Journey made it into the office before anyone else on Wednesday morning. Even her mother hadn’t graced the building yet, which was just as well. Nothing ruined a day like dealing with Lydia before they both had their morning coffee. In the twenty-four hours she’d spent going over Samara’s information on the bid, Journey had racked up over a hundred emails.
Sixty of them were marked as needing urgent responses.
Journey dropped her head to her desk and groaned. I should have fought harder to keep Samara on this project. Or at least demanded that either Anderson or Bellamy come back here to help with the workload. She knew better than to ask for help from her little sister. Her brothers both held executive roles within Kingdom Corp, but precious Eliza was off finding herself or some bullshit in Europe. Oh, that wasn’t what anyone was calling it—she had a modeling contract, after all—but that’s exactly what she was doing. Dodging her responsibility to the family.
None of it mattered right then. There was no one to help, and Journey wouldn’t ask them for help even if they were in Houston. To ask for assistance was as good as admitting she wasn’t capable of doing her job, and her mother would never let her live it down.
The phone rang, and she spent three seconds seriously considering crawling under her desk and pretending she wasn’t in the office yet. Just long enough for her to drink her damn coffee in peace and conquer the overwhelmed feeling taking root deep inside her.
But the phone just…kept…ringing.
Journey angled her head to look at her watch. Six a.m. Who the hell was calling her at six in the damn morning?
There was no help for it. She answered. “Journey King.” It was too early to fake a smile, so she sounded downright surly.
“Hey, sweetheart.”
She went cold. Not this. Not today. Oh God, make it stop. It took everything she had to make her voice cool and disinterested. “Elliott.”
“Don’t be like that, sweetheart. You don’t sound happy to hear from your old man.”
She stared blankly at the photograph across from her desk, trying to draw strength from the vivid autumn tree standing alone in a misty field. As alone as I am right now. “I’m not happy to hear from you. It’s been…” She shuddered. “Eight? No, nine—nine months since I heard from you. I would have preferred to have gone another nine years. What do you want, Elliott?”
All the playful wheedling disappeared from his tone. “Your mother’s in a shitload of trouble. If you’re not careful, she’s going to bring you down with her when she crashes and burns.”
Journey pulled the phone away from her ear. “Where are you right now?”
“Los Angeles.”
She did some quick math. “You’re drunk, aren’t you? That’s the only reason I can think that you’d be calling me at four a.m. your time and spouting some bullshit about Mom. If you want to fight with her, leave me out of it.” She leaned forward to hang up.
“Don’t you dare end this call, sweetheart. You won’t like what comes next.”
Journey froze, and hated herself for reacting to that tone in his voice. She closed her eyes. He’s not here. He’s not even in the same state. She wasn’t a scared little girl anymore. She had her own power, and with hundreds of miles between her and her father, she should be able to handle a single conversation. Except even hearing his voice makes me feel like I’ve been doused in sewage. “If you were in a position to do something with that big talk of yours, you would have done it by now. Good-bye, Elliott.”
“You tell that bitch mother of yours that she’s bit off more than she can chew with Beckett King. That boy isn’t going to roll over the same way his daddy did.”
Journey opened her eyes. Questions bubbled up. What the hell do you know about Beckett King? What did Lydia do this time? How do you have anything to do with it? She didn’t voice any of it. Questioning her father was like feeding internet trolls—once he got a little taste of power and attention, there was no getting rid of him. Better to ignore his bullshit until he found someone else to terrorize. “You’d be better served to sleep that drunk off than calling me issuing threats. Don’t call here again.” She hung up.
Her hands shook so hard when she reached for her coffee that she abandoned the motion halfway through. Fuck me. She shot a look at her open door, half sure she’d heard her mother’s heels clicking down the long hallway from the elevator to her office. But no, it was all in her head.
It was just a phone call. The man was two time zones away. There was absolutely no reason for her heart to be kicking in her chest like she’d just run a marathon. She wrapped her arms around herself, but that only made her shakes worse. Damn it.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she grabbed her cell phone and hurried to shut her office door. Journey locked it for good measure, but it didn’t make her feel any less exposed. Stupid. Irrational. Crazy. She shut the blinds next, blocking out the lightening sky. It wasn’t enough.
Her chest hurt, and no amount of trying to count her way through her inhales and exhales helped. It got tighter and tighter, until the only thing she could do was huddle on the little sofa situated in the corner farthest from the door. She pulled her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth. He’s not here. He can’t get to you. You are not this fucking weak. Get ahold of yourself. It didn’t help.
It never did.
She unlocked her phone with numb fingers, even as she told herself it wasn’t necessary, that it was wrong to call her big brother. It didn’t stop her this time any more than it had stopped her every other time. The phone rang and rang, the seconds spiraling away from her in a whirlpool she could almost see.
“Journey?”
“Anderson.” Her voice was barely a whisper of an exhale.
The background noise faded and she could hear him moving away from wherever he’d been. Probably an important meeting that your crazy ass is dragging him away from. A door closed and then he was there, extending a lifeline through the phone to her. “What’s wrong?”
“It was him.” No need to specify. There was only one him in their lives.
“He’s not there.” Anderson spoke sharply, as if he could command his words to be the truth rather than the inquiry they actually were.
She shook her head. “No. He called. I…I’m sorry. I should be able to handle this on my own.” She was so damn capable in so many damn ways, but one call from Elliott Bancroft and she was a whimpering mess reaching for her real-life teddy bear.
“Don’t be sorry. I’m here. Do you need to talk, or do you want me to?”
The question felt just as formal this time as it had every time before now, starting when she was a little girl who would hide in her big brother’s room to escape their father. “Can you? Just for a little bit.” She loathed the weakness, loathed leaning on him. “Wait—Anderson, don’t. I’m okay. I…I’ll be okay.”
He ignored her pathetic attempt at bravado just like he always did. “I’m hoping we’ll wrap up the last of these meetings today and reach an agreement with Senator McMurphy. He’s coming around, but he’s taken a disliking to Bellamy, so it’s hampering the progress.”
“Poor Bellamy.”
“No ‘poor Bellamy.’ The first thing he did when he saw the good senator was to drop the names of both the man’s mistresses in conversation. He’s so damn smug I want to toss him out a moving car sometimes.”
She cracked a smile. “Poor Anderson.”
“That’s right. Poor Anderson. And you’ll never guess who I saw yesterday…” He went on like that, talking about nonconsequential things until her panic retreated and she finally stopped shaking.
Journey inhaled deeply. “I’m okay now.”
“Do you need me to come back?”
He would if she asked. To hell with their mother’s plans and the important business meetings and political agendas. If Journey told her big brother she needed him, he’d be on the next flight out of DC and winging back to Houston to save her.
I need to be able to save myself.
“I’m fine. I’ll see you next week?”
“Yeah, we should have things wrapped up by then.” He hesitated. “Hang in there, Jo. I know that asshole doesn’t call often, but if you need me to…”
He didn’t have to finish that sentence for her to know where he was going with it. “No.” She straightened and put as much of a command into her voice as she could. “No, Anderson. Don’t you dare.” Her brother had been protecting her for too long, and she’d be damned before he put another stain on his soul on her behalf. “I’m fine.”
“I know.”
It couldn’t be more obvious that he didn’t believe the words any more than she did. She had to get off the damn call before he changed his mind and did come back. “I’ll call you soon—a real call. Not me freaking out over nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
“Yes, it is,” she said firmly. One of these days, it might even be the truth.
Not today, though.
Today, nothing was fine at all.
What the hell had her father meant about Beckett and her mother?
As the plane touched down, Beckett reluctantly turned his phone back on. It was tempting to tell the pilot to keep circling or, better yet, to fly him and Samara somewhere far away from Houston. It would only postpone what came next, though. If the thing growing between them couldn’t survive the reality of their respective lives, then spending more blissful time together would only make the hurt worse when it inevitably fell apart.
Nothing inevitable about it. I said I was keeping her, and I damn well meant it.
His phone buzzed in his hand, and Beckett frowned as voice mail after voice mail appeared. Three from the superintendent of his building and five from Frank. “What the fuck?”
Samara set down the magazine she’d been idly flipping through. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, but I’m about to find out.” He bypassed the voice mails and called Frank directly.
The phone didn’t even ring before his friend was on the other line. “Thank fuck. I thought you were supposed to be back in Houston last night. I was just on the phone with the damn airport, threatening my way into getting your flight plans.”
Samara shifted closer, her dark eyes worried. Beckett was worried. Since they’d known each other, Frank was always the calm and measured one. He’d heard the man raise his voice only a handful of times in a decade. “Frank, what happened?”
“Someone broke into your apartment. The superintendent called me right after he called the cops. You weren’t home and I’m apparently your emergency contact.”
A break-in.
Beckett frowned. A break-in was bad, but it wasn’t any worse than the damn fire. “I don’t—”
“It wasn’t just a break-in, Beckett. There’s blood everywhere. I thought…” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was closer to normal. “It was a gut reaction. I couldn’t reach you, the police aren’t sure if it’s human blood or something else, but they’re treating it like a potential homicide.”
“A homicide.” Beckett pulled the phone away from his ear and put it on speaker. Samara could hear most of the conversation either way, but he wanted her fully looped in. “I have you on speaker. Samara is with me. Tell me what you know.”
“It’s not much yet. The police barely let me get a look at your apartment. I have a guy at the station waiting for an update, but it takes time for the tests they did on the blood to come back.”
Blood. In his apartment.
Was it meant as a warning or was he being framed? Only time would tell. “I’m assuming the police want to talk to me.”
“That’s a safe bet.” Frank hesitated. “There’s something else.”
For fuck’s sake. He braced himself, and nearly flinched when Samara covered his hand with hers. Beckett turned his over and laced his fingers with hers, taking her silent support. “Might as well spit it out.”
“Whoever got into the apartment got into the garage as well. They trashed your Harley. After the cops cataloged the scene, I had it sent to a mechanic I trust, but the guy said it’s a lost cause. They put sugar in the tank, and if that wasn’t enough, they set the fucking thing on fire. It was the bike that first prompted security to check your apartment out. The superintendent knew it was yours and wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Beckett wasn’t okay.
The plane taxied toward the private hangars and Beckett allowed himself a full thirty seconds of mourning that bike. He’d had it since he was sixteen, and he’d rebuilt it himself and upgraded it over the years. Countless hours had gone into that vehicle, both with tools in his hands and with the road flying beneath him. Gone. All gone. There would never be another bike like it, if only because of the sheer history.
First Thistledown Villa.
Now my bike.
The apartment…His breath stopped in his chest.
Everything he’d taken from Thistledown was in that apartment. The baby book. The pictures. The other things he’d brought with him when he’d moved out after high school. It was all he had of his history, the only reminders that wouldn’t fade with time and distance. Fuck.
“Beckett?”
“Give him a minute,” Samara said.
Beckett realized he had her hand almost in a death grip, but he couldn’t make himself let go. She didn’t seem particularly worried about it. Samara shifted and rubbed his thigh with her free hand, offering what comfort she could.
He appreciated the gesture even if it changed nothing about what he was about to walk into. “We’re pulling up to the hangar now. We’ll be at the apartment inside of an hour.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
“Appreciate it.” He hung up and forced himself to let go of Samara’s hand. “I can drop you on the way.”
“What?” Her brows slammed together. “No way.”
He recognized the hurt that flickered over her face and reclaimed her hands, being careful to hold her lightly. “I’m not rejecting you, and I’m not trying to spare your delicate woman sensibilities or some bullshit. I don’t know what I’m walking into, and the acts against me are escalating. There’s no telling what they’ll do next.” But he could hazard a guess. As threats went, Lydia’s were textbook. First she took his childhood home. Then she proved she could get to him both at work and at home if he didn’t bow to her will. Next it would be Beckett or the people he cared about getting into unfortunate accidents.
Right now, the people Beckett cared about numbered at two.
Frank could take care of himself.
Samara likely could as well, but she wouldn’t be expecting danger from Lydia. Her eyes might be opening to what Beckett’s aunt was capable of, but she’d worked for that company for a decade. That was a whole lot of time and experience to be overridden, even when faced with mounting evidence.
“You think it’s Lydia.”
He picked his words with care. “Even without her pulling that stunt with you and basically flaunting her knowledge of the fire, the timing would be more than suspicious. My sparkling personality might piss people off sometimes, but I haven’t been back in town long enough to inspire murderous rage in anyone but my aunt.”
The plane jolted as it stopped completely, and Samara pushed to her feet. “Beckett, this is serious.”
“I know.” He had to put a stop to it and do it now, but if he didn’t deal with the apartment first, he’d have to handle both the police and his plans, and that would only hold Beckett back. He stood and grabbed their bags. “I don’t want you in the middle of this, Samara.”
“I’m already in the middle of this. I have been since it started.”
He couldn’t argue that, so he didn’t bother to try. The door opened and he headed for it. They could stand around talking about this all day and get nowhere.
Samara followed closely, frustration rolling off her in waves. She didn’t speak, though, as he tossed their bags into the trunk of the waiting car and drove them away from the airport. Beckett gripped the steering wheel and tried to find the right words to say. There were no right words. Until he knew the extent of the damage—and whose blood the police had found—he didn’t have any answers for Samara. It was entirely possible that Lydia had decided to frame him for some crime, though murder seemed going a bit far, even for her.
Except it wasn’t going too far when it came to my father.
“Beckett.” She spoke softly, not looking away from the windshield. “Promise me that you won’t do anything in retaliation for this until we know for sure who’s behind it.” When he didn’t respond, she continued. “If, by some chance, it isn’t Lydia, then you risk creating two enemies instead of one.”
What she said made sense, even though her determination to point the blame at someone else aggravated him. Most of the time, the simplest answer was the real answer. Lydia had the most to gain by ruining Beckett’s life and effectively running him out of town. Even if this was all to keep him distracted while she put something else into play, it all revolved around their competing businesses and, even more so, around the split in the family thirty years ago. It obviously didn’t matter to her that he was a nephew—he was an obstacle to be removed by any means possible.
The chances of the perpetrator of all the acts against him being some shadowy villain who hadn’t been revealed were astronomical. It didn’t make any sense.
Telling Samara that wouldn’t change her mind, though. She might not be blindly defending Lydia any longer, but she was just as obviously resistant to the idea that the woman she’d trusted for so long was capable of this level of attack.
“I promise that I won’t retaliate unless I have to.” It was all he could give her. Beckett had no intention of sinking to Lydia’s level. A war between them would hurt more than just his aunt. It would hurt his cousins whom he hadn’t had a chance to know. It would hurt employees at both companies.
It would hurt Samara.
No, Beckett would do this his way.
And he’d remove Lydia as a threat. Permanently.