Page 55 of Flawed Revenge

Months ago, when they first started this plot of revenge, using Rose as bait, they’d come so close to catching Ridge Gardner. But the man had slipped through their fingers, escaping in a helicopter after the car he and Rose were in had crashed. They’d stopped to save her life before the car, with Rose still inside, could tip over the edge of a cliff.

Never once had any of them regretted that decision. Saving Rose’s life should have come first, and it had. Possibly the first thing they’d done in a decade that had made them feel like maybe they weren't the monsters Dr. Gardner had claimed he’d turned them into.

Now another helicopter was rising from the ground, lifting into the night.

Soon the others could see and hear it, too, and they all stood and watched as it got closer until it was flying right overhead.

While the others tensed, preparing for someone to start firing on him, Lion froze. Because he saw two pale faces staring down at him.

Kate and Ariella’s.

Whoever was on that helo had just abducted his girls.

March 18th

4:13 A.M.

So close but so very far away.

Kate clutched her daughter against her chest and looked out the window of the helicopter they’d been forced onto. Below her were trees, the forest spread out like a blanket beneath them, and between the trees she saw him.

Leo.

Right below her. If she thought she and her daughter would be blessed with a second miracle, then she’d find a way to throw herself and Ariella right out of there. As stupid as it sounded, she trusted that Leo would catch them when they fell.

For a whole decade, she’d been so angry with Leo she thought that she hated him, even when she’d learned the truth, she’d been unsure if she could ever trust him again. Not fully at least, because he’d gone too far in his attempts to push her away, so she never wanted to come and look for him.

But now she trusted him.

Enough to catch her.

Enough to save her even.

While it was too dark for her to tell, it felt like his gaze met hers, and she felt that promise. He was coming for her. He’d find her, and he’d save her. Save them both, and then he’d donate lifesaving bone marrow to their daughter and save her again. That she believed without a shadow of a doubt, because Leo could do anything.

Not because he had been injected with an experimental drug that gave him enhancements, but because he was her Leo. The boy she’d loved when they were kids and the man she’d given her body, heart, and soul to when she was eighteen. The man who had given her the most precious gift, their beautiful daughter, and the man who had ripped out both their hearts in a somewhat misguided attempt to save them all. Her Leo would fight for them until his dying breath, and he had no intention of dying, not while she and their daughter weren't safe.

It might be stupid to believe that Leo could defy odds like that, cheat death, but Kate knew deep down in her soul that he was coming for her.

The helicopter kept moving, and she could no longer make out the spot where she’d seen Leo and the others, so Kate reluctantly shifted her gaze back to the woman watching her with shrewd green eyes. She knew what her job was. It was to stay alive, protect their daughter, and wait. If she could get a little intel from River Gardner in the meantime, she wouldn't hesitate to gather it.

“Do you want them dead or alive?” Kate asked, deciding she may as well get straight to the point. River had said she would have been willing to kill everyone, but she had to know if that was the woman’s goal or if it was just a worst-case scenario.

River studied her for a moment. “You still love him. I hazard a guess you never stopped.”

“My love life is really that important to you?”

“You haven’t had a love life as far as I can tell for the last decade. Was he your first?”

“He’s my only,” Kate said simply. There had never been a time when she had been able to look at another man and imagine his hands on her body. It had always been Leo. It was why she’d held onto her virginity through high school, letting any of those boys touch her felt wrong. Even after he’d dumped her, she hadn't been able to allow another man to touch her. It was silly, but it was true, she was Leo’s, and he was hers. Nothing could change that.

“I admire that level of commitment, of love, of connection. Too bad I didn't find a partner who loved me with that same level of devotion that even when we were apart, he was still mine.”

“I don’t know what that means,” she said. From what she knew about Rose’s family history, her parents had been scientists and survivalists, who lived in a small cabin that was blown up one Christmas, killing them and some extended family, but leaving Rose and Ridge alive.

Obviously, that wasn't the case since River Gardner was sitting opposite her right now.

Rose had only been four when her parents supposedly died. She didn't have many memories of them, or knowledge of what their marriage had been like, but River was making it sound like it hadn't been a happy one. Did that mean that Rose’s father was really dead? Or was he wherever River was taking them?