Page 92 of The Bad Wedding Date

“I wish I had. Now they know it’s me who sent Matteo into hiding for all these years. Me who sent the threats, the warnings—all the shit that’s made him become a paranoid fool and stripped him of his public image. It’ll be me they come after. I used my real fucking name out there.”

“Let him come. We’re ready for this. Look at us,” Dean said. He gestured around the room to all five men standing within it. “We’re not some group of dickheads brought together to feel tough and walk around with walkie talkies, Fraser. We’ve been doing this for years. We’re all in this for a cause—for the purpose of getting scumbags like him who did what they did to our mothers, sisters, cousins, aunties, and friends off the streets and red carpets for good.” His face grew serious, a scowl forming when he pointed right at me. “And you’re at the helm of the boat, man. You. We’re gonna let some punk with a chef’s hat and a truckload of money scare us off? That’s not how we operate.”

I ground my teeth together, staring at him, knowing he was right.

“We’ve nothing to lose here. He has everything,” Dean added. “Remember that.”

If he’d have made that statement a week ago, I’d have been able to agree, but now we did have something to lose. Or rather, I did.

“Charlotte knows some things,” I said quietly, resting a hand on the table while my other found my hip.

Wade and Ray’s expressions remained the same, while Dean and Joey looked at me with wide eyes and raised brows.

I waved them off before they could start. “Don’t bother with the lecture. It is what it is.”

“What does she know?” Wade asked.

“That Vega isn’t safe. That I tried to kill him.”

“She’s a lucky, lucky lady to have you in her life,” Dean said, making me cut him another look that told him to shut the fuck up before I shut him up.

“Was she spooked?” Joey asked.

“Not as much as she should have been.”

“She’s a surprise, that’s for sure.”

“That’s one word for her.”

Dean’s smirk grew, and I rolled my eyes at him before I stood tall and copied Wade’s pose—arms folded over my chest, feet apart. No one said anything for a short while, a feeling of suffocation and being lost taking over. The only thing I had running through my mind—after years of thinking of nothing else but how to torture Matteo—was the way Charlotte looked when I drove into her. The way she looked when she first awoke to a new day. The way she looked when falling asleep in my arms. The way her eyes and smile widened a little more every time she saw me outside of her work, waiting. It was hard to think of anything elsebuther, and if it hadn’t been for the way Ray lowered his hands to the table and looked up at me, both judging and assessing, I would have kept Charlotte in the forefront of my mind a little longer.

I stared into Ray’s eyes, seeing the destructive mercenary sitting beneath a layer of calm he made look natural, but I knew was hard for him to conjure.

He wanted revenge as much as I did. For my mother. For his mother.

For all the mothers and sisters out there.

“What do you think, Ray?” I asked, not missing the way the other men in the room looked at one another slyly in surprise, knowing I never asked for Ray’s opinion. I only ever gave him instructions, the way he liked it to be.

“Me?” His voice was gruff, unused as much as the rest of ours, never having much need to say anything. I gave him a nod, and he held my gaze, a slow smiling curling the edges of his lips before he spoke. “I say we lure these fuckers out of hiding.”

“And how do you propose we do that?”

With a tilt of a head and a raise of a brow, he told me his plan.

* * *

I sat outside Charlotte’s apartment, looking up at the dim light of her living room, trying not to get too uptight about the fact that she hadn’t closed her curtains. Her shadow danced against the wall as she moved around, and I clenched my fists around the steering wheel of my Aston Martin, wishing she’d block me out for her own safety. My selfish need to see her again be damned.

After a few minutes, she appeared at the window, not looking down or around as she pulled the curtains, a small scowl creasing her brow.

I wondered what she had running through her mind as she cut the world off, and I instantly swallowed down the guilt I felt at having been so weird with her earlier, but I’d had to break away, if only for a minute, an hour, a night.

Things were getting far too intense inside my own head.

Charlotte had taken over my life for the last seven days. Nothing outside of the four walls where she laid in bed waiting for me to climb under the sheets and devour her had held my attention. I’d even started to ignore Wade’s texts until I’d been in the bathroom and heard my phone beep.

Wade: We can’t stall any longer. We need to move, and we need to move fast. Otherwise, you know where he’s going next now that he’s seen your face. She’s in danger. Call me.

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