Cooper sat down and wished he could think of a damn thing to say to get that dark look off Dane’s face. He’d done the right thing. It was what Coop would have done himself. Alea needed to know they would never leave her. They would fight for her, even if she was the one they had to fight.
A massive man in a three-piece, charcoal-gray Armani suit stood at the front of the room. He was impressive from head to toe, every inch of his six foot seven inch muscled frame encased in what had to be a couple thousand dollars’ worth of designer handmade wool. Cooper had to give it to him. Dominic Anthony made an impression. If he hadn’t known what the man’s profession was, he would have immediately thought gangster, and not the kind who followed orders. Oh, no, Dominic Anthony would be the one tasking his soldiers to kill. He had pitch-black hair and some of the darkest eyes Cooper had ever seen—and he didn’t just mean their color.
“Thanks for coming on such short notice, gentlemen.” Dominic had a deep authoritative voice to go along with his intimidating physique. “I know you just got off the plane, but I think it’s important we go over some of the things Riley has uncovered in the last couple of hours.”
“By all means. Tell us,” Talib insisted, taking his seat between his brothers. “I want my cousin to feel safe as soon as possible. She’s getting married in the next few weeks. I would like to have some confidence that her wedding will be peaceful. We’ll need added security.”
“I’ll handle it,” Dane said, frowning. He was such a control freak. He wasn’t thinking at all.
“No, we’ll need to handle Lea,” Coop shot back.
Dane had been married. Did he not remember everything that went into a wedding? Coop had been in the wedding party of three of his brothers’ weddings, and they had all been nearly comatose by the end of it. This was a damn royal wedding to boot, one they had to throw together in a few weeks. Cooper could foresee all kinds of trouble. Alea was being forced to the altar. They’d have to spend long hours convincing her that they could handle being her husbands. He had no doubt about how they would accomplish that. In bed. At least that made him smile.
“I think we can handle security for our own wedding,” Lan said.
“Are you planning on standing at the altar covered in handguns?” Coop asked.
Lan shrugged. “Not just handguns. I was going to add a P-90 and some knives, too. I feel naked without them.”
“You can’t be covered in firearms in our wedding pictures,” Dane said, his lips curving up in the first smile Coop had seen on him all day. “What is wrong with you?”
Dominic sighed, those dark eyes rolling slightly. It was obvious the man was not impressed with their banter. “If the three of you are done making wedding plans?” He turned to his two partners. “This shit is so not happening with us. If we find a chick, it’s going to be no muss, no fuss. It’s Vegas or nothing. Now, let’s move on. Sheikh, we’ve hit a brick wall with the whole Caymans account thing. I sent Law and Riley to the island where they canvassed the banks, and no one was talking. I tried bribes, but those are well-trained employees. Or they’re terrified of the people they work for. Even if the clients are criminals, if something came out about secret accounts, the mob and the cartels would not be pleased.”
“You told us you had some good news,” Dane said, his jaw tight.
“I have some news about the girl who’s on the news right now.” He looked down at his file. “Brittany Hahn. She’s a twenty-two year old from San Bernadino. She was partying in Tijuana during spring break a couple of years ago when she was taken by the same group that was hired to acquire Alea. I’ve done a little more background on these thugs. They’re tied to a cartel in Colombia. Real entrepreneurs, those guys. They’re diversifying. This particular cartel has its hands in cocaine, slavery, and kidnap for fun and profit. It’s a new enterprise that’s starting to become more popular. They take high value targets like celebrities and upper-level businessmen, then they ransom them back to their families or businesses. Let me tell you, if you’ve got money, you don’t walk around parts of South America without ransom insurance.”
“But my cousin wasn’t taken from South America,” Kade said.
“No. But I believe this was a kidnap for hire all the same,” Dominic said.
“We’ve gone over and over everything, and it’s the only thing that makes sense,” Riley explained, taking over. “If she’d been taken for use in the brothel, then she would have been raped.”
“Alea was raped,” Cooper stated grimly. “Maybe not physically, but she was violated all the same.”
If Burke and Cole Lennox hadn’t already killed the motherfuckers and burned down that house, Cooper would be on his way to Colombia.
“Agreed.” Riley nodded. “But nevertheless if the purpose of her kidnapping was to use her as a prostitute, she would not have been discovered fully intact, so to speak. So the question then is, why was she taken at all? And who was paying for her upkeep?”
“I assume someone was going to buy her,” Dane surmised, his hands tightening into fists. “And they were holding her for this asshole.”
“I don’t know about that,” Dominic said. “Put yourself into the head of a man who would purchase a female for his own use. We’re not talking about D/s, but true criminal slavery. Still, the owner’s impulse would be very similar to what a real Dom would feel.”
“Possessive.” Cooper knew exactly what he was talking about. They all found the possessive instinct at first with Alea. “Any man who would want to buy a virgin is going to be possessive and territorial.”
“He wouldn’t leave her there for long. He wouldn’t leave her training to someone else,” Lan added. “I know I wouldn’t. And the so-called training they gave her was mostly psychological torture.”
“And they got her hooked on drugs,” Cooper added. He hated the thought of his Alea strung out and aching. They had used the drugs to keep her calm and quiet and to make her dependent. Alea was strong. He could imagine she’d given the fuckers hell in the beginning. “Do you think they would do that at some buyer’s request?”
“No, especially not heroin. That’s not cheap,” Dominic said. “I don’t think they had a buyer lined up for Alea at all. These are not the type of men who allow for installment plans. But they do love a little blackmail. I have a different theory of what happened. I believe the princess was kidnapped and that the men had help from an insider who plotted to draw Alea out, then help to urge the sheikh to pay the ransom as soon as possible.”
Tal shook his head. “I never got a ransom.”
Dominic leaned forward. “Ah, yes, but from the kidnappers’ point of view, why simply take money from the victim’s family when they could first blackmail the person who set up the abduction? Once they bled their ‘cohort’ dry, they could always come to you with an exorbitant ransom request. And by doing it this way, they don’t have to give their conspirator any of the promised kickback. They simply could have cut them out altogether or killed them. Either way, they’re not sharing the fat ransom. So the longer they kept your cousin, the more likely you would be to pay an outrageous sum to get her back. In the meantime, they were busy getting paid by the same dirtbag who aided them in her kidnapping.”
“But the Lennox brothers found her first,” Cooper pointed out.
“Yes, and their only job was to rescue the princess and save the girls. They weren’t investigating the whys and wherefores because everyone assumed Alea had been caught up in a simple slavery ring. So the question becomes, who hates the princess enough to subject her to hell? And more than that, who needed the money her ransom would have brought?”
Dane held up a hand. “You said this had something to do with that girl on TV, the Hahn woman. Are you trying to tell us she had something to do with this?”
“Not at all,” Riley replied. “She really was a victim, and as far as I can tell, she has some very dark emotions toward Alea. You see, we believe that her story is true. Alea really was there during her torture, but maybe she was forced to use drugs as well. If so, her memory is not necessarily accurate. She would have had nightmares and delusions. It would be easy in that situation to see Alea as a villain. She wasn’t raped the way Brittany was. Even without the drugs, it’s possible that, because Alea’s torture was easier than her own, she would be resentful. I’ve talked to some of the other victims, and most of them see Alea as one of them. A couple of the women asked me to reach out to her. They want to meet and talk because they’re the only ones who really know what happened.”
“So if she’s not the one who helped with Alea’s kidnapping, what does she have to do with the person who did?” Cooper was starting to get antsy. His instincts had always been good, and he didn’t like the way his spine was prickling now. Something was very wrong.
It was the same feeling he’d had when he and Dane had been in the Korengal Valley just before everything went to hell. It was a combination of adrenaline and pure doom.
“Someone sent her money to buy a new wardrobe before her TV appearances.”
“Someone put her up to this? Someone wants to ruin Alea’s image?” Lan asked.
“Yes, the same someone who wanted to use her to make money. It would have been easy to hire someone to simply kidnap the princess. She was vulnerable in the States. She didn’t have the same type of security. The flip side was not a lot of people knew her connections to the royal family. There were some people in the embassy, but almost no regular New Yorkers knew who she was.”
Dominic Anthony seemed to deeply love the sound of his own voice. He was dragging this thing out like Sherlock Holmes reporting to the damn queen. “Who? Just give us a damn name please.”
Law seemed to be the only one who wasn’t into theatrics. “It’s one of the Thurston-Hughes people, most likely the chick, Yasmin. She was working for Reaching Across Cultures, the charity fund Alea had originally set up and planned to head once she got her master’s degree. The money that went to Brittany Hahn came from an account directly accessed by the charity fund director. I also confirmed that the Thurston-Hughes family has several offshore accounts, several in the Caymans.”
Talib had turned a dull red. Cooper briefly wondered if they still chopped off heads in Bezakistan. “Yasmin offered to head the charity in Alea’s stead. She was also the first one to call and to beg me to pay whatever ransom they asked for.”
“She was a jealous child,” Rafe said, running a hand through his hair. “She had everything given to her, but she couldn’t stand the fact that Alea lived in the palace. That Alea was called princess. Her mother and father were incredibly wealthy. Our parents were close to them. After Alea’s mother and father died, Yasmin’s parents offered to take her in, but my mother wouldn’t have it. She told me she was afraid Yasmin would make Alea’s life difficult. I would have thought she’d have grown up and gotten over it.”
“I don’t believe she has. She only married Oliver because she thought Alea wanted him. I overheard her talking to some friends at her engagement party,” Kade said.
“And you never bothered to mention this?” Talib asked.
“I thought she was just a jealous bitch. I didn’t realize she was crazy enough to have Alea kidnapped,” Kade shot back. “Do we know where Yasmin is in the palace?”
Cooper felt his blood run cold. “She’s in the palace? Why the fuck is she here?”
Dominic answered that one. “I thought it was best to bring her here. I wanted to be able to keep an eye on her. I suspected either she or her husband was involved about a week ago. I had Talib invite them here to discuss the further search for Alea. We told her that she could be critical to the effort. I knew she couldn’t resist being the center of attention.”
“So this time she just intended to kill Alea?” Lan asked.
“Oh, no. That plane was insured heavily, plus she managed to bilk her brother-in-law into opening up his accounts so she could upgrade security. I had someone tailing her and listening in on her cell phone conversations for a couple of days. She pocketed the cash. I’m a little worried though because she recently took out a twenty million dollar life insurance policy on her husband. I think once she decided Alea was dead, she no longer needed Oliver Thurston–Hughes. Since she signed a prenup, eliminating him would be her only way of taking as much of his family’s wealth as she could. I intend to have a discussion with Oliver as soon as this meeting is over.”
Tal reached for the phone on the conference table in front of him. He pressed a single button. “I need you to put Yasmin Thurston-Hughes under lockdown. Yes, that’s right. She does not have freedom to roam the palace. Cut her phone lines and her Internet access. Do not allow her to leave under any circumstances. And find her husband. Bring him to me in the conference room.”
Dane stood, placing both hands on the table. “Do you want to explain why you chose to cover this up until now?”
Dominic went positively arctic. “I didn’t cover up anything, Mitchell. We just got confirmation today. At any point in time, she could have bolted and she has the resources to disappear. I wanted her brought here so she couldn’t escape. Besides, it was rather safe since Alea wasn’t in the palace. Now she’s under guard, and I suspect you three won’t let her out of your sight. She’s locked up in her room. She’s not allowed visitors.”
“I never said she couldn’t have visitors,” Tal said, picking up that phone again.
Cooper didn’t wait for the order. He shoved his chair back and took off running. He prayed Alea was safe and sound and locked away, but his instincts were screaming otherwise.
Even as he shoved through the doors and into the vestibule, he felt Dane and Lan beside him.
Whatever happened, he wouldn’t be alone.
* * * *
Alea looked down at the floor and wondered how long Oliver had. He was bleeding badly, curled on his side. She couldn’t see exactly where he was hit, but it had been somewhere in the torso, perhaps his stomach or right at the bottom of his rib cage.
Oliver probably didn’t have long, but then she wasn’t sure she had much time, either.
“You’re home for just a few hours but you’re already all over my husband.” Yasmin stared down at the man she’d promised to love and cherish, a disgusted look on her face.
“I have never touched Oliver. Not ever.” Alea tried to keep her voice calm. Where was the guard? How had Yasmin gotten in? She looked over to the door.
Yasmin’s lips curled into a wicked smile. She was dressed to kill in all black, from her tight slacks to the shirt that clung to her. It had a plunging V-neckline that showed off her nearly skeletal chest. Yasmin had always been obsessed with being thin, but she was gaunt now. She sported a pair of leather gloves on her hands. She’d obviously been concerned about leaving fingerprints. “The guard isn’t going to help you, cousin. He was a little too trusting of females. He let me get really close, so I shot him. Do you like the silencer? It really helps. And of course you never touched Oliver. He never wanted you, you stupid cow. Who would want you when they had me? God, Lea, you were even in a brothel and no one wanted you.”
Panic got shoved down in the place of anger. “You were behind all this?”
“Of course. Look, all of our lives, you’ve always gotten everything. Poor little Alea. Her mommy and daddy died so she gets to be the princess. You were ugly and fat and everyone felt sorry for you. But it should have been me. I’m princess material. I should have been the one who lived in the palace.”
Alea seriously wanted to slap the bitch. Yas was seriously screwed in the head if she thought that losing her parents and being an orphan had all been made better because she had Her Royal Highness in front of her freaking name. But she couldn’t do what she wanted because that gun would take out more than just Alea. It would take out her baby. Her baby with Cooper, Dane, and Landon. She had to stay calm and give herself time until she could find a way out or her men came for her. Someone would come for her. As soon as that meeting was over, they would be beating down her door.
Unless they were still furious at her for what she’d done and wouldn’t talk to her tonight. They might go back to their rooms and let her stew. She wouldn’t blame them. She’d basically told Dane that she didn’t love them. She’d put him in a horrible position.
Oh, god, she couldn’t die like this. She couldn’t die when they thought she didn’t love them.
Everything she’d suffered before seemed to fade away. She’d spent so much time holding her pain close to her that she hadn’t embraced the love they gave her. Tears blurred her eyes.
She had to keep Yasmin talking. The balcony doors were open to her left. Her bedroom was to her right. If she got the chance, she could bolt one way or the other. Yasmin loved to talk about herself. “Why didn’t you just have them kill me? Why have them take me to a brothel?”
She glanced back at the door, but then turned back, the gun held casually in her manicured hand. “I didn’t care where they took you, but I laughed my ass off when I found out it was a brothel. I had a blast thinking about you taking it up the ass from anyone with a couple of pesos.” She frowned. “They were supposed to ransom you. I was going to get a twenty percent cut as a finder’s fee and for working Talib on this end. The assholes decided to squeeze me. If you hadn’t been found when you were, I was going to be in serious trouble. They were going to turn me over to Talib.”
“And you don’t think Tal is going to be mad that you killed me now?”
She shrugged a little. “I’ve set everything up so it looks like you killed yourself and poor dumb Oliver. You couldn’t handle the truth. Everyone knows you helped your kidnappers torture those girls. No one will be surprised you couldn’t handle the guilt. And Oliver was having an affair with you. I’ll tearfully testify to that. His brother already thinks very little of him. When he hears about this, he’ll think even less. He’ll open the checkbook to me.”
“Is this about money?”
“It’s about everything, Alea. I’m not about to just accept my place in the world. I fight for more, unlike you.”
Her heart was racing, pounding in her chest like a barreling freight train. She was so mad, but that anger had to come second to survival. Which safe haven was closer? The balcony. But the doors to the balcony were made of glass. She would have to climb down the trellis. The bedroom was the safer bet, but it was much farther away and lacked cover. If Yasmin was any kind of shot, she would hit Alea in a second. What should she do? She had to make the right decision. Her baby was counting on her. And she wasn’t the only one with a baby.
“What about your baby, Yasmin? How could you kill the father of your baby?” Keep her talking. She could still see the faint movement of Oliver’s chest. He was still alive. She had to hope that he stayed that way.
A nasty laugh came out of Yasmin’s mouth. “Are you kidding? I’m not pregnant. I’m not some dumb animal who’s going to allow a parasite to suck me dry and make me fat. I pretend to be pregnant every so often and then I tragically lose the baby. To soothe me, he’ll buy me whatever I want for a while. I’m not wrecking my body for some disgusting infant.”
So pleading to her maternal side wasn’t going to work. Alea drew a deep breath. Her cousin was lost, truly without any redemption. She wasn’t sure how it had happened, but there was something missing in Yasmin that had allowed her to become a true sociopath. Nothing Alea could do would save her. The childhood they had shared had been a lie. The face Yasmin showed the world had been a mask.
Yasmin sighed as though the whole exercise bored her to tears. She reached into the pocket of her pants and pulled out a second pair of gloves. “I need you to put these on.”
Yasmin tossed them her way, but Alea allowed them to hit the sofa that came between her and Yasmin. The black gloves hit the cushions and fell to the floor.
“Why?” It was obvious, but Alea would do just about anything to put off that time when she had to make the decision. Her men just needed a little more time. They would be here. She just knew it. She let her eyes roam the room for anything she could use as a weapon.
“Because if you don’t, I’ll shoot you here and now.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Oliver move slightly, his head coming up. He was trying to change positions, turning very slowly.
“It’s not going to work,” Alea said quietly.
“It is. Men in this country can’t believe a woman would do anything terrible. I used to get away with a lot when we were kids. I’m just moving on to murder. And after this, I’ll be set. The truth of the matter is, I got lucky when those mercenaries found you because they killed anyone who could have identified me as the person who set you up. I really owe them a lot. And now I’ll get an even bigger slice of the pie because I’ll get Oliver’s insurance money, since you’re going to go crazy and kill him.”
“I’m not going to cooperate.”
Oliver got to one elbow. She could see blood on his hands as he pushed himself up. He was behind Yasmin, his stare finding her back and his fists clenched, red dripping from his palms. How much had he heard? Did he know she wasn’t carrying their child? Did he know she’d never loved him, wasn’t capable of love?
Yasmin frowned. “Yes, you are because I’ll shoot you otherwise.”
Another thing Yasmin rarely did was to really think something through. All throughout their childhood, Yas had come up with outrageous plans only to run up against a wall of logic anyone with half a brain could have seen a mile away. She needed Alea to cooperate, but there was no real incentive to, beyond making Yasmin’s job of getting away with double homicide easier, and Alea just wasn’t in a giving mood.
“You’ll shoot me anyway, so I don’t see why I should help you out.” Besides, if she moved, she left the relative safety of the sofa. It was an antique with a high back that reached the middle of Alea’s chest. It had been a piece from her mother’s childhood, handed down from generation to generation from the seventeenth century. It would survive a bullet better than she would.
Yasmin huffed a breath from her mouth in a frustrated sigh, but a grim light hit her eyes, and she leveled that gun again. “Fine. I’ll put them on you afterwards.”
Oliver was still fighting, now almost to his knees. “Am I supposed to have shot myself in the head from ten feet away? You know the rest of the world watches TV. Everyone knows that the police can figure out the distance a gun was fired from. You need to be closer. You need to make this look like I shot myself in the head and my arms aren’t that long, Yas. You always sucked at math.”
If there was one thing Yasmin loved more than her clothes and shoes and money, it was complaining about how terrible things had been for her.
Yasmin’s face went a dull red. “Well, how could I compete with the egghead? I just went to school. I didn’t have an army of tutors to do my work for me.”
Yasmin had gone to the world’s most expensive private schools, but that had never been enough for her. There was something deeply empty inside her cousin, something no amount of money or fame or possessions could ever fill. Even if Yasmin succeeded, she wouldn’t be happy. She would find all the flaws in life and hold them tight to her because she believed the world to be against her. She saw herself as a victim. It was how she excused everything she did. It was how she managed to live with herself. What a miserable existence. But it was all Yasmin understood.
Alea realized that she could have become just like Yasmin if she’d kept trekking down the path to empty bitterness. She would have shut out anyone who could have loved her, and resentment would have ruled her life. Her men had saved her from that. The island had saved her, and now she wanted life and love in the real world, too. It wouldn’t be easy, but nothing worthwhile was. That simple truth was what Yasmin had never understood.
“This isn’t going to work, Yasmin. No one is going to save you from your short sightedness this time. Put the gun down, and I’ll talk to Talib about sending you to a place where you can get some help.” A psychiatric hospital would be a good place for Yasmin. They could figure out if she was a complete sociopath.
For the first time, Yas looked a little uncertain. “I can’t. I’m not going down for this.”
“I disagree, bitch,” Oliver’s words were guttural as though forced through sheer willpower from his chest.
Yasmin screamed and turned, her gun firing wildly, hitting the balcony doors and sending glass flying out. The sound filled the room and her ears, making her heart pound again. Now she had to decide which way to run toward safety.
Oliver shoved at Yasmin, toppling her and sending her to the floor. His dress shirt had turned a horrible muddy red and she could see the gray cast to his skin. His hands shook as he reached for his wife’s throat. Yasmin scrambled, the gun still in her hand. She kicked out and got to her knees.
The bedroom was too far away, and Yas had a direct line of sight. If she could get a shot off, it would likely hit Alea in the back.
Another little ping zipped through the air as Yasmin fired wildly.
Alea dashed to the doorway, sprinting as she looked back, trying to see what was happening with Oliver and Yasmin. Yasmin kicked out, catching Oliver’s chin and sending him flying. Alea heard his body fall, then another little ping.
She made it to the balcony before Yasmin turned. Alea forced herself to not breathe as she moved around the glass at her feet.
“Where did you go, bitch? Do you think I won’t find you? I don’t care about anything now. I just want to kill you! You wrecked everything! Everything!”
Alea clung to the marbled walls, inching away from the door. She had to get to the trellis and hope that she could still make it to one of the trees that were planted close. When she’d been a child, she’d been able to make it to the ground by jumping from the railing to the tree and shimmying down. Her aunt and uncles had been horrified. Talib had called her a little monkey. Who knew the skill might come in handy now. God, would the branches even hold her?
She heard a door slamming open. No doubt Yasmin was searching for her in the bedroom.
This was her one chance. She stepped across the glass, crunching it under her shoes and stepped up on the terrace railing. Shit. It was a long way down.
“Lea! Lea!”
“Lan?”
Landon stood on the ground beneath her, a gun in his hand. He quickly shoved it into his holster and held his arms up. “Jump, Lea. Jump and I’ll catch you. I swear I will. Jump, darlin’.”
“Got you,” Yasmin snarled as she came through the doors.
Alea jumped. No question about it. She would rather die trying to get to Lan than face down a bullet. She heard herself scream as she made the short trip from the second story.
Her breath huffed from her chest as she landed in strong, warm arms.
“I can kill you both.” Yasmin stood on the balcony, her gun in her hand.
Lan moved fast, turning so his back was to the gun, and he pressed Alea to the ground.
A loud report filled the air. That hadn’t been Yasmin’s gun with its silencer. Then whose?
“Thank god,” Lan whispered and pulled Alea upright.
Yasmin’s gun fell to the ground, her body slumping over the balcony railing. She hung there for a moment, eyes wide, as Dane and Cooper charged through, both with a semiautomatic in their hands.
Alea gasped in horror as Yasmin teetered, her body unbalanced, then tipped over the railing. She fell through the air, her blonde hair flipping with her body before she hit the ground with a sickening thud. A glance told Alea that Yas’s neck hung at an unnatural angle. She was dead.
Dane looked over the railing. “Is Alea okay?”
“I’ve got her,” Lan yelled. He scooped her up, holding her to his chest.
Alea stared at Yasmin’s dead body as he carried her away, brutally aware of just how close she’d come to a very similar end. She clung to Lan and cried.