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He was genuinely surprised. She was still shocked.
“Where’s Wagner, Ford?” She glanced at the door to the other office.
“Wagner left earlier.” He shook his head in bemusement. “I haven’t seen him all evening.”
“Wagner’s here.” She walked farther into the room, lowering her weapon on the far door as it slowly opened.
If she lived a hundred years she would never forget the sight that met her eyes.
Mary’s delicate face was bruised. Her eyes were nearly swollen shut, her lips swollen, her cheek black and blue. Dear God, Wagner had hit her.
He had her braced in front of his body, a smile on his face, a gun at her temple.
“Wagner.” Ford’s voice was strangled as his son stepped into the room using Jules as a shield. “My God . . .”
“Bailey.” Mary’s voice was thin, betrayed. Tears leaked from her swollen eyes and dripped down her face. “Bailey, what’s going on?”
Bailey stared at Wagner in shock. This wasn’t the man she had been raised with. The man she had thought of as a brother at one time.
“Why?” she whispered.
“She didn’t want to help me.” Wagner shrugged as though it were all perfectly acceptable. “I had to teach her better. Just as I always had to teach Anna better.” He glared at his father’s pale, shocked face.
Bailey shook her head slowly. “It was Ford,” she whispered again. “He was the one beating Anna and your mother.”
Ford’s head swung around to her, his face almost dazed with shock now as Wagner laughed.
“Father is a wuss. He wouldn’t have dared to raise his hand to either of them. The few times Mother tried to tell him, he wouldn’t accept it. Would you, Pop?”
Ford turned back to his son. He was visibly shaking now.
There was so much pain in his eyes, his face.
“What have you done, Wagner?” he whispered. “My God, what have you turned into?”
“A better man than you?” Wagner sneered. “My fortune is twice yours by now, old man. I was smarter and better and you were never smart enough to see it, were you?”
Ford shook his head as he stared at Jules, then back to Wagner. “You call this smarter, better? Abusing those who love you? Who trust you? Betraying them?”
“They’re like lambs, they need guidance,” Wagner snapped. “Just like Mother and Anna. I told you those two bitches were trouble but you wouldn’t listen, would you? You just had to let them go that night, didn’t you? You couldn’t see sense. They would have destroyed us. Destroyed me.”
“They would have convinced Ford that you were the monster you were,” Bailey said painfully, imagining the hell she must have lived with. “To know your child was a monster, that there was something this twisted inside him must have been a horrible weight on her shoulders.”
“She thought she could actually get away from me,” he screamed back at her. “That I’d ever let either of them go. I owned them. They belonged to me and refused to see it.”
“God, are you insane?” Ford suddenly yelled back at him. “You don’t possess people, Wagner.”
“I possessed them,” he sneered. “I owned them. Just as I own the rest of you.”
“And the disk of your father ordering Orion to kill Anna and her mother? My parents?” She felt as though she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t assimilate what was happening around her.
He laughed at that, too. “Computers are such amazing inventions, as is the software now available. His insane assistant thought he could blackmail me with that disk. I let him believe he could for a while, then got rid of him when the time was right.” He shrugged again as though it didn’t matter. “I’ve been smarter than you, Bailey. Admit it.”
She nodded slowly as she stared back at Jules’s dazed face. “You were smarter than me,” she said, barely believing what was happening around her now.
“I own you too, Bailey,” he informed her cruelly. “I’ve maneuvered you for years, tested you, drawn you in.”
“And I fooled you, didn’t I?” she mocked him suddenly. “You never suspected, did you, Wagner? Not at first, not until tonight.”
