Page 27 of Desperate Vows

I was probably riding into a trap.

All I could think was tallyho.

Chapter Eleven

CLAIRE

I was exhausted, happy, and strangely at peace. Some of it was attributed to the fact that my father wouldn’t be here until this weekend. Maybe his plane would blow up. It was horrible to think that way. I didn’t want to be like him, but he’d hurt me and my mom so many times. He’d been even more wretched to her. If I knew he’d take the trust fund and leave me alone, I’d sign it over to him in a heartbeat.

He would never leave me alone.

When I’d overheard him talking, there was no mistaking the word liability. I didn’t know why he’d thought that of me, but it didn’t matter. In his mind, whatever he did was justified.

I finished toweling off after a quick shower and dropped the damp towel over the end of my bed. When I’d returned home after having dinner with Thea, I’d felt windblown and dirty. Just as I slipped on my pajama shorts, it sounded like the door opened and then closed. I figured Remy had ordered pizza or something.

Remy wasn’t so bad. He was nice enough to me. It didn’t change the fact that I felt like a prisoner in my own house.

I grabbed my hairbrush and began pulling it through my hair. The length was a bear, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut it, not when I’d lost it twice because my father went into a rage. After about thirty minutes, it was tangle-free, and I curled up on my bed with my phone.

There was a breaking news notification, and I tapped it. The vigilantes had hit a warehouse, and police had released a statement about a group of little girls of varying ages huddled together. There was a picture someone had taken. It was a little grainy, but I knew what I saw. Dimitris Kalantzis stood in the crowd as a stretcher with a little girl was loaded into an ambulance. I let it go, thinking maybe he was just in the area.

Reading on, the reporter who was covering the vigilantes mentioned that crime had steadily gone down in the last three years. Now that I thought about it, he was right. That was about the time my father began mentioning his warehouses and loss of business.

I looked at the picture again and remembered another article I saw when I’d started researching Lucas. One of the reasons I’d picked him was the fact that they didn’t deal in skin. None. Drugs, gambling, guns, yes, but that was it. They had in the past, but they’d gotten out of it… three years ago.

A forgotten detail surfaced as I revisited the picture. Back when I first hatched my plan, I stumbled upon a documentary about the mafia—it’d included Lucas’s family. It was mostly speculation and guesses, but when they’d noted a fine print update, it’d mentioned their move away from the skin trade.

Interestingly enough, that was about three years ago.

Around the time Giana and his dad died.

Puzzle pieces clicked into place, and I gasped.

Lucas’s family were vigilantes, and I was marrying the boss.

I laughed at myself. There was no way I was right. I was reading into things using little more than a theory derived from what most would call a fantastical reenactment of mafia life disguised as a fact in a documentary.

The doorbell chimed twice in quick succession and then again. I grumbled as I set my phone down and got out of bed. Grabbing my robe from where it hung on the bedpost, I slipped it on and began tying it as I walked out of my room. I stopped at the top of the stairs and scanned the open first floor. “Remy?”

I descended the steps, and the doorbell chimed again. Good grief! Someone was impatient. It was a big house. Give me a second.

I paused and wondered if maybe it was a bad idea to answer the door. The thought was stupid. I’d never had anything happen that would make me think someone was here to hurt me.

Most of the time, it was a delivery driver who had found themselves lost and turned around. GPS was great until you were sent to Street instead of Place or Avenue.

When I reached the door, I looked through the peephole. “A balloon?”

Who? Lucas. Had he sent me a gift? I opened the door and realized my mistake almost immediately. Before I could slam the door, a boulder of a man shoved his way in, sending me flying to the ground.

“Grab her,” a man shouted. “We don’t got long.”

Before I could shake the fuzziness from my head, the thick-necked man who barreled through the door yanked me off the floor, nearly dislocating my shoulder.

“What’s going on?” I asked. I must have been in shock, because to my ears, I sounded calm, but I was shaking.

His lips curled up. “You was promised to someone. They’ve paid us to deliver. Now, be a good little girl, or we’ll have to do a little scratching and denting.”

“Pr-pr-promised to who?”

---