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Ava looked to Cole, and he shrugged, not having any idea who the man was. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or sweat on it that he didn’t know the name. It didn’t make a difference to his heart pounding in his chest or his gut clenching painfully.
“Collingwood is a contact of one of the principal agents at City Space, a man named Charles Frazer. Frazer briefed Collingwood, but there was a third person involved—the brains and bank behind the operation.”
“Who?” Ava asked, reaching for Cole again.
He pulled her tight against him, sure she could feel his pulse fluttering under his skin and his heart beating a mile a minute.
“Collingwood reported to Frazer, but he was just a puppet. Their puppeteer is a powerful person. I’m surprised I haven’t come across his name before,” she mused thoughtfully.
Cole buried his face in Ava’s hair and breathed in her floral scent, wishing that his nerves would settle. Bloody hell, did she have to drag things out? Couldn’t she just put them out of their misery and give them a name?
“Maxwell Denyer,” she added as if it was an afterthought.
It was as if Cole had punched through a frozen lake, the shock instantly seizing his lungs and every nerve ending in his body simultaneously sizzling and numbing. Screaming pain tore through him, the betrayal deep. Someone who was supposed to keep quiet—weren’t lawyers like priests and had to take stuff like this to the grave?—had ratted them out.
The urge to lash out and destroy something, anything, like Denyer had done to them was overwhelming. “Fuck,” he muttered. Tearing himself away from Ava, he spun away and shouted, “Fuuuck.”
Cole kicked the cupboard door that always sat open. Now that the foundations were finally succumbing to the water leak that the previous owners had patched, but not bothered to fix, the whole section of the house had begun to sink. His mood had been headed in the same direction. Finding out that it was someone who’d been friendly to Bryce, who’d tried to influence his decision on his future, was the icing on a fucked-up shit sandwich.
The door hit the cabinets, banging loudly. He flinched. That pissed him off even more. It bounced open, swinging in the opposite direction. The timber splintered from the force of his steel-toed boot, the bottom half falling through the hole where the flooring had once been and into the sludgy ground below the house. The top half bent at an awkward angle, the hinge barely holding on. He wanted to destroy it. He wanted to destroy the whole fucking kitchen. The whole house. He wanted to burn it to the ground, to raze it from the earth.
No. That wasn’t right.
He wanted to raze Denyer from the earth. He wanted to make him pay. Slowly and painfully. He wanted revenge. No one stole Bryce’s dreams. No one humiliated Ava. No one tried to rip them apart. No one hurt the loves of his life.
He clenched his fists, his body taut like a rubber band about to snap. Ava’s soft touch against his back brought him back from the edge. Cole gritted his teeth, focussing on the calm she gifted him with rather than the murderous thoughts coursing through his veins.
“As in the Lightning’s lawyer?” Ava asked, her voice quiet. He spun only to see the colour draining from her face. “No, that…. No.” Her legs gave out and she slid down the kitchen cupboard until her butt was on the floor and her phone hung loosely in her hand.
The anger fled. The desire to reap bloody revenge instantly dissipated. Ava needed him. She was hurting, and he needed to fix it. He’d already failed to protect her once. He wouldn’t do it again by focussing on the wrong thing.
Cole fell to his knees, cupping her cheeks. “Breathe, baby,” he whispered, stroking her face with his thumbs.
Her eyes filled with tears that spilled over her long lashes with every blink. Ava’s voice sounded winded, the pain in her tone excruciating. Cole’s chest tightened and he rubbed the spot where his heart was breaking.
“It’s over a fucking house? Bryce got kicked off the team and we’ve had every journalist in the country digging up information on us because that bastard was pissed we wouldn’t sell him a fucking house?” Ava’s voice pitched higher with every word she spoke. She shook, her eyes hardening, that fiery strength burning within, even as her tears spilled freely down her cheeks.
“It appears that way,” the woman on the line agreed sympathetically. “All he had to do was come up by a few thousand dollars and he would have been the highest bidder.”
“We still wouldn’t have sold it to him,” Cole spat. God, if he could get his hands on him… He couldn’t believe the piece of shit had walked into one of their builds, talking to them and playing nice only to throw his toys out the cot the moment he didn’t get what he wanted.
Except his form of tantrum hurt Bryce and Ava, and Cole wouldn’t stand for that.
“Why not?” she asked, curious.
Ava wiped away her tears. She blew out a breath, tucking her hair behind her ear. Pulling herself together like that when everything was crumbling at their feet, being their pillar of strength, was a feat that floored Cole every time Ava did it. She’d never wavered, the tears he’d witnessed a moment earlier her only show of weakness since Bryce had shown them that godforsaken email.
“Because he wanted to use it for holiday letting.” Her voice wobbled, but she swallowed it down and continued, “The neighbours were worried about how many were popping up in the suburb. They were losing the community feel there because of it—people in and out all the time, partying at all hours, strangers walking around instead of friends, and empty houses the rest of the time.”
Cole slid his hand into hers and thought back to the build Denyer had walked through. The neighbours had come to visit them early on, everyone except Mr Moss, the others calling him too grumpy to bother conversing with them. But Cole had seen something different in him. It had been too long since he’d seen the old man—weeks had gone by. He missed his blunt honesty, and now that they were leaving Sydney, Cole wanted to see him one more time.
Ava squeezed his fingers, and Cole spun around, sitting next to her so he could tuck her into his side. He explained, “Our company’s objective is to restore houses for people to live in—”
“Not to perpetuate the housing crisis by locking more away for short-term use,” Ava cried, passion infusing her voice. That addition to their mission statement was her condition. It was something she’d insisted on after seeing how profit-focussed the development industry was. Maybe it was the bad taste left after her first employer had gone under because they didn’t care enough. Maybe it was the shitty conditions and high expectations at the company she’d worked for free at until their own was set up. Either way, Ava had wanted to do things differently with Triple Threat, and Bryce had wholeheartedly agreed. So far their approach was working.
With the exception of Maxwell fucking Denyer.
All this mess was because they were trying to be good people and had turned him down. They were striving to make a difference and do some good in the community, rather than being solely focussed on the bottom line.
