They were like a swarm, their damn cameras and microphones in my face. Daniel had to actually push more than a few of them as he made way for us to get out.
“Noah, is this just an act to help your father escape?” I paused right before the door and turned to him, his microphone pushed closer to my mouth. I grabbed it out of his hands and pulled him out from the crowd right into my fist. His whole head turned, and they all backed up, allowing his fucking body to fall on to the ground.
“Go ahead and sue me, you fucking piece of shit,” I told him before getting into the car and slamming the door behind me. I punched the seat in front of me. “Fucking shit! Goddamn fucking damn it!”
Exhaling through my mouth, I pulled out my phone. It was stupid. It was useless. But I still had to try. I called her phone.
“The number you have reached is…”
Amelia. Please. Please, be okay.
Biting my fist, I gripped the phone, for the first time hoping that either Frank or Bo would call. Whatever they wanted, they could have … I just needed her.
Amelia
“Wakey wakey,” someone slapped my cheek.
“Urgh…” I groaned, my whole body feeling like an open wound. “I’m gonna be sick.”
“You’re going to be worse than that in a few hours.” Another low deep voice said to the right of me.
My eyelids felt heavy, but I finally managed to open my eyes. I was staring straight at Bo, a toothpick in his mouth. My arms were chained to a pipe behind me.
“Welcome back, princess,” he said calmly, reaching up as if to touch me. He reached past my head for a cup of water with a bendy straw. “Drink.”
Keeping my lips shut, I only glared at him.
“I can see why your brother likes her.”
In the corner of the room of what looked to be some sort of old factory was the son of a bitch himself, peeling an apple with a knife in hand and sliding slivers of it into his mouth. His nose was broken and had dried blood around it, and he hadn’t shaved. Even from the distance between us, I could tell he reeked of booze. In a way, he didn’t look human anymore. However, his eyes—they were the same blue-green as Noah’s, and I found comfort in that.
“You need to drink,” Bo said, pushing the cup in front of me.
“You make me sick,” I flinched. Talking burned.
“I know, but you gotta live long enough for my brother to save you, right?” He smiled like we were old friends and like he hadn’t just kidnapped me.
“If the bitch don’t wanna drink—”
“I brought her here!” Bo hollered at him. “I brought her here to save your no-good ass, not so she will die, okay? She’s Noah’s girl—”
“And the little bitch still can’t protect her after all this time.”
“Kind of like you can’t make an honest living,” I snickered, looking up at him.
“What is that—?”
“I got it, Frank!” Bo said, stepping in front of me. “She’s beat up as it is. You do anything, she accidently dies. Then you got nothing. Screw anyone else. Noah will lose it. You want to get outta here, just wait.”
Frank glared down at me. “You shouldn’t go around walking with your head up so high, princess. You are covered in mud just like us. You’re a killer, a thug, a piece of filth just like us. Only difference is no one knows it.”
“Fuck you.”
Bo turned back around, grabbing my face. “You need to listen to me, because I’m trying save your life. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. This will be over soon, okay? So can you do that, Ms. London? Can you shut up and stay alive, please?”
Again, he lifted the cup for me. This time I drank. It stung and brought relief at the same time.
“Now, what’s Noah’s number?” he questioned, putting the cup down beside me.
“What?”
“Noah’s number. I’ve only got Austin’s.”
He couldn’t be serious. He was so proud to call Noah his brother, yet he didn’t even have something so simple as a cell phone number.
I wanted to laugh, but my head hurt too badly.
“Oh no you don’t. Wake up.” He lifted my head up. “The number.”
The vision of him blurred, and everything became dark again.
Idiots. Him, Frank, me, all of us.
Noah
Being closer to the hospital, we got there a few minutes before the ambulance. I didn’t care. I ran straight up to Austin, side-by-side with the doctors rushing out.
“Austin! Austin!” I yelled as they brought him down.
“Sir—”
“N…N…o…ah,” he said. One side of him was blackened and bloody with burns, the smell of his skin was so horrid I flinched. However, when he reached out to me with his other hand, covered with cuts, blood, and small burns, I didn’t back away from him. His eyes were wide and red with pain. He was in agony.
“N..eck…lace….neck….lace.”
“Necklace?”
He nodded the best he could.
“We need to get him inside!” The doctor yelled at me, but Austin just held on.
“A…m…eli…a…ne…ck.la…ce—”
“He’s out. Page the OR!” One of them yelled, pushing me aside. “We gotta go.”
It was painful, his hand ripping from mine like that, but seeing it drop, lifelessly, was even worse.
“Sir? We need to get inside before the press makes its way here,” Daniel said beside me.
Amelia’s necklace?
She always wore this butterfly necklace whenever she went out. Her mother had given it to her. But what the hell did that have to do with anything? Esther had only given it to her so she could—
“Of course.”
“Sir?”
“Keys,” I demanded.
“What?”
“Give me the keys!” I yelled and he threw them at me. “Stay here.”
I wasn’t just going to get her back. Bo and Frank were going fucking pay dearly, even if I had to make a pact with the devil himself.
Chapter Ten
Noah
Pulling to a stop in front of the restaurant, I saw them sitting at the window, casually talking to each other as my world was going up in flames.
“Can we help you?” Two men stepped in my path, flexing their muscles as if that was enough to get me to move.
“I’ve got an appointment—”
“No one disturbs Mr. and Mrs. Callahan while they’re at lunch. No one,” he said sternly, like a brick wall I was more than ready to blow up.
“I’ma say this once. Let me in or you’re going to wish you had when they find out the reason the police got Frank Sloan was because you didn’t have the balls to disturb them,” I replied.
They glanced at each other, and the man before me nodded at the guy behind him, who took his sweet old time dialing on his phone.
I glanced at my watch and then the map I had on the screen of my phone.
Fuck this shit. I thought, running between them.
“Hey!”
“Liam!” I yelled, only getting a few steps into the empty restaurant when two of their men grabbed me.
He casually looked over to me, his green eyes annoyed as drank his brandy.
“Let him go,” the woman across from him said so softly I wasn’t sure how they heard her. But they did and released me, allowing me to get closer to them.
“If you knew how hard it is to get my wife on a date, you would not be in front of me right now,” Liam snapped, cutting into his steak.
“Mr. Sloan, it’s a pleasure. Please, grab a chair and sit,” she said, ignoring him completely and focusing on me.
“These are the coordinates to find Frank—”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” she said, reaching for her wine. “Grab a chair, Mr. Sloan, and sit.”
Inhaling, I reached over to the empty table beside her grabbed a damn chair and sat it down right between them.