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What had I done for them to target me?
“You’re mine.” I flinched at the memory of Garon’s words as they played through my head. “She got everything when the old man died. Everything. If I take you, one of her precious children, and make you mine, it will destroy her.”
The knife had touched my cheek tenderly, as if he were actually caressing me lovingly with the deadly blade. My skin had felt raw for a day or so from how sharp the knife had been.
Shivering, I glanced up and met Daddy’s gaze. “Mom,” I breathed. “Garon wanted to hurt Mom by hurting me. He was so pissed that she got everything from PopPop. The money, the acknowledgment. Everything. He was obsessed with me because it would have driven Mom crazy.”
His brows pulled together, his eyes darkening with anger and lingering fear for both Mom and me. “I remember.”
“The note.” My stomach cramped, wanting to rebel again, but I swallowed the saliva that filled my mouth. “It said, ‘Little birds get eaten by the big, bad kitty.’”
“Creepy, but I’m not catching on to where this is going, honey.”
“Claudia!” I shouted, then quickly pressed my lips together when every eye in the living room turned to us. Swallowing roughly, I tried to control the volume of my voice when I spoke again. “PopPop once said something about his first wife in passing that was weird at the time. He was joking around, telling Damien not to get married because kittens have long claws that will shred a man apart. He brought it up again when Braxton kept calling Nevaeh ‘kitten.’ He said Claudia was the baddest kitty of them all. She attempted to destroy him after the divorce, but he made it back to the top even though she tried to bury him.”
“Arie, Claudia is harmless. All talk and no bite,” Mom said with a dry laugh, lovingly tucking a lock of my hair behind my ear.
I shifted my gaze to her. “That’s what we thought about Garon too.”
She paled and jerked to her feet. “I’m going to call Detective Kirtner.”
Daddy pressed a kiss to my forehead before straightening. “No, Angel, I’ll make the call,” he said in a voice that had Mom rolling her brown eyes at him. “Maybe it’s nothing, but at least it’s somewhere to start, even if it’s by simply eliminating her as a suspect.”
Phone in hand, he walked out of the living room, and Jordan quickly moved to sit beside me. From the time we’d arrived, my parents had surrounded me, making it nearly impossible for my fiancé to get close. I’d been so out of it, I hadn’t really noticed.
The moment his arm slid around my back and his thigh pressed against mine, I felt as if I was actually thawing. I didn’t think I would ever feel safe again but having him beside me was as close to feeling safe as I would get.
And for the moment, that was enough.
Closing my eyes, I leaned my head against his shoulder and let my exhaustion pull me under. But even as I drifted off, the frustrated anger began to simmer into a consuming fury that threatened to overtake the fear. And I wasn’t sure whether that was better than being afraid all the time or not.
Chapter 6
Arella
My anger only burned brighter when Detective Kirtner couldn’t confidently say whether Claudia had been a party to the poor kitty I’d been sent as a wedding present. Mom continued to say the bitch was harmless, but I didn’t remind her again that her stupid brother had supposedly been harmless too. Barrick and Braxton seemed to agree with her. Everything they could find out about the woman, from their own investigation, pointed to her being too old and frail to do anything remotely threatening.
I didn’t agree.
She had too many reasons for it not to be her.
The woman had thought her son would inherit at least a part of his father’s fortune. When that didn’t happen, Garon had tipped over the edge of reality, developed a sick obsession with me, and then started stalking me to the point he’d actually hidden a camera in my dressing room at the studio where we’d both worked. All because of his hate for my mom. Claudia might be old as dirt, but she was also an angry, no doubt unhinged, mother who had lost not only the chance at more money from a man she hated, but she had lost her son as well.
Her hate for Lana Daniels Stevenson was always there beneath the surface. No one could ever deny that. It was the birth of my mom that had proven Cole Steel had cheated on her and given her the evidence she needed to take him to the cleaners when she divorced him. The way I saw it, the hate she felt for Mom would only double where I was concerned if she blamed me for her son’s death.
Which, technically, I was.
The bastard had held a knife to my throat, threatening not only my life, but that of my unborn baby, and Braxton had taken the first chance he was given to save me. The result had been Garon’s brains being blown all over the parking garage.
After another night of nothing but terror-filled dreams, I woke up the next morning determined that I wasn’t going to sit by and let someone try to scare me until I went crazy or even potentially had a miscarriage from all the fucking stress. Messing with me was one thing. Maybe I would have let the fear take complete control of my life and allowed Claudia to win. But it wasn’t just me, damn it. I had the safety of my baby to consider.
Like my mother, I was already a protective mama bear where my child was concerned.
And nothing was more dangerous than a mama bear fearing for her cub’s safety.
“How are you feeling today, Arella?”
I blinked back my thoughts and gave the woman sitting across from me a grim smile. “If I told you I was more angry than scared, would you think I was insane?”
