Page 90 of Claimed By the Villain
Because there’s no doubt left now that that’s what he wants: revenge.
A hired gun doing this for money wouldn’t have bothered to forge images of me in some fake relationship with another woman and a child. Whoever sent that woman after Jackie didn’t just want to take her; they wanted her to hate me. And now I need to know why.
I look at my mentor, sitting in a leather armchair in my office at Hazard in New York.
I’ve already taken over the clubs with Roman, but legally speaking, we’re just Beau’s contractors, since we still can’t justify the acquisition of the chain to the IRS.
This is the third time Beau has come to New York this month alone so we could talk about this fucked-up game of cat and mouse.
What my enemy may not realize is that I’ll never be the prey.
“We have to find a way to think like him,” Beau says.
“I’ve been doing nothing else, but there’s no fucking starting point. Jackie’s getting impatient, too. She’s not my prisoner. She’s my wife. She accepts all the restrictions of our life, but there are situations I can’t stop her from taking part in, like the birth of William and Taylor’s daughter, for example.”
“The redhead friend?”
“Yeah.”
“Send an army to escort her.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing every time she leaves the house.”
I bought a residence on the outskirts of Connecticut. No ocean, but it’s lakeside. I’m also negotiating for an island.
Still, I know I could drop treasure chests at her feet and it wouldn’t be enough. Jackie wants to live too, and having a sword constantly hanging over our heads runs counter to that idea.
“We need to figure out his motivation.”
“Revenge.”
“Yeah, we know that. But revenge for what?”
I shrug. “Once I became an adult, almost all my jobs were contracts,” I say, recalling the only exception, and he nods, knowing exactly what I mean.
“And as a child?”
“I hurt some adults, but the only one I killed was the fucking jailer of the pedophiles who kidnapped me.”
“I don’t think it’s about that,” Beau says. “Too long for someone to wait for payback.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ll keep my eyes open and pray I don’t go insane in the process, because not knowing why he’s coming after me is driving me mad.”
Chapter 48
“Your daughter is the most beautiful child in the world,” I say, wiping my eyes, overwhelmed, as I watch my friend nursing her baby girl in the hospital bed.
After months of only talking on the phone, we both cried in each other’s arms for several minutes.
Taylor knows almost everything about my life now. I told her about the wedding and even about the supposed deadline we had agreed upon at the time, which is now out of the question. I just left out the part about the man who wants to kill Lucifer, because I know she’d panic.
Betina’s birth feels like the crowning glory of Taylor’s happiness, finally erasing the painful past she endured. Not only the kidnapping she suffered, the time she lost during that period, but also everything she had to overcome after losing both her parents.
They say like attracts like, and maybe it’s true, because both my friend and I long to build our own families. It’s probably a result of what we went through in childhood.
Today was one of the rare moments I left home for a social event. Since we came back from the Caribbean, I’ve been inside a prison made of golden bars.
A prison where the jailer is the love of my life, but still, a prison.
