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“Exactly, no message means that it’s not a threat,” I reason. “Surely, if it was meant to be a threat, there’d have been wording on it or a cross drawn over one of our faces or something.”
“This isn’t an episode of some police procedural.” Dad shoves his chair back from the table, his expression grim and his hands curled into fists. “This is real life, Vincent, and it’s a real threat.”
“It’s not a threat,” I repeat. “It’s a picture of me kissing someone. You’ve never freaked out about those surfacing before, and let’s face it. There have been a few posted on social media. I’ll accept that it’s weird that it was emailed to Olivia, but have any of you thought of the fact that it could’ve been emailed to her just because she’s on our security team? It could be a fluke that she also happens to be the girl I’m kissing.”
“If you believe that, you’re naive,” Dad hisses at me through clenched teeth. I’ve never seen him like this, but Mike clearly has.
“John,” he murmurs, turning in his chair to look at Dad instead of me for a beat. “This isn’t Joe we’re dealing with. It’s not going to end the same way.” He looks back at me. “As for your assertion that it isn’t necessarily the same person, I agree. While it’s highly unlikely, it is possible that one of your followers saw you out and about, took the picture, and sent it to Olivia because they know who she is as well. You’ve all been in the public eye all your lives to a certain extent, so we can’t completely discount it as a possibility, and we’re looking into it. The situation is evolving, though, which means we have to evolve with it.”
“What he means,” Dad says, looking at me with thunder in his eyes when he faces me again, “is that you will do as you’re told. You need to act like a fucking grownup for once in your life and listen to us.”
“I’ve been listening to you, but—”
“If you insist on acting like a child here, Vincent, I swear to God that we’re going to start treating you like one,” Dad snaps, and his tone is so sharp that even Maxim sits up a little straighter. “I will move you into the room with your Mom and me. I’ll stop your cards and start paying your salary into a trust account that you won’t get access to until you’re fifty. I’ll sell your apartment back in New York and have all your stuff moved into storage. You’ll be back in your childhood bedroom so fast when we get home it’ll make your head spin.”
My jaw just about hits the floor. “You can’t do that.”
“I’m Jonathan fucking Moore. There’s not much I can’t do, son. This is about your safety, and there are no lines I will not cross to make sure nothing happens to you. You know what happened to my brother. Fuck, Vince, you’re named after your uncle who got shot by a psychopath. Nobody is looking for history to repeat itself.”
“Seriously, you’re going to play that card?” I grumble, but it was clearly the wrong thing to say.
“It’s not a fucking card, and I’m not playing!” There’s so much emotion in his voice that he sounds hoarse. Then he suddenly jabs his finger toward Maxim. “My brother died right in front of me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Look at your brother. Imagine how you would feel if someone put a gun to his head right now and pulled the trigger, because that might be the reality of how he’ll feel in the future if something happens to you just because you refuse to pull your head out of your fucking ass.”
It dawns on me then that what happened to my uncle is the reason everyone is acting the way they are. They’ve been through something like this before, and it ended in tragedy. Hell, my mother was even kidnapped by the same guy before they eventually caught up to him.
I never knew my uncle, and as cold as it sounds, I’ve never given much thought to my namesake. Maxim knew him, though. For the first five years of his life, Vincent raised him like he was his own. My dad didn’t even know of my brother’s existence at the time, and my uncle stepped in to help my mom with the baby.
As I look at my brother now that my dad has brought it up, it suddenly strikes me that he looks terrified and exhausted. I’ve never seen him like this either. He was young when Vincent Sr. died, but he remembers flashes of everything that happened.
He gets up slowly, approaching our dad and murmuring to him in low tones until I feel the tension in the room subsiding as he slowly reins in the situation. Once he’s done with our dad, he turns to me with this hollow, pained look in his eyes.
“Please just listen to what everyone is saying, Vincent,” he practically pleads with me. “Just stay in the hotel for now. If we don’t need to worry about where you are and keeping you safe while you’re out, everyone will be able to function much better, and we’ll find the guy that much faster. It’s not so bad to have to stay in the hotels for a little while. You can still work. You can hit the gym and the pool and hang out with everyone in your room. It’s not even so different from what you’ve been doing for the last few weeks anyway. Just be responsible. Just for now. Please?”
Mike clears his throat, drawing my attention back to him. “Olivia has already agreed that she will do what we’re asking you to. She’s not leaving the hotel for the foreseeable future either. Since she won’t be able to stay on her assignment if you do decide to act against us and leave the hotel, that means I’ll have to put someone else on you. An army of someone elses actually. Come what may, you will not be roaming the streets alone, and you can be damn sure that the others won’t be as easy on you as Olivia has been.”
The words hit me like a mortar shell. All the pieces to the puzzle suddenly snap together in my head, and it feels like the walls are closing in on me. “Assignment? You put her on me? That’s why she’s been around all the time?”
He nods once, his eyes expressionless. “We needed someone with you to keep an eye on you and let us know if you ever got in trouble. Olivia will be keeping you as a client, but she’ll be working with us as a team now on tracking down your stalker.”
I hear him say it, but it’s like my brain is slowly imploding with all the new information I’m trying to process. Anger rips through me when I think back over the last month or so since we’ve been overseas. How Olivia has always been right there with me. How she suddenlychanged. How she’d never leave until I was ready to go home.
It all makes sense now, and it’s such an obvious answer that I feel stupid that it didn’t even cross my mind. The worst of everything is that it was always a possibility that she could’ve been working, which means that I don’t only feel stupid for not realizing it. I am stupid. It’s literally part of her job to keep an eye on us when the situation calls for it, and I also knew that everyone else thought the situation called for it.
I should’ve fucking known. I should never have trusted her. I should never have fucking kissed her. But now that I have, I know I can never not have done it. In the back of my mind, even while we’ve been talking about all this, that kiss has been playing out over and over again.
And now I find out that she hasn’t changed. I find out that the only reason she’s even been hanging out with me is because she wasassignedto me. It’s a fucking blow all right. Not in the least because I actually thought I was starting to like her.
But she hasn’t changed. Inside, she’s still the same tattling, condescending, judgmental little goody-two-shoes she’s always been. In fact, I’m one hundred percent sure now that she’s the one who told them about the party. She’s probably been writing progress reports on everything we did together since the beginning of this leg of the tour.
I wonder if she wrote in her report how wet her pussy was for me on that fucking bus.Even better, I wonder what she’d do if I told her precious daddy about it now. Two can play that game, and if she wants to fucking tell them about everything I do and say, I can do the same.
But I don’t.
Because if I do, they’ll chalk it up to me being exactly as childish as they all assume I am. But I’m better than that. I’m not a fucking child, and I won’t be treated like one. I’ll concede for now, but whatever that flirtation was that Olivia and I had going is over.
“Fine,” I finally say, causing all of them, who have since turned to talk to each other, to look back at me. “I’ll stay in the hotel, but I want to be kept up to date and in the loop, and you can put any one of the security people on me except her. If she so much as breathes in my direction, I’m leaving. The hotel. The tour. My job. I’ll fucking leave it all behind and start over somewhere else, and there won’t be a damn thing anyone can do to stop me.”
It’s dramatic, I know, but I don’t care. If they can all overreact because of a fucking picture, I can overreact when I find out that the girl I can’t stop thinking about still hates me just as much as she always has—she’s only been pretending not to for the sake of her job.
