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I eyed him. He was middle-aged and nondescript, head to toe—brown hair, dark shades, medium build, face deadpan.
I had a very bad feeling. "Fuck you," I said succinctly, eyeing the open door narrowly.
My cell started ringing. It was Adelaide again. "Do you have her?" she asked by way of greeting.
"He doesn't," I said, my temper boiling. I really wanted to hit something. Adelaide's face particularly.
She made a tsking noise over the phone. "Always difficult, even when you don't have a leg to stand on. Give him the phone and get into the car."
"What do you want?" I was already so fed up with her that I was ready to say to hell with the consequences.
It was a problem, except that my rage was almost a comfort just then, for the simple reason that the alternative was worse. If I was focused on my anger, I wasn't worrying about the fact that my life, and my options had just narrowed drastically.
"As I told you, I'd like to talk," Adelaide said into my ear, sounding almost reasonable, which let me know that she was full of it. "In person. I think we can work something out. I want you out of my son's life, and you want to stay out of prison. We're both motivated. This can be productive."
I wasn't sure what I could have done, I felt pretty cornered, but I was saved from having to decide by the sudden and very welcome appearance of Dante.
His car pulled up, he jumped out, and whisked me away. I barely had time to hang up on his mother before he'd bundled me into his car and started driving away. It was over in seconds.
His hands on the steering wheel were shaking. "What was that? Was that one of my mother's henchmen?"
"Yes. She was trying to get me to go with him. She said she wanted to talk. She knows about us, Dante."
He started cursing and did not stop until we were nearly at the house. "Were you actually going to go with him?" he finally asked incredulously.
"I don't know. Maybe. She wasn't exactly giving me a choice."
"Never deal with her by yourself," he told me. "Never go anywhere with her. Never engage her. If she bothers you, and I'm not around, you fucking wait for me."
We were home by then, and he didn't even allow me to respond. He was out of the car, on his phone, pacing.
"Adelaide knows," he was saying. "Yes. She tried to grab Scarlett. Sent one of her henchmen to pick her up right outside the studio." He paused, gripping a hand into his hair. "Yes. Fine. Fine. We need to figure this out and fast. We're running out of options here." He hung up and looked at me. "We need to meet up with Bastian. We've been working on some things, but we thought we had more time. Now we need to focus on plan B. Do you want to grab anything from the house before we go?"
"Where exactly are we going?" I worried about filming, but felt silly about it. What would the movie even matter if I went to jail tomorrow?
"Not far. Bastian's already here, so we'll meet him at his hotel."
This was news to me, and so was the plan B. And the plan A, for that matter.
We were driving again before I brought it up. "You're getting into that habit again. Keeping things from me. I know you think it's to protect me, but I want to know the truth more than I want to be protected, and I think you owe it to me to start respecting that."
He just nodded, mouth tight. "I do. I know it. And I'll bring you up to speed on everything tonight. If it makes you feel better, I don't even know some of it. Bastian's been doing some dirty work of his own, but he seems to think he has a solution for us."
It was becoming clear that Dante had nothing on Bastian in the scheming department. It was almost impressive. One thing was for sure, they were both, without question Durants.
The hotel was only twenty minutes away. Bastian was on the top floor, and he didn't have a room, he had a penthouse suite. And he wasn't alone.
He opened the door for us and led us straight into a large room with a bar.
A bar and a drunk Leo.
"Oh God, why is he here?" just sort of slipped out. Because Leo.
He shot me a very unfriendly look.
I returned it in spades.
"You can all hate each other later," Bastian said reasonably. "Right now, you need to work together. Leo has some pieces of this puzzle and a vested interest in seeing justice done. Isn't that right, Leo?"
