Page 146 of Waiting For A Girl Like You
Michael looked down his nose at her, unimpressed. “I don’t give two shits about you, Jamison Fairweather. Sorry to disappoint.”
She punched him in the chest.
Hard.
And the man didn’t even flinch. “Feel better?”
“Yes! No!” She surged up on her toes to shout in his face. “Why am I here? Why did you let them take us? Why are you doing this?”
“Because I needed Fairweathers,” he said calmly, “to draw them in. Taylor is making this whole baby mission into a free-for-all. She’s calling in her friends to come and play. The psycho wants her Fairweather baby, but she wants a boy. A mini-Toby. And you guys didn’t have any boys for her to take. Well, until today when your sister gave birth.”
“What about Xavier?”
“Oh, did I forget to mention that Taylor is also a raging racist? Xavier has always been safe. I only sent Zanmi men there to get their asses shot or arrested. Just like that first night I tried to kidnap you. The men I sent after Emily were completely incompetent, and one of my guys accompanied them to ensure they were taken care of by the police. Same thing with Claudia. As soon as Smitty discovered she was pregnant, he dumped her. She could be carrying a boy, and we weren’t about to give Taylor what she wanted.”
Jamison stumbled back a step, horror curling in her stomach. “The women. At Haven House and Samuel’s house? You sent those women to—”
“Thosefertilewomen who would have been used on Damon or your brother or even your dad? Yes, I sent them. To. Their. Deaths. Eugenegave me the list of who was the most viable to carry a child, and those are the ones I sent.”
For the briefest of seconds, hope had flared inside her. For a single moment, she thought Michael might not be the monster he pretended to be.
But she was so wrong.
Those poor, misguided women had been murdered by him.
“Eugene Gilbert?” she whispered. “Toby’s friend from college who started Zanmi?”
“Eugene didn’t start Zanmi. Taylor dragged him into it. He wants the group dead as much as I do. They’re bleeding him dry with their blackmail.”
“They could have killed us.” She went to the bed and sat on its edge. “Those women wanted to kill us.”
“But they didn’t, did they? They stupidly ate the fruit I told them were decoys. They never even questioned me.”
“And Taylor didn’t know you were doing it. That’s why she sounded so surprised on the phone.”
“Yeah, that took some smoothing over. Unfortunately, I lost focus during the whole thing and allowed my ego to take control. Something in me needed Taylor to know her people were about to die, so I let your dad’s call to her go through. It was a mistake, and she almost caught on that I wasn’t completely on her side, but her narcissism won. She couldn’t fathom anyone not wanting to be dedicated to her needs.” He inhaled deeply, rubbing an eye that had begun to spasm. “In the end, it was a win. I was able to eradicate a round of future rapists and use it as a distraction to get my nephew from the feds.”
Staring at her hands folded in her lap, she replayed everything he’d just said. “Are you going to let us go before you do whatever you have planned?”
Michael crossed over to where she sat and knelt in front of her. “Grief twists people into unrecognizable things. I was already standing at the tipping point, but I completely lost my soul when I lost Cecilia.”
That strange shadow returned, merging with Michael’s on the wall. It crouched beside him as if it, too, were listening.
“That’s not a yes.” She shook her head, overwhelmed but somehow clearer in her thinking. One’s impending death did that to a person. “You’re going to let us die here.”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how fast you run.”
Chapter 34
2008
Everything.
Laura Jean.
