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She expected him to be brutal. He was her captor, and his reputation was well known. But Willow. There was someone who had destroyed her without laying a finger on her. Willow and Digby had been extracted while she was being thrashed. They must have heard her cries as they crept from the house. Someone could have done something, and nobody had done anything.
That was why Willow was worse. Willow was supposed to be her friend, and Willow had betrayed her so deeply she could barely stand it. She'd left her to be tortured and probably killed by Angelo Vitali. If Bobby hadn’t intervened…
Gemma balled one hand into a fist and ground it into the palm of the other. She could not believe this was happening. For so long, she'd been a faithful friend to Willow. She'd become her accomplice without even noticing it, really. And in the end, she'd meant less than nothing.
"Come here," Angelo said gently, easing her up from his lap.
She allowed him to hold her in his arms, surprised that he wanted to. She could smell his Angelo-ness, feel the stubble of his chin against the top of her head. He was leaner than Bobby, and being held by him felt very different. A long time ago, she had seen a picture of some poor deer being held by a lion in an 'embrace.' That was how she felt. Angelo had made some amends, but he was still a threat.
Dangerous or no, she was curled up against his suited body, still completely naked. Angelo had punished her harshly, and without cause, there was no denying that. Taking comfort in this was foolish. But she couldn’t help herself. There were some truths which defied sanity, and one of them was that she felt safe when Angelo held her. God, she was fucked up.
"We're not going to be able to get them back, are we? Willow, and Digby. They're gone." Bobby started talking business again.
"While they live, Mark, Tilly, and the child will always be unsafe. We don't want them back." Angelo reached over and took a long swig of something high proof before finishing his sentence: "We want them dead."
“How are we going to find them? They could be anywhere.”
Gemma found herself on the verge of doing something she truly thought she would never do.
"I know where you can find them."
"You do?" Angelo looked down at her.
"Willow has a retreat on an island. She told me about it when she purchased it. We went there together to look at it. That's what I did. I witnessed all the little glories she couldn't share with anybody else. I know Willow better than anybody else. I can help you get her."
"You never mentioned that before," Bobby said.
"She never left me for dead before."
Angelo gave her a little squeeze. "Good girl," he purred.
Climax
An uninvited visitor tip-toed through the halls of a remote Grecian mansion. She should have been more nervous than she was, but there was some destined finality to the situation which kept her moving.
Gemma had managed to find a dress to wear, which was infinitely preferable to being the naked animal kept writhing on the laps of dangerous men. Clothed, she almost felt like a real woman again.
There should have been security everywhere, but there wasn't. Willow and Digby were so confident in their escape and triumph that they no longer had hardly any armed men around them. Even if they had, Gemma would not have had any issue getting into the house. She had been there many times before and knew all the staff.
“Jolly good!”
She heard voices nearby, and approached carefully. She wanted to hear what they were talking about, the two absolute bloody bastards.
Willow tipped her glass to her brother. "Well done," she smiled. "Very well done."
"Sorry about your friend," Digby drawled.
"I have many friends. I have only one brother. And now we have the location of the girl and the baby. It should be a matter of hours before they are eliminated, and the Braybrooke fortune falls to us."
Gemma took a deep breath. So it was true. Willow had dismissed her outright, written her off like a bad debt. All their years of friendship had culminated in this moment of pure greed. She wished she was like Angelo or Bobby, but she wasn't. She couldn't go charging in there like the very incarnation of vengeance. Instead, she plastered a happy, half-stupid smile across her face and turned the corner.
"Oh, hello!"
It wasn't the most dramatic entrance, but it worked. Willow looked as though she had seen a ghost. Her face paled, and her jaw dropped, but she took all of 0.2 seconds to recover.
"Gemma! You escaped! And you made your way here! To the island I forgot I told you about!"
Willow went toward her old friend with extended arms and a smile that Gemma realized she should always have known was painted on. Willow was cold at her core. In the past, Gemma had mistaken it for refinement and good breeding, but it was neither of those two things. It was garden variety, bog standard narcissism. Nothing particularly special about it.
