Page 30 of Like a Hurricane

“Sit down, princess.” I order gently, “I’ll tell you.”

Chapter Fourteen

He slides a crystal glass towards me after filling it with a bourbon he’d pulled from under the counter. The ice clinks against the sides, the amber liquid sloshing up the glass as it goes and I wrap my hand around it, bringing it in close.

He has his own which he takes a tender sip from, almost as if stalling to answer the question.

I’d cried for the past God knows how many hours, silently sobbing with my back to the door so I could hear every time Everett came to the room. I didn’t want him to hear me crying, didn’t want him to witness me falling apart right there on the bedroom floor.

The version Everett was getting of me was not going to be vulnerable. He wasn’t to see that side of me, ever.

The media casts me in an ice queen picture, daughter of one of the richest men in the US, extraordinarily successful model and brand owner but never smiled for the camera unless I was being paid for it. I was cold. Emotionless.

I was perpetually single since, according to everyone who supposedly knows me, I was too picky. I should just settle. I wasn’t getting any younger after all. What about kids? And family, and all that jazz that comes with it.

But I refused to settle. I refused to show any part of myself to the world who only looked at me as a woman to carry on a name that was not mine, to be pretty and quiet. Don’t mistake this bitterness as being ungrateful for what I have and what I have accomplished, but just because I liked what I did, and what I had, did not mean I had to sit down and take the piles of shit thrown at me.

Vulnerability was earned and there were only a few people in my life who had worked to prove I could be that version of myself with them. And Everett had only proved he could not be trusted, and he certainly didn’t deserve anything other than the ice queen the world knows me to be.

I let him have one part of me, had believed him to be something he was not and that’s on me. I let my guard down, gave him my body and now I’m here, in the middle of the woods, somewhere I don’t know with my father murdered, my life likely over and no idea what the hell is happening outside of these four walls.

“Talk, Everett,” I tap my nails against the side of the glass impatiently.

“Your father contacted me for a certain set of skills I possess.”

I feel my jaw twitch as I clench it in irritation at the cryptic way he’s speaking with me.

“Spit it out.”

“I’m trying here, princess, how about you stop being a brat.”

“Wow.” I scoff, “you’re an asshole. You think I want to be here, sitting here at this stupid fucking table with a madman?”

“I’m not mad.”

“Could’ve fooled me, Everett.”

He didn’t deserve an ounce of kindness from me. I could think he was attractive. I knew what he could do to my body, how he could make me feel and those memories, of course, were going to make me react. It was hard to forget something like that when no one has ever made me feel the way he did, but he was still an asshole.

“For fuck’s sake, Arryn, I kill people. He hired me as a fucking hitman!”

My blood turns to ice right there in my veins.

“I am a hired killer, Arryn, and I was working on a double hit with your dad before he died.”

“Who?” I whisper, throat closing around the word.

“Kenneth and Malakai Ware.”

I choke on the air in my lungs. “No. No, you’re wrong.”

He sighs and drags a laptop closer, typing something on it before he spins it and shows me the screen.

It was a wire transfer, from my dad to Everett for quarter of a million dollars. “Half of my fee, paid a week before I was due to take out the targets.”

My eyes flick to the date on the transfer, “A week has already passed.”

“I was preparing for the hit the night they killed your father.”

---