as he seethed at me over the phone. “I will never stop until you are ruined.”
“Too late,” I smirked. “Ravenhead is gone. Catchfire…poof!” I opened my hand next to me, gesturing an explosion. “And everyone attached to you is probably now running and trying to hide from the FBI.”
“They’ll come after you. There’s many men out there that hate you.”
“They’ll never find anything. I burned it all. It’s done.”
“What?” He looked completely taken aback and confused.
“It’s gone, Montgomery. I shut it down.”
“You had no right!”
“You’re right. I needed one other person to approve it. The only other person who had any rights to Ravenhead.”
He gave me a blank stare as he assimilated what I had just told him. His eyes met mine as he realized what I was saying. “Who?”
“Your daughter.” I watched his expression change to that of shock.
“Turns out she owned twenty-five percent of Ravenhead. And guess what?”
“I can’t believe it,” he murmured as I continued to tell him.
“She signed everything to me. And now Ravenhead is no more.”
“Stupid, son of a….”
He banged on the glass with the head piece and the officer standing on guard started moving towards him. Before he grabbed him, I told him one last thing.
“Remember Montgomery, the devil’s always in the details.”
He was shouting obscenities, or what I could make of them as they dragged him out. Straightening my jacket, I felt satisfied. He would never get what he wanted, because it didn’t exist anymore. Sabrina and I had both decided on that. Instead we were in the process of selling and to be honest it was the best decision I ever made.
As I stepped out into the sunlight, the prison that I had been burdened with for the last ten years was finally gone. In its place stood sunshine, freedom, and a woman that I loved more than life itself.
Epilogue
Three Years Later…
The wedding had been intimate, just a few close friends including Drake and Maxwell. After we closed down and sold the property, I knew I didn’t want to have anything to do with that type of Corporation again. That was my father’s dream, never my own. I had huge biddings on it from the military and a few of the government agencies, but I just didn’t trust anyone. So, I shredded the documents, the blueprints, burnt hard drives, and got rid any type of malicious evidence. I sold everything else I had to the U.S. military and then I said goodbye to Ravenhead.
After selling, I took the money and invested into stocks and a few up and coming companies. I also bought a couple vineyards, one which was located in the heart of the Mediterranean. Drake decided to finally retire and enjoy life with his young wife, and we both went ahead and did some investments which in turn gave us both very large profits.
Maxwell took Victoria and flew to England where he was offered a job with a major contract company. Victoria was thrilled to be back home and from the last I heard, she was working for that same company as a computer engineer.
Adam, well, I can’t really tell you much about him. After he placed the cuffs on Joseph Montgomery, Catchfire went down quick. He was able to take down a few massive clients that had been feeding off Montgomery and from what I heard he’d had a huge success. But then he disappeared. Even Drake couldn’t find him. He’s been missing since then and the worst part about it is we don’t know if he’s alive. We try not to think about it anymore, but it irks us, all of us. We only hope that if he was in trouble, he’d reach out.
But here I was, on a balcony in Greece, taking in the blue of the Mediterranean Sea. I’d gotten us a honeymoon suite in Santorini, and I had to admit it was probably one of the most beautiful I’d ever been to. I mean, there was a pool that went down a long inner corridor and out to this amazing balcony where the sun was setting. We were currently standing to the side of it, my new wife was looking stunning in a white silk dress that wrapped around her gorgeous curves. We’d gotten married only hours before, and I couldn’t wait to get her to myself. I couldn’t seem to keep my hands off her.
“Lucian,” Sabrina gasped as she swatted at me. I couldn’t help but chuckle as I dragged my fingers up her bare thighs, the wind catching onto her soft skirt, lifting it slightly and giving me glimpses of white silky panties.
“Would you stop, people will see us,” she hissed, and I whirled her around, slamming her up against the white cement balustrade, holding her against me, her ass squirming against my hard cock.
“Are you ashamed that they’d know what a dirty slut you are for your husband?”
“No,” she whimpered as my hands found that slit in her dress and slid against the soft pant
ies that covered her delectable mound.
“No? Is that so?” I played along the edges of the material, tracing her lips gently, barely touching her.
“Lucian,” she breathed, her hands gripping the cement, her knuckles whitening as she fought for control.
“Always resisting, always fighting me. You know I’m going to win.” I bit her earlobe loving her shudder. “I always win.”
She whirled on me then, tugging me into her by the lapels of my jacket. Her lips slammed against mine, her tongue seeking mine in a hungry tasting that made my cock roar to life. She knew just what I liked, and she also knew that her submittal was necessary at the end. But I’d let her have her way today.
Just for a moment.
She tore at my shirt, her nails dragging down my chest and scratching at my abs. I sucked in a breath as they grazed my hard cock. She smiled against my lips, nibbling on my bottom lip. Fuck, she knew how to kiss. I grabbed the nape of her neck and pulled her into me, her hand now stroking my cock through my pants, her lips mine to do with as I pleased.
She was a sexy little tease. Her dominating ways turned me on, and the fact that she gave me all her submittal made me hard and left me craving for more. I swept my tongue along hers, stroking her, and she moaned for me. I teased her, slowly feeling how she relinquished control to me. I loved how she tried, her frustration only making her wetter and more vulnerable.
“What were you planning on doing, Princess? Did you actually think that would work?”
“You drive me crazy,” she breathed against my lips, slipping my cock out of my pants. I grunted as she squeezed the tip.
“Isn’t that the point. To make you desperate and needy, like my good little slut.”
I tugged on her hair, tipping her head back and I could see the muscles of her throat working as she swallowed. Groaning, I licked her, my tongue dragging along that sensitive area, dipping along the hollow of her throat and running against the outline of her jawline, nipping at her chin.