Chasing His Brother's Bride

Captured

She saw the car pulling immediately behind hers as she parked in her driveway and felt dread fill her to the brim.

The office today had been quiet. Too quiet. They’d done their jobs and had even gotten the report done with the three of them working through lunch. Because they’d had all the information from the last three years, since her hire, already well organized, it had been to get the two prior years sorted and they did it. Mordecai had a report he could present to Brixton Beckwith ready to go for Monday and she was going to drink a bottle of wine in a bubble bath after putting Pia to bed. Or it had been the plan.

Now as the tall man in a suit approached her driver’s side door, she wondered if the only bathing she was going to have would be water torture. It had been one of Val’s favorites. To hold her head under water until she passed out, revive her, and start over. She felt sick to her stomach as she looked in the rear-view mirror.

He knocked once on the window and she looked up and exhaled slowly and nodded. This was how it was going to go down. She should have packed up Pia last night and run. She prayed they let her little girl live. Dumb. She was dumb. They would have chased her had she run but at least she’d have had a head start. Here, she was a sitting duck. Regret was aching.

She unlocked the car door and he pulled it open. She got out and stood tall, jutting her chin forward. She wasn’t going to go out like a mouse. If she was going to take one last beating by a Cacciola, she was looking the bastard in the eye when he did it.

“Jolie.”

“Mr. Beckwith,” she met his gaze directly.

“You should have identified yourself the minute you saw me yesterday and knew I took over the company. My father has been looking for you.”

“I’m not interested in having a conversation with either of you.”

“You don’t get a choice.”

“Why? I’ve kept my mouth shut for six years. Let’s pretend you never saw me and I’ll pack up and be gone in the hour.”

“Not happening. We have to talk. There are things you were witness to, including my brother’s murder.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“You were the last one to see him alive and you had motive.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Beckwith. I wish I’d been the one to pull the trigger and splatter his brain matter all over the walls but given the amount of rage I still feel to this day thinking of him, I would think one shot wouldn’t have been enough. I’d have emptied an entire magazine into his face.” She saw the brief moment of surprise in his eyes before he masked it. He’d thought she was going to be meek.

“Hi Jolie!” her neighbor waved as she got home from work. “Spring is finally coming! Do you have a date?” the woman wiggled her eyebrows.

“No. My boss,” she waved at him, “he’s picking up some work I finished for him.”

“In the house now,” he whispered. “We aren’t doing this in public.”

“I’m not letting you in my house. The minute you’re in my house, I’m dead.”

“I’m not here to kill you, Jolie. Just to talk. I need to know what you saw and what you did.”

“I saw nothing. I heard nothing. I did nothing. Please, let me go,” she wasn’t above begging. Pia’s life was on the line. Unlike her father who didn’t fight for her, she would fight to the death for her little girl.

“I said in the house. Now.”

“Please.” She gripped the front of his black coat in a fist. “I swear, my lips are sealed.”

“Jolie for the love of f*****g god get in the house before I make Malik carry you in.”

She swallowed and then moved to the back seat and he moved in front of her. “I just need –” she put her hand on the back door handle and saw him roll his eyes. He was standing directly behind her and when she bent over her ass made contact with his thigh and he stepped back and away. She unbuckled the sleeping child from her car seat and picked her up in her arms and turned to face him. “Okay, let’s go. Please don’t hurt her,” she whispered as a single fat tear rolled down her cheek as she rested her face on the thick mess of black hair. Holding her daughter made it real.

When she’d picked Pia up today, they reported she’d been a wild child. She’d punched Norman in the face for calling her shorty. She’d refused to eat the jam sandwich and had jumped on it. By five she’d had a full-blown fever and by the time Jolie had arrived to the after-care program, she’d had to take her straight to the clinic. The clinic had prescribed a round of antibiotics for an ear infection and had given her a mild pain medication and fever reducer on the spot.

Now the child was sound asleep and with luck wouldn’t bear witness to her mother’s demise.

She missed the astonished exchange of glances between the two men behind her as they escorted her into the house. She looked to Brixton. “May I put her to her bed? It’s right down the hall. Please?”

“No. I don’t know what you have hidden down there. Put her there,” he motioned to the sofa.

She lay Pia on the sofa and pulled her boots and heavy winter coat off. Her cheeks were rosy and warm to the touch but her skin was significantly cooler than it had been when she’d picked her up. “She has an ear infection. She’s not feeling well.” She paused, “I left her antibiotics in the car.”

“You can get them after.” He motioned to the kitchen table. “Sit.”

She took the seat at the table which still had the tablecloth draped the wrong way for Pia’s cave.

“Where’s her father?”

“Dead.” She met his eyes straight on and noted the surprise in them.

“She can’t be more than three,” Malik commented from the far side of the room where he studied the sleeping child. “Are you saying she’s Val’s?”

“She’s mine.” She corrected with a fierceness she hadn’t know she possessed.

“Age? Now, Jolie. I’m done with this s**t,” Brix glared at her as he leaned on the table. “How are you saying this kid is Val’s? He beat you to an inch of your life. No way a baby survived that. How old is the kid?”

“She’s five. The last night with Val, he raped me at least a half dozen times. He was too wasted to even think of a condom. I wasn’t allowed to take birth control because he said it made me bitchy. He’d already beat one baby out of me about four months before he died,” she didn’t miss the intake of air from the bodyguard. “The night he died he had guys in. I disrespected him by not greeting him at the door and blowing him in their presence. He punished me. He went to the living room and was furious his friends had all left. I got a second beating because he felt they left because of me and he left me on the floor of the bathroom after he smashed my head off the tiles. I woke up to hearing him yelling in the living room about you, actually.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. He was on a kick about you for the rest of the night, from what I remember. He came back later and did the thing he did where he apologized for hurting me. Told me you could have all the whores in the world but you’d never have what he had in a woman who loved him like I did.” She sneered as she stared at the scratch marks on her wooden kitchen table, tracing her fingers over where Pia had carved with her fork when she hadn’t been looking. She felt the burning of vomit in her throat as she recalled the events of the night aloud only for the second time in her life. The first time had been to Opal two and a half years ago. “He told me he loved me and how I was so lucky to have a man like him love me like he did and then he ‘made love’” she air-quoted, “to me in his very special way during which he choked me out and I don’t remember anything after I passed out until I woke up in the hospital. The nurses were talking about how his big brother was coming to see me and I knew you would finish the job he started and I ran. Eight weeks later I found out I was pregnant. The night he died he got me pregnant. I considered an abortion but couldn’t do it. Sat in the chair, in the stirrups with the IV in my arm ready to end the pregnancy and then couldn’t go through with it. She was born five weeks early. I didn’t have health insurance at the time,” she gave a dry chuckle, “six years later, I’m still paying off the hospital bills for the minimalistic treatment they gave her. Pia’s small for her age because she was a preemie. I’m also not very tall and my dad’s nickname for me was squirt so she probably has her mother’s stature to start with. My mother was only five foot four. I’m five-five.”

“When is her birthday?”

“November. She’ll be six in November.”

“Your father didn’t say anything to my father.”

“I didn’t tell him. We’re not exactly on speaking terms.”

“Why?”

He seemed perplexed by her words.

“Are you kidding? He admitted to me when I was in the hospital bed he never once tried to get me back. He asked Val how I was and Val said I was fine. He said he knew I wasn’t fine but didn’t dare ask your father to intervene. He could have asked your dad. He could have called the cops. He could have even tried but he was too scared.” She pointed to the sleeping child, “her? If someone took her from me, I’d be fighting them to the death to get her back. I’d be on every cops hate list because I’d be hounding them. I’d exhaust every penny I had to find her. I would sell my f*****g soul to the devil to get her back and he left me without even a second thought. f**k him.”

“We’ve been searching for you under Segreto. Why Haversham?”

“It’s my legal name. It’s on my birth certificate. I was enrolled in school as Segreto because my father paid my tuition and most people who knew him presumed our name was Segreto but my name on my birth certificate, my driver’s license and my social security number are all Haversham.”

“Your father gave us documentation as Segreto.” He was clearly pissed off about it “Do the feds think you’re a Segreto?”

“No but about a week after I arrived here, they cornered me and brought me in for questioning. I told them I was a prisoner who spent eight months tied to a bed being brutally victimized by a kidnapper and never was permitted to leave the room. I didn’t know anything. They believed me. They left me alone.”

“We have a problem,” he swung a chair backwards and sat down on it, resting his forearms on the back. “You know things. Val was working a special project for my father and instead of doing it where he was supposed to be doing it, he stupidly brought it home with him.” He pointed to her, “you know all about it.”

She knew every bit of it but she was keeping her mouth shut. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Val kept me locked in the bedroom most of the time.”

“Now see,” he wagged his finger disapprovingly, his dark eyes so much like Val’s, yet so different, burning at her with annoyance. “I personally interrogated all of his friends and they all said the same thing. He kept you,” he clicked his tongue when she looked away, “so close to his side all the time it made them all uncomfortable. One of the guys said he even had you on his lap once when he was weighing out the gold on his kitchen table, accused you of touching it and beat you right in front of them all.”

She kept her lips shut and her eyes averted. If he knew she knew, why was he doing this? The playing of games with people’s emotions and spirit were obviously a family characteristic. He had been sent to kill her. She remembered Val telling her the story of how Brixton had stabbed a man with a steak knife right through the chest while sitting at a family dinner because he’d insulted their father. The man in front of her might be a gorgeous specimen of a man but he was a murderous bastard as much as his father and brother were.

She swallowed and looked up finally to meet the eyes of the man sent to deal with her. “If you’re going to kill me, can you do me a favor? She’s a Cacciola. Your dad won’t hurt her, will he? You can do what you want to with me but maybe he can find a nice family for her to be safe? I know I don’t get out of here because I’m a risk but please don’t hurt her.” She heard her voice cracking with the emotions she was trying to hold back. Her throat felt clogged and painful. “She didn’t ask for this. She is innocent.”

“What do you know?” his words were carefully enunciated and he didn’t dispute her belief she was going to die.

She knew he was growing impatient with her and she wiped the tears off her cheeks and met his direct gaze. “Valentin was supposed to be bringing drugs in from a Columbian named Juan Rueda and paying him out in gold your father was bringing in from Europe. Val was supposed to be meeting the cargo and then taking the smaller packages from the shipping containers and bringing them to a warehouse. He would take the gold he picked up and exchange it for the drugs. Instead of taking them to the warehouse, he was bringing them home. He was weighing everything at home. He weighed the gold at home. He weighed the coke at home. He would take an ounce or two off them and put them into a safe.”

“The boys said he put it in the fridge.”

“When they were there. The minute they left, he pushed the sofa, rolled the rug, and put everything in the safe on the floor. I always wondered how he got a safe so big into the condo and none of his friends knew about it. Anyway, it’s where he put it all, the gold anyway. The coke he put up his nose in vast quantities. I can’t tell you how many times I prayed for him to overdose so I could escape.”

He looked to Malik and nodded and the man walked out of the house.

“Where is he going?”

“To call our guy in Vegas to verify your story. Nine hundred thousand dollars worth of gold went missing over a six-month period and my father was led to believe he was being shorted on the shipping end. It almost caused a war between my father and Juan. I personally shipped a quantity of gold from Italy and the week Val died the shipment was received in Vegas. Val picked it up and I was there and confirmed the package was untouched. Of the million-dollar shipment of gold, fifty grand went missing. The night he died, he missed a meeting with me and my father to discuss the fact one of his guys was shafting him. It never once dawned on my father it was Val. He thought perhaps, you might know where it was.”

“He thought I took it,” she almost laughed at the absurdity. “I was afraid to pee without permission and you think I was stupid enough to take gold from Val’s stash? When I escaped, I stole fifty bucks from a nurse’s wallet left at their station when a code red was called. I took a cab to my father’s house in the most excruciating pain of my life. I grabbed a suitcase of clothes and my banking card. I made my way to the bus station. Took every single penny I could from my bank account and I got the hell out of Vegas. I got my arm patched up in Colorado. In Nebraska, a nice elderly lady took me to her house and I stayed at her place a month until my ribs healed. Then a nosy local sheriff ran my name in a data base and the feds showed up in town wanting to talk to me. She had her son drive me to the bus station before they caught up to me. He gave me a thousand dollars and told me to take as many buses in as many crazy directions as possible and not to stop until I finally felt nobody was looking for me. I stopped here when I was too tired to run any more.”

The rest of the conversation was stalled as the sound of a wailing cry pierced the air and Pia’s sobs of pain interrupted them. So much for her daughter not witnessing her death.