AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Dressed head to toe in white, she should look like an angel. Her honey-blonde hair, the hair that she gave me, either hasn’t started graying or has been expertly dyed. Her makeup is minimal, only enough to accentuate her already elegant features. She looks perfectly put together. Just like always.
I want to spit in her face, but I can’t. I struggle against the gag, trying to tear it from my lips, holding her gaze.
I don’t recognize the woman in front of me. Not anymore.
When we first met in the warehouse, I could see something of the mother who had left me behind, who’d abandoned me and my father and sold out Landon Novak, the woman who’d faked her own death.
But all I see in front of me now is a coldhearted murderer, an obsessive woman who cares only for herself. She may have built up her own syndicate, but she doesn’t care for them in the way that Hale cares for his men, their wives, and their children. She won’t give a fuck if the muscled, stone-faced men standing on either side of her die—in fact, she would be the first to pull the trigger and blow their brains out if she had to.
Camilla only wants power, and she doesn’t care how she gets it.
I hate her with everything inside of me.
“I gave you the chance.” She sighs, looking almost sad. It’s just another lie, and I can see through it now. I don’t think Camilla is capable of feeling sorrow. She doesn’t feel anything other than arrogance and pride in what she’s doing right now. “I gave you the chance to come with me, to join me. All of this… the power, the money, it could have been yours, if you’d only listened to your mother.”
Working my jaw hard, I manage to loosen the gag around my mouth, spitting it out.
“I don’t want any of this,” I say hoarsely, struggling for air. “I don’t see power here. I don’t see money. I see a fucked up woman who is so desperate for both of those things that she’s stooped as low as it’s possible to get—selling other human lives. Turning perfectly innocent girls into slaves.”
“No one is innocent, Grace.” She shakes her head. “No one is good. I wish I could make you understand that.” She gestures at the girls gathered around the warehouse. “Any one of these women would shoot you themselves if I told them that was what it would take for them to walk free. Don’t you see? We all have to look out for ourselves. Help ourselves. Because no one else will.”
My mind settles into an eerie sort of calm as I listen to her talk. If I hadn’t already realized it, she’s proven beyond a shadow of a doubt how insane she is. How depraved.
“So all that talk about how badly you wanted to be free,” I say, laughing mirthlessly, “that whole story about how you hated being trapped in your marriage to Dad? Your solution to that was to build a business that’s based on stealing other women’s freedom from them? Can’t you fucking see how hypocritical that is?”
“It’s not hypocritical to do what needs to be done,” she says shortly. “I would offer you the chance to come back to me. To return to your rightful place by my side as my daughter, but I know it’s just foolishness to think that you would.”
Every time this woman opens her fucking mouth, she gives me another reason to hate her. I’m sick of this conversation, sick of hearing her try to justify her actions and reframe herself as the good guy.
But I need to keep her talking. I don’t know what she plans to do with me or with any of the women here, or when she plans to do it. And I don’t know if Agent Brady will take the text I sent him seriously enough to actually do anything about it.
Either way, I need to buy myself time.
If no one is coming for me, then I’ll need to figure out a way out of this myself, and I have no fucking idea how to do that yet.
“You have the softness of your father,” Camilla says, crouching down to my level. Her nails are painted bright red like mine were at our meeting, pointed into little sharp tips. “Sometimes I used to wonder how he did his job. He was always so gentle, so kind. Soft. Weak. Just like the men with whom you’re so obsessed.” She’s so calm, controlled, and emotionless. It’s fucking terrifying. “The Braddock twins. Novak’s boy. The quiet one. You were obsessed with them when you were younger, so I’m not surprised that you’ve run right back to them.”
“The Novaks would never stoop so low as to trade and sell other people, Camilla,” I snap.
She cocks an eyebrow, lifting her chin slightly. “Camilla? Since when have I become Camilla?”
“I’m not calling you mother anymore.” I spit out the word like it’s something disgusting. “You were never my mother in any shape or form. You never loved me like a mother should. If you loved me, it was because you saw yourself in me and you loved yourself.”
“You did always take after me,” she says slowly, watching me with glittering eyes. “But you got that stubbornness from your father.” Her voice hardens again, turning back into that woman I don’t know. “I gave you the chance, Grace, to have everything. You could have had everything with me, and yet you ran back to those boys. You don’t need men to make you happy—”
“I don’t,” I snap, “but you don’t need to be a man to be respected.” She flinches, and I know that my words have some dig. “We’re in a different time, Camilla. All of those boys? Those men treat me better than you ever did. Those men actually care about me,” I say, and my throat constricts, but I force myself to continue. “If you truly loved your daughter, would you tie her up here with other slaves you’re going to sell?”
This time, my voice breaks. “Dad loved you. He loved you so much. He respected you. But you were so fucking busy thinking about yourself, brooding over your own petty need for power. Power you could have found with him, power you could’ve shared.”
“You forget Grace, I didn’t love your father,” she says sharply. “I hated that man. Samuel was the worst of them all. Like I said he was soft, weak. I never understood why Damian took such a notice in him when he clearly wasn’t capable of doing his job properly. I always hoped you’d turn out more like me than your father, blinded by sentimentality.”
“I never want to be like you, Mom.” I hate that I say the word, but it just slips out of me. It’ll be the last goddamn time I say it. “I never want to be so fucked up in the head, so set on ambition, that I completely close myself off to humanity. What a miserable fucking world you must live in.”
A bitter laugh spills from me, and her lips twist, barely containing her irritation. Leaving me with the last word, she turns on her heel and clicks away back into the shadows.
As I stare after her, a soft whimper from my right catches my attention. Dragging my gaze away from where my mother disappeared, I search for the source of the sound.
Fuck.
