Page 80 of Knocked Up by my Best Friend's Brothers

“I want this, yes,” I say with a trembling voice. Tears prick my eyes, but they’re tears of joy, of much needed relief.

“Forget about the past, forget about everything we could’ve done differently,” Cassius says, stroking my hair. “It’s time for us to focus on what comes next. And there’s no room for any of this Mancini crap in our future.”

“I wholeheartedly agree,” I tell him.

25

Christa

That’s the last of the boxes, packed and ready to be moved into the Hawthorne mansion.

“You were supposed to be my fresh start in Portland,” I mutter to the spacious, sunny living room.

My phone pings. It’s a message from Nathan. He’ll be here in about half an hour.

Good, your sister is already on her way over to help, I text him back.

It feels nice. It’s another fresh start, I suppose. Hopefully, the next one will have a more permanent feel to it once the Mancini threat has been eradicated. I’m still thinking about what I’ll do and how I’ll do it. The legal option is for me to come forward about what happened at Perry-Sage while demanding protective custody from the FBI.

But I would need something solid to incentivize them on the matter.

Dirt on the remaining Mancinis would be a great start. I would have to hack into their offices, unless Spike can help me pull a proxy attack. I could use his systems and mirror every signal through the Hawthorne servers. It might work. It’s also insanely illegal, so that might attract the FBI’s attention in a wholly different manner.

There’s a knock on the door.

Smiling, I open it to welcome Teagan, but my whole body freezes at the sight of a man with a familiar face. I’ve seen it in photos the Hawthorne brothers showed me.

“Vince Mancini,” I gasp and immediately take a couple of steps back.

“Ah, I see you know who I am.” He chuckles but remains in the hallway, holding a pretty pink box in his hands. “I brought you this, Miss Campbell. I figured it was about time I introduced myself.”

“What are you doing here? I’m calling the cops!” I show him the phone in my hand for good measure.

But he laughs again. “And when they arrive, you can tell them all about how you hacked into the Perry-Sage databases and wiped yourself from their records. I believe that amounts to obstruction of justice, at the very least.”

“What do you want?” I snap, shaking like a leaf. My eyes keep darting around, looking for a sharp object to use. There’s nothing except for a pair of scissors on the coffee table, which are out of my reach.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” Vince says. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Why are you here then?” I ask. “The Hawthornes are on their way. If they find you here—”

“You think I’m afraid of them?” He laughs in sheer mockery. “Don’t be ridiculous, Miss Campbell. If I wanted you dead, you’d be six feet under by now. Your head would be on the steps of the Hawthorne building.”

“I left Perry-Sage. I stayed out of everybody’s way.”

He points an angry finger at me. The first crack in his mask. “You were supposed to go down with the ship. And you certainly weren’t supposed to attack my family the way you did. Some of us took it personally.”

“They got what they had coming for everything they did.”

“You didn’t mind playing along when you were making a pretty penny off your math genius; isn’t that right, Miss Campbell?”

“I didn’t know what kind of monsters I was dealing with. Not until your people shot someone in front of me simply because he wanted to leave.”

“We don’t leave loose ends.”

“I just wanted to do a good job, but not at the cost of innocent lives.”

“No one is ever completely innocent.”

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