Oh boy.
“If you’d have told me—”
“You’d have done nothing,” he barked, and I knew it was the truth. “You hate men. Everyone knows that. Everyone!”
I wanted to throw up. All this time, I was partly responsible for his girlfriend’s condition. I remembered seeing her at buybuy Baby. How distressed she looked.
He began kicking things around as he spoke, determined to inflict as much destruction on me and mine. “Things got really bad at home. After a while, I just up and left. Like my daddy did before I was born. I couldn’t deal with it. And now there’s this cycle, you see. That you created. My son is going to come into this world with nothing while your kid is going to come into this world with everything. And why? Because you have a pretty face? A tight ass? Because your sister married some rich guy and now you two are prancing around like millionaires all day?”
I knew where this was going, and I didn’t like it. Not one bit.
“You were the one who went after me. But … but who was that man who came to Madame Mayhem to threaten me?”
“My stepdad.” Frank shrugged. “Did me a solid. Good guy, huh?”
“And the man at Boston Common?”
“Boston Common?” He frowned. “Ain’t nobody went for you there.”
My head was spinning. There were a few people after me. Frank was on a roll, though, and wasn’t exactly in the mood to answer any more of my questions.
“Well, I’m here to tell you if my baby is not going to have a future—and I certainly can’t give him a future…” his blade found my heart, moving down my skin toward my belly as he crouched down before me, “…then yours is not going to have one either.”
“Frank, please—”
The knife halted on my belly.
He smiled as he poked the blade into it, breaking the skin.
And that was when one of the living room walls came crashing down.
I arrived at the Penrose parents’ suburban house to find Belle’s father’s truck parked out front. Though it wasn’t necessarily in my plans to try and win Mr. Penrose over by explaining that my mother had sent people to threaten his daughter and that I may or may not had planned to marry someone else at one point, I was going to have to deal with him. After I informed Belle we were getting married this week and stopping this nonsense, of course.
I walked over to the door, determined, and raised my knuckles to rap the door.
Just then, a crash sounded from the inside. It sounded like glass shattering. I moved toward one of the windows, peeking inside.
Belle was sitting on the couch, mostly naked and duct taped while a Frank-looking-guy (I’d never seen the man, but again, deductive reasoning) stood above a pile of glass, a knife at his feet. I pressed my hands to the glass and roared, but they couldn’t hear me. I could tell by the thickness of the glass, and by the blurry way I saw them, that it was too thick.
I rushed over to the door and tried to pick the lock, but fuck, it wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t a flimsy door either. It was one of those steel security doors Cillian had installed in his mansion the day Astor was born. I couldn’t kick that shit down if I had The Rock’s quads.
Frantically, I rounded the house, trying to find a way to break in. I tilted my head and looked up to see if the windows on the second floor were open or maybe not triple glazed. No such luck.
After a quick inspection, I realized the only way in was through the ventilation. There was only one problem: confined places and I weren’t exactly good friends.
Staring at the exhaust hole on the side of the house, I reminded myself that I didn’t have a choice. That it was either me dying in a space smaller than the dumbwaiter or Belle … Fuck, I couldn’t even begin to think about what could happen to her.
Pulling my phone out of my pocket, I called 911 and explained the situation, giving them the address, then crouched into the hole and crawled right in.
It wasn’t the type of air duct you saw in the movies. The square, never-ending metal labyrinth you could crawl comfortably in. It was a round, flimsy one that could only carry my weight because it was bellied between bricks, the surface uneven from every direction. It felt like skulking into someone’s arsehole. I had to army-crawl on my elbows and knees, collecting dust, mold, dirt, and mites on my Cucinelli suit, which turned from navy blue to gray.
My throat was thick with dirt, and every one of my muscles felt strained and shaky. Putting myself in this position was something I never thought I’d do. But I had to. I had to save her. To help ease the pain, I squeezed my eyes shut and kept pushing. I sometimes knocked into a dead end, and maneuvered myself left, right, up, and down until I found the next curve to take what would lead me to the other side.