35
After tucking Emma into bed after her bath and getting into another heated argument with Jason about forcing him to cancel his plans to babysit, Linc found himself standing across the street from The Ali Hotel, huddled behind a tree that lined the sidewalk. The hotel, owned by and named for Malik, was one hundred stories high and sat on a street lined with high-end shops, a short three-minute walk from London’s most famous attractions. Even the sidewalk went unvarnished. An unheard of phenomenon on the busy streets of London. No trash, cigarette butts, foul odors, or even a single scurrying rat could be found on the quiet St. James Street that evening.
The black hoodie and jeans Linc wore surely made him stand out like a sore thumb, but as he stared down at the screen of his phone, where the map gleaming up at him showed a pulsing red dot that proved Mia was across the street in that very hotel, he couldn’t make himself care.
All he cared about was getting to Mia as quickly as possible. Mia: who had taught his daughter how to read because Malik wouldn’t let her go to school. Mia: who had proved he was still capable of connecting with a woman after a string of gut-wrenching romantic failures. Mia: who he’d promised to come back for. To spare her the same fate that seemed to befall every woman he’d ever touched. Every woman he’d ever loved.
A full day hadn’t even passed since the trade, but Malik hadn’t wasted a single moment in trotting Mia out to the next party—the fundraising gala currently underway in one of the hotel ballrooms. Linc hoped getting Mia back in his arms that night would be even easier than the first time. He knew he wouldn’t have to haul her out on his shoulder this time. He wouldn’t have to bind her hands and ankles to the bed—unless, of course, she asked him to. This time, she’d come to him willingly. She’d fight alongside him. Then all three of them—him, Mia, and Emma—could finally be together.
Finally be free.
Emma would never get her mother back. As heartbreaking as that fact was, it was a fact nevertheless. And Linc would never waste his time trying to replace Lisa with another woman. To Emma, there would never be another Lisa. She was irreplaceable. But, at the very least, Linc believed, she could have a new woman in her life to look up to. He believed Emma could have that in Mia. A woman she’d always love second best to her mother, but whom she would love regardless. A woman he could feel himself loving just the same, even though he’d never told her.
His stomach rumbled as he looked down at that pulsing dot on his phone, cursing himself for being so foolish. So foolish to make the trade, Mia for Emma, without making it clear as day to Mia how he really felt. He could only imagine what she must be going through at that very moment, inside that hotel, with a fake smile plastered on her face as she schmoozed with London’s elite. She’d told him she loved him earlier that day, during the trade, but he’d been so enamored at the sight of Emma, with the need to feel her weight in his arms, he hadn’t had the capacity to say it back. He hadn’t had the capacity to say anything, so paralyzed he’d been by the breathtaking love he’d felt at the sight of his daughter. Mia must’ve been sick, plagued, utterly ruined by the fact that he hadn’t returned her heartfelt admission.
His eyes hardened as he looked up from the phone, nostrils flared, and he made a silent vow that he’d tell Mia how he felt before the night was out. Then he’d spend the rest of his life never letting her wonder how he felt again.
With a deep, determined breath, he slid the phone into his pocket and looked both ways before he began across the street.
He’d only taken one step off the sidewalk when something solid struck him on the back of the head, once, twice, three times. Each hit coming too quickly for him to respond. The pain of each blow a little more blinding than the last, leaving him paralyzed, his knees giving out from under him before he could even process the battering he’d just taken.
By the time he’d finished crumpling to a heap in the street, everything had gone black.
——
Linc had never fully understood what he’d put Mia through until that moment. Until he opened his eyes, vision still blurry, head still aching from the beating he’d taken on the sidewalk outside, and found his hands bound high above his head. A pair of handcuffs had been locked around each of his wrists with the chain slung across the top of a water pipe overhead, leaving him shackled. The sensation of being completely out of control was enough to make swallowing back an enraged scream a battle he nearly lost. He knew if he remained that way—restrained and out of control—for long enough, he’d perish from manic psychosis alone.
Every bone in his body trembled and throbbed in agonizing pain as his vision crystalized and shifted around the room. A dark, gritty warehouse that he could only assume was the basement of The Ali Hotel. The hotel that, moments earlier, he’d been standing across the street from. Planning to infiltrate the gala raging on in one of the ballrooms to take back what was his. Take back Mia. Instead, he realized, it had been him who’d been taken, as his shifty eyes landed on several men, all dressed in tuxedos, who surrounded him. Clearly, he’d pulled all of these men from the party where Mia still awaited his arrival. Each man had a gun cradled in front of their bodies, hard gazes never leaving Linc’s as his sharp green orbs flitted all over the room.
It wasn’t the sight of those men that made Linc’s heart beat twice as fast. It wasn’t the guns in their hands that knotted his belly and caused him to wheeze, his head collapsing between his hoisted arms. It wasn’t even the fact that his death was inevitable that caused a self-loathing so breathtaking it blazed across his body and sealed his lungs shut, making it nearly impossible to breathe.
No.
It was the fact that he’d failed Mia, and Emma too. Mia would be stuck with Malik forever, enduring his mental and emotional abuse before he finally killed her, probably savagely, as punishment for having an affair. Emma would be forced to grow up, not just without her mother but without her father too. Tears stung his eyes as he imagined all the struggles his baby girl would endure. As if she hadn’t already suffered enough. It killed him that she would now suffer ten times more, and it would be all because of him.
All he’d wanted was for the three of them to try. To try and surrender to love. To try to be a family. To try and forget the hurt, the pain, and the struggles that the savage world they lived in seemed happy to supply in droves.
But he’d failed.
“You promise? You’ll never leave me?”
His eyes reddened, lips curling down as he recalled the hope in Emma’s soft voice when she’d asked for that promise in the bathroom, earlier that night.
“I promise, baby. I’ll never leave you.”
A lump filled his throat, making it hard to breathe, angry that he’d made his daughter that promise. That he’d promised to never leave her only to walk away and never come back. It didn’t matter that it had been against his will. She wouldn’t know that. All she’d know was that she’d woken up one morning and her father had been gone without so much as a goodbye. That he’d never come back.
If he’d just been honest with her, told her the truth—that, eventually, all kids lost their parents—maybe it wouldn’t hurt her so badly when she woke up the following morning to find her father gone. When she woke up each morning after that, day after day, year after year, hopeful that he’d return, only to be hit with the devastating blow that she was alone once more. Another day that her father had broken his promise. Another day he’d left her, abandoned. Would she grow up to resent the man who’d left without a trace?
Linc ground his teeth as he fought the pain charging through him, glaring when one of the men in the room walked toward him. The click of the man’s expensive black leather shoes drowned out the incessant sound of water dripping from one of the exposed leaky pipes that zigzagged throughout the ceiling.
Linc’s nostrils flared, taking in a heavy whiff of the moldy scent that permeated the muggy room. When the man came to a stop about a foot away from him, Linc instantly recognized him as Hakeem, who Mia had informed him, earlier that day, was the head of Malik’s security team.
Hakeem smiled kindly at Linc as if he were looking upon one of the donors in the ballroom upstairs and not the man he’d just incapacitated on the sidewalk outside.
“Lincoln Hill,” Hakeem purred.
Linc’s eyes widened—the hairs on his neck standing tall as a cold chill made him go rigid.
Hakeem’s grin spread as he lifted up a passport and picture ID, both with Linc’s photo on them. “Forgive me, I suppose you were waiting for me to refer to you as Harold Washington,” he said, referencing the names that graced both the IDs in his hand.
Linc slammed his eyes closed, his breath coming heavier by the second, dots of sweat collecting on his skin as his chest heaved wildly.
He kept his eyes closed as Hakeem spoke to his men, his words but a hum in Linc’s pounding ears.
“Don’t kill him.” Hakeem’s muddled voice droned into Linc’s pulsing ears. “Call Homeland Security and tell them we have America’s Most Wanted.”
Scattered laughter filled the basement.
And Hakeem’s muffled voice came once more. “It’ll be much more satisfying watching him rot in prison. Spending the rest of his miserable life wondering if Malik has reclaimed what’s rightfully his.”
Linc’s gleaming eyes flew back open, searing a blazing cringe at Hakeem, who’d already turned his back to walk away. The mention of Malik reclaiming what was “rightfully his”—reclaiming Emma—while Linc was imprisoned in America, sent a heat flushing through Linc’s body that almost made him go blind. He hadn’t even realized he’d charged after Hakeem until the clatter of the handcuffs around his wrists disagreed with the drain pipe above. Until a curve in the pipe prevented him from moving any further, stopping his body in mid-charge and making him ricochet backward, stumbling over his own feet—his wrists screaming in agony when he unwittingly gave the cuffs all of his weight, causing the metal to dig into his skin as he struggled to find his footing.
Hakeem stopped at the door across the room, the door that would lead him back to the ballroom party, turned back to Linc and curled his lip high. Without another word, Hakeem straightened his bow tie, threw open the door, and disappeared out of sight.
Linc watched him go with his heart at his feet.