AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Vaughn leaned over to kiss him. “Only in the bedroom.”
Nash rolled his eyes and went back to leafing through his papers. “Spare me the details of the kinky shit the four of you get up to. Rebel, there’s mail here for you.”
He tossed a white envelope onto the bar in my direction. It landed just short of in the sudsy water.
I wiped my hands on the backs of my jeans and turned the envelope over. My name was in the center, but there was no postmark.
My stomach twisted in a knot.
This was all too familiar.
I took the card out from inside, already knowing it would be white with plain black text.
“That better not be what I think it is,” Fang growled low beneath his breath.
It caught Kian’s and Vaughn’s attention.
“Not possible,” Vaughn said.
But when I turned the card over, I knew it was very possible.
You’ve been warned and warned again, and yet nothing changes. Time’s up. Boom.
The card fluttered from my fingers.
Vaughn picked it up and read it, Fang and Kian reading over his shoulders.
“How is this possible?” Kian asked. “I thought Brooke was the one delivering notes. Isn’t she off in Barbados or something, locked up in a mental institution? Or a ‘health retreat’ as the rich probably call it.”
Vaughn tapped the card on the bar top. “She is. She’s not even in the country. Her father told me that again when he called to tell me he’d transferred the money.”
“Then how the hell did she hand-deliver this?” Kian took the note from Vaughn’s fingers and studied every inch of it, like the back or one of the corners might give us some sort of new information we hadn’t noticed yet.
“She didn’t,” I said quietly. “She might have sent the notes to Vaughn, but the ones I got were addressed to me.”
“Same white cards though.” Kian’s fingers crumpled the thick paper. “That can’t be a coincidence. She had to have sent all of them. She isn’t exactly your biggest fan. And she’s clearly lost it if she’s chopping off her own fingers to blackmail Vaughn. She’s definitely capable of throwing a few death threats your way for good measure.”
I thought that over for a minute. “Or she didn’t. If the sender already knew we were getting threats from someone else, a smart way to throw us off the track would be to just blend in. Make their threats look like the same ones Brooke sent. Pretty easy to just copy the ‘white card, plain black text’ format. Hardly creative.”
“I always thought it was Hugh,” Fang said quietly. “Or Leonn. Or even Caleb.”
“Leonn’s in a prison awaiting his trial. Hugh is dead.” I shook my head. “This card can’t be from either of them. It’s gotta be Caleb.”
Nash squinted at the card, his dad face firmly in place, even though he wasn’t actually a dad yet. But he’d been playing that role with me ever since I’d first started working here. “He sent notes to Bliss once. Tricking her into meeting him. This is in his wheelhouse.”
I sighed and plucked the card from Kian’s hand and tossed it in the trash. “Then we don’t pay it another second of attention. We can’t live our lives in fear of what he might do. We have Kara and Hayley Jade back. The women are all safe and fed and making plans for returning to their old lives or new ones of their choosing. We’re done with Caleb.”
But even as I said the words so hopefully, I knew they weren’t true.
We’d never be done with Caleb. He’d wormed his way into every aspect of not only my life, but Bliss’s, Kara’s and, in turn, all the men’s.
We’d never be free of him.
Not until he was six feet under.
20
FANG
