Page 139 of Savage Surrender

She turns toward the window while I start the car. We drive the rest of the way with the heater blowing against my wet shirt and silence. Twice, I almost apologize. I can’t find a version that doesn’t confess too much or make her responsible for the thing I refused to do.

At her school, she opens her door, then glances back at me. Her face has smoothed out. I can’t tell if the hurt is gone or if she’s tucked it somewhere I can’t see.

“Text me after.”

“After what?”

“Your meeting.” She adjusts the strap of her bag. “Just tell me if he was awful about it. Or don’t. It’s whatever.”

It isn’t whatever. I want to pull her back into the car and ask what she thought was about to happen in the church parking lot. What she wanted to happen. Instead, I watch her close the door and walk away.

My father’s fingers clamp around my jaw, and his knuckles are bright red. I stare at them.

“Are you able to understand me?” His voice is deeply controlled. The lapse lasted long enough to put me on the floor, and now he’s locking it back up. Some old part of me is relieved. That’s what humiliates me. My body still understands his control as safety. The more control I gave him, the less interest he had in me.

“Yes.”

He lets go and stands. Owen is closest, and I hear him drag in a breath through his hood. Tristan must be behind me because I can’t see him, but Ezra is lying on the ground on Owen’s other side. I catch a small movement at his wrists. He’s working on the ropes. I’ve tried, but they’re too tight. There’s no give.

“Tell me what you did.”

He lets the question linger, and my mind starts trying to satisfy him before I can stop it. Even now, tied at his feet, I can feel the report forming.

I lock my mouth shut.

“Everything you touched,” he says eventually, “will be returned. I’ve spent two days being assured by intelligent people that the assets can be traced while the people doing the tracing fail to find them.”

I’m smart enough to understand that what he needs from me is the only thing keeping me alive right now.

“Where is my money?” He wipes a spot of my blood from his knuckle with his thumb. “Let me speak clearly so you understand. You can tell me where the money is, or I will kill her. But first, I’ll let Alex and Vincent take their aggression out on her until her body gives out. Then I’ll shoot her in the head.”

Sick crawls up my throat, and I swallow it back down.

“The money is gone.”

I begin to suffocate under his glare. He’d enjoy killing me.

“You couldn’t have done that alone. Tell me who,” he says. “Then we can begin correcting this.”

Correcting.

I asked Mason to find Juliette after the night he admitted he abandoned her. I called it due diligence because I needed to know the truth.

“Juliette,” I say, and his eyebrows rise slightly, like I’ve caught him off guard.

“What about her?”

His voice is almost bored. I wonder how long she waited for such an unworthy mate.

“You left out the rest of the story.”

His eyes narrow slightly and irritation catches at the corner of his mouth.

“She’s dead.”

William inhales deeply, and his gaze slips past me. I want to find something human in him, if only for selfish reasons. Horror. Regret. Something that would make me feel less like I came from an empty place.

“Her death was reported to me,” he says. “The hospital called when she was sick. She wouldn’t eat. Failure to thrive is what they called it. I wasn’t qualified to care for her.”