She planned to let Rhea know first, and grabbing a pencil, she opened her copy of Wuthering Heights and started looking for words or letters to convey her message.
She shut the book nervously when her mother strode into her bedroom, remarked about the dark circles under Alexandria’s eyes, and informed her that she had booked them a day at the spa and shopping for baby clothes afterward.
She knew her mother, and unless she were dead, Crystal Swan would make her daughter do exactly what she wanted because nothing she did was not for the duty to the family name collectively.
Throughout the day, Alexandria really looked at her mother and found not an ounce of love inside her. It should have made her sadder, but she cheered herself up by being extra excited about picking out baby clothes for a baby that was never going to be theirs.
“It’s Swan House’s time again, Alexandria. The drought of our financial problems will be over with the birth of this child. Riches will fall from the sky for us again. You’ve done your family proud.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Alexandria said cheekily, relishing the shocked look on her mother’s face at being addressed as Mom. It was always Mother. In fact, if it had not been frowned upon, she would have preferred her daughters call her Crystal. She never forgave Rhea for the obscene stretch marks she had felt on her body.
If ever Alexandria had a child, that child would be so loved and cherished, and they would know it every single moment of the day. But somehow, she knew that happy ending was not in her future. The evils of her family would follow her everywhere.
Whatever guilt she had nurtured about leaving her parents disappeared.
All that remained heavy in her heart now was Cara. She had to give her back to her brothers. It was the right thing to do. The only thing to do. And once she and Rhea got immunity from The Console, maybe they could visit Cara. But would her brothers let her anywhere near a Swan again?
Chapter Ten
Cian could still feel her pussy on his cock, penetrating her virgin tightness and forcing her to open up for him, the same way she would have to do for Slade and Lachlan.
In the dead of their cells, where they’d been shoved into after she was taken away, he could tell Slade and Lachlan were thinking and feeling the same thing.
There was no denying that the Swan House princess was the epitome of beauty, with her dark, expressive golden eyes fringed with thick, lush eyelashes, her full and plump lips, her jaw slender and feminine, and her throat perfect for any one of the three of them to wrap their hands around and squeeze until she was no longer breathing.
She was one of them. Their number one enemy. She’d sat on their laps and wrapped her cunt around their cocks, and they had been forced to come inside her.
The fact that this whole thing had been in the making for close to fifteen years staggered him. They grew up in a trailer park, most nights going to bed hungry if they weren’t able to steal food from the nearest town. They didn’t know where they came from. All that mattered was where they were going. And fuck, they got there fast.
The richest men in the world. The most powerful. The most feared opponent. No one in their right frame of mind wanted to make an enemy out of them. Then, one day, a strange man with dead eyes insisted on seeing them in their sky-scrapped office.
The man dressed in a white robe, wearing a chain with a swan pendant, his hair slicked back with oil, and his breath sour, and they had given him the time of day only because he mentioned one name.
Cara.
They were eleven years old when they found her. She was wrapped in a thin blanket in the middle of winter under a tree near the river that ran through the trailer park they called home.
She had only been a year old, too cold to even cry. A note had been attached to her blanket, and they all three remembered each word.
Take her. I don’t want her anymore. Her name is Cara.
That note had ripped them apart, right down to their souls. They knew what it was like to feel unwanted by the people who birthed them. From that day on, they vowed to take care of her with everything they had.
Cara became their world. She had everything a baby could need. She never went to bed hungry or cried because she was sad or lonely. The food she ate, the best of everything, the clothes she wore, and the cot in which she slept were all stolen. They’d been so motivated to take care of her they’d upped their skills exponentially.
They had big plans to take over the world, and Cara, their sister, would have that world at her feet. They loved with their hearts and souls, and she loved them right back. No one in the trailer park cared that three eleven-year-olds were bringing up a baby by themselves. No one wanted to get involved, so they turned the other way, and that suited them fine. If anyone touched Cara, they would die.
But then they decided she needed a maternal presence in her life, something to balance the scales, and no one had been as good, honest, and generous as Lady Lydia. They were a family.
Until the day Lady Lydia’s mobile home exploded, with both Lady Lydia and Cara still inside. They’d been eighteen years old, and Cara had just been eight-faulty wiring. If Cara had been living in a house, she might still have been alive. Buying a house had been something they were working toward. For Cara. Their little sister, whose mother threw her away because she could, just like their parents had done to them.
Their whole world was destroyed in one go. They lost their humanity that day. They became cold and strategic, mopping up money as they went and dominating the world just because they could.
Then the man in the robe and the weird swan pendant showed them live footage of a girl who looked very much like Cara, but when they saw her unusual birthmark, they knew without a doubt it was their sister. She was alive.
She’d been taken from them.
Slade had been the nearest to the man, and within lightning seconds, he’d held the man against the wall, squeezing at his throat to tell them where Cara was.