Page 37 of Her Billionaire Hero
“It’s hard to lay blame on anyone but myself.” Her answer seemed purposely evasive to me.
“But did he kill you? Did he take your life?”
“In the end, none of that matters. What I want you to remember about me is that I did love you. I was proud of you, too. I was the one who lost out, honey. I lost out on so much with you, and for that, I am terribly sorry. Learn from my downfall. Don’t repeat my mistakes. I was looking for a hero to take care of me, someone to make me feel like my life was complete. It didn’t make it that way at all. My decisions took away so much from all of us. Please forgive me, Sloan.”
“I forgive you, Mom. I truly do. I will learn from your mistakes. I’m in danger right now and so is Dad. Is there any way that you can help us now?” I knew I was reaching for something unreachable. Even in my state, I knew my mother wasn’t really there—not in the flesh.
She began moving backward into the darkness. “This is your life, Sloan. These are your decisions to make, not mine. Fate is in charge. But you have the power to influence fate. Only you can save yourself with your decisions. I love you. I always have and I always will.”
My eyes sprang open as she disappeared, and I felt the hard, wooden floor under me. Lying on my back, I inhaled, and a material of some kind sucked into my mouth, making me cough and gag.
It all came flooding back to me. Preston had put something like a bag over my head and there was something on the material that had knocked me out.
Now that I was awake, I couldn’t hear a thing.
Did he leave me in the attic alone?
When I tried to move my arms, I found he’d bound them, and he’d done the same with my feet. I was stuck. Wiggling, I tried to get free, but it was made harder because every breath I took caused the material to pull into my mouth. So, I closed my mouth and breathed through my nose. I recalled what my mother had said in the dream about making the right decisions to stay alive.
As I wiggled around, I was able to get the bag off my head. Looking around, I saw that there was one small round window at the top of one wall. Dust hung in the air as a few rays of light came in the window.
Looking around the attic, I saw the chair my father had been in was empty. There were some things on the floor around the chair, so I wiggled over to find out what was left behind.
The first thing I noticed was an empty syringe.He injected Dad with something!
A loud sob came out of me as I began to cry. “He killed him. He killed my father.”
Crying took so much out of me that I couldn’t move as I sobbed, feeling hopeless, desperate, and clueless as to how to stay alive myself. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to stay alive. My parents were both dead and I was sure Preston meant to torture me before eventually killing me. He’d gone completely insane.
Closing my eyes, I felt as if I might just stop breathing. My chest and head hurt badly. Whatever he had used to knock me out must’ve been the cause of the pain in my chest, and I remembered that he’d hit me in the back of the head, knocking me down before he put the bag over my head. I’d never been in so much pain or felt such anguish. It was all way too much to take.
But as I lay there, almost wishing for death to come for me, a face began to loom in front of me.Baldwyn.
He loved me and I loved him. I couldn’t give up when there was so much ahead for me. Our love was new, but it was deep and getting deeper all the time. I saw a real future with him. And I thought he probably felt the same way about me.
His eyes lit up whenever he saw me. That had to mean something. How could I let go when there was something so special waiting for me?
My heart ached for how Baldwyn must’ve felt when he found me missing. I knew how it felt to worry about a loved one who you couldn’t find. Mom’s disappearance had left me shaking and crying for weeks on end. I just kept praying that one day she’d walk through the front door and tell us that she was home and wasn’t leaving again.
But that had never happened. And my dream finally made me believe that she really was dead.She had made unbelievably bad decisions. But that didn’t mean she deserved to die—to be murdered and then cut into pieces in order to hide what was left of her. Preston was to blame for all that. And now he was to blame for my father’s death too.
It made no sense to me how Preston thought killing my father would get him off the hook for my mother’s murder. It was as if nothing was working correctly in his brain. I really did think that he’d had a stroke that had rewired his brain in a way that had left him psychotic.
But then again, he’d killed Mom, so he had a strain of psychosis all along that I’d either missed or straight up ignored. Preston never slept much—maybe three hours at a time. I had thought that odd, but when I’d asked him about it, he told me that he just didn’t require that much sleep. His mind was always going, thinking about new ideas and ways to make money.
Who was I to think anything was wrong with him for not sleeping much?
He also had to have certain things certain ways. Like his sandwiches. White bread, toasted to medium tan, mustard on the top piece, mayonnaise on the bottom—a layer of meat on the bottom followed by a piece of cheddar, then one leaf of lettuce, a slice of ripe tomato, and one dill pickle slice right in the middle. If he ordered one when we went out, he’d send it back if it came out any other way.
So many things popped into my head about the man being a bit off. And I wanted to kick myself for not noticing that those things were signs of him having a real problem. But I’d never thought much about it.
When I did ask him why things had to be certain ways, he’d say that if things weren’t done the way he needed them done, then chaos would ensue. I had no idea what that meant and even assumed it was sort of a joke.
Preston had little to no sense of humor, so any joke he made wouldn’t be easily recognizable as an attempt at humor anyway. It made me mad at myself for falling for him in the first place.
I wasn’t sure how that had happened. When Dad brought him home that first time, I hadn’t thought a thing in the world about the man. I did notice how he looked at me though. I should’ve found it creepy.
Perhaps there was something wrong withmybrain. Losing my mother had done some damage to me. I felt so much pain in the beginning, and as it ebbed, only numbness was left in its place. Maybe it was because of the emptiness inside of me that I had let Preston in so easily. Whatever it was, I hadn’t done it consciously.
