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Kidnapped by the Billionaire(118)

By:Jackie Ashenden


To anyone else there was a bored look in those green-gold eyes, yet Elijah knew it wasn’t. He saw deeper than that. Because he knew men like this, had worked with them many times over the course of the years with Fitzgerald. It wasn’t boredom. It was emptiness.

The look of a man who’d sold his soul to the devil.

Whoever Theo Fitzgerald once was, he wasn’t this man standing in front of him. Like Kane Archer, Theo Fitzgerald was dead.

“If you’re going to fucking shoot me, you’d better shoot me.” Jericho’s gaze was level and there was no fear in it. He looked like he’d stared death in the face one too many times and had come to terms with the fact that there was nothing to be afraid of.

Perhaps he even welcomes it.

No, he didn’t want to acknowledge this bastard, he really didn’t.

“My pleasure, asshole.” Elijah lifted the gun. “This one’s for Marie.”

And then he made a mistake. He glanced at Violet, standing behind her brother, and saw the tears streaming down her face. She didn’t make a sound.

She was his peace, but he wasn’t hers. He only caused her sorrow. Pain. He only hurt her. And if he shot Jericho, he’d keep on hurting her. Her brother’s death would be a wound that wouldn’t heal, and he knew all about those kinds of wounds.

He’d promised he wouldn’t hurt her again.

What about Marie? What about that promise? Didn’t you want peace?

And his heart cracked, a great jagged line going right down the middle of it. Because he knew there would be no peace for him, no matter what he did. Killing Jericho would lay Marie to rest, but it would shatter Violet. Letting him live would spare Violet, but he’d have to live with his wife’s death forever.

He stared at Violet, at her vivid eyes, her wet cheeks, and her soft, lush mouth. Bright and beautiful and alive. Hurting so much already. And he knew there was no choice to make.

Marie was dead and had been for a very long time. He couldn’t save her. But he could give Violet this. Heal a little bit of her pain. It would only be fair after everything she’d given him.

Slowly, Elijah lowered the Colt. He looked at Violet one last time, memorizing everything about her so he could keep at least the memory of her to last him.

Then he turned and walked out the door.





CHAPTER NINETEEN

Violet wiped futilely at the tears, scrubbing them all away with vicious swipes of her hand.

She shouldn’t be crying, not now she’d made her choice and picked a side. And it was the right choice, she knew that in her heart. Pity her heart kept insisting it was broken and shouldn’t be making any sort of choices right now.

Theo was speaking on his phone to someone, his voice completely calm as if he hadn’t just faced down a man intent on putting a bullet in his brain. He was again speaking in German and it sounded as if he was issuing instructions.

Violet tried to pull herself together, tried to ignore the way her chest felt like it was full of broken glass. Elijah was gone and she’d understood the moment he’d given her that final look, as he’d lowered his Colt, that she wouldn’t see him again.

There had been such pain in his eyes. He’d looked at her as if he was a man standing on a desert island watching his last chance of rescue disappear over the horizon.

You have me, he’d said. The closest a man like him would ever come to laying out his heart.

And yet in the end, it hadn’t been her who’d left.

She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. Even now there was a part of her that wanted to go after him, throw herself at his feet and tell him that yes, she had him. And he had her. That he didn’t have to hurt again. Pity she was such a fucking coward.

I need this, princess.… Let me have it.

But he hadn’t taken it. Why not? What had stopped him?

“A car will be waiting by the curb when you get downstairs,” Theo was talking to her, his deep, smooth voice so achingly familiar, and she had to struggle to pay attention. “It’ll take you to Teterboro, where I have a jet waiting.”

Ah yes, that’s right, he wanted her out of the country. Ostensibly to keep her safe.

She lifted her chin, studying his handsome face, noting the tightness in his jaw and the lines around his mouth. Marks of grief and pain. There were shadows in his eyes, too. Shadows that she hadn’t seen before.

You were the one who made the deal. And you were the one who let her die when a client slit her throat …

Had he really been the one who’d let Elijah’s wife die? Who’d sold her to a brothel? Who operated behind a cloud of secrecy, the power pulling the strings on a vast, shadowy human trafficking ring?

“How could he not know?” She wasn’t sure she’d said the words aloud until she heard them echo in the silence of the apartment.