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The fact that my father referred to me as a delicate situation wasn’t lost on me. It only served to make me hate him even more.
I had to say it. “Wait! You didn’t let me finish!”
One of the guards raised his hand to hit me, but Frank waved him down. “Let the little girl speak,” he said to the guard. “What do you want, doll?”
“I’m pregnant with Jack’s baby,” I said. For a moment, the room was completely still.
Frank laughed. Father did not. Everyone else in the room was silent, waiting on Frank’s permission to react.
“You hear that, Lane?” Frank asked. “Your little girl has a Reed inside of her.”
Father glared at me, his eyes as cold as the arctic ocean. “You can’t be serious.”
Frank patted him on the shoulder. “This might work out in our favor.”
“Emma,” Father said. “Let the adults take care of this.” He then looked at the guards. “Make sure she doesn’t leave your sight.”
Frank nodded. “I’ll kill both of you if she gets away.”
The guards both gulped. Frank King was no one to mess with, and the only man who could handle him was elsewhere.What did they do with Jack?
I wish I could have said that I felt relief for getting that news out in the open, but that telling my father felt like a mistake.And why did Frank say that it would work in their favor?I had so many questions to ask, and I was left alone with my thoughts in a room with a balcony overlooking a steep drop down. A guard stood at my door and there were several positioned outside of my window. None of them looked very friendly, and they all had guns.
The wait for further news was torturous, and when the door to my room finally opened, it was simply one of the guards delivering my dinner.
They say that it’s better to be imprisoned comfortably than to suffer as a free person. I wasn’t sure of that since I had few experiences with even the mildest discomfort. The only time I had ever felt truly alive though was when I had been with Jack.And that was under duress.I had feared for my life, but something about Jack lit the spark of fire within me. It was a violent fire, one that had awakened with his entrance into my life. I missed him dearly, and, with every moment, I could feel that his absence left a hole in my heart that only he could fill. The sun was beginning to set, the red orange sky burning with the passion that was now missing from my life.
Eventually, the red orange turned to a dark red that then went purple, and then black. With the smog of the city above us, there were no stars. I felt nothing, the pain too thick to bear.
They had taken everything from me, my freedom gone, my man’s safety uncertain, and all I had left were shallow comforts to hold me. Tears rolled down my eyes, yet these too dried out, until nothing was left.
I laid in the soft bed provided for me, with any hopes that Jack would rescue me gone.
16
JACK
Braden Reed had anger written all over him, but he remained ostensibly pleasant. We were at Braden’s headquarters. I was right across from him, but to me, he was miles away.
“What were you thinking?” Braden was asking me, his voice gentle. He snapped his fingers in my face, but all I could think about was Emma. She had been taken too, and I’d been powerless to stop them.
I would stop at nothing to get her back.
“I couldn’t let them hurt her,” I said. “She’s far more valuable to us unharmed.”
Braden nodded idly. “The Kings are gaining power, and I was hoping we could have Lane Price’s money. You know what we could have done with all that money the Kings are getting?”
I cringed in disgust. Money. It was our religion, and there was nothing sacred enough that we wouldn’t do just to have the right amount of dollars.
He paused, waiting for a response from me, but I kept quiet. The only tell was the look on my face, and Braden gave me a concerned look.
“You’re lucky I didn’t have Karen kill you for crossing me when you were healing,” Braden said. “You owe me the debt of your life for getting you back to health. Instead, you betrayed me again. What were you thinking?”
“Can we really place a price on someone’s life?” I asked.
“Ten billion dollars,” Braden said. “You know what we could do with that? Once the Kings get that money, they’ll be unstoppable, and I won’t be able to justify your existence anymore, Jack.”
“Might as well kill me now.” I pushed myself up from the table.
