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Liv’s smile is completely gone now. I laugh and tell her that her acting skills aren’t as grand as she may think.

“And then there’s the fact that Lena overheard all you bastards talking. She tipped me off and Chase got a wire on Brian. We know all about your back door dealings, and believe you me, the authorities are just eating that up and ready to indict your asses. We needed your boss, though. So thanks for the long convo and thanks so much for admitting that you all used me as a pawn. You got everything, Dec?”

The window behind me slides down slowly to reveal not only Dec, but Brick and a grinning Chase, his eyes focused on the gun I have pointed at my targets.

“We’ve got it, babe. You thought about that executive position I offered you? I could use your scheming mind to close deals,” he croons.

“Nah. I kinda want to have a baby soon, so I think I might already be booked. Sorry.”

We’re all laughing by the time the limo pulls up to the police station, and I have to say, I like this new, harder, more intense version of me. In the end, I’ve not only been an integral part of unravelling the mystery that was the sixth player, but I’ve nailed Liv to the wall too.

While it’s a shock, I understand why I woke up in that room alone and why she was never drugged. They wanted me dead, I was no longer of use to them and they were trying to kill two birds with one stone—because killing me would have destroyed Chase.

Even more, I understand that my life has not been my own since the day my mother saw me slipping through her grasp, and that only now am I truly free.

Chase gave me that, and I will henceforth move on from this part of my life secure in the knowledge that I am protected, yes, but I am fully capable and powerful enough to protect myself.

Remy

“I am so sorry.”

I kiss my father once and walk away from the courthouse, my husband standing tall beside me as he hurries me to the car and hands me in. The case, after four months of investigation and building evidence, went relatively quickly.

Brian will serve at least twenty-five years. While he was only doing this because they were blackmailing him, he was directly involved in my kidnapping and thus got a few more years even though he turned state’s evidence.

The rest of them will never see the light of day. I feel sorry for my mother, but I am finally feeling free of the pain she has brought me. Liv only got five years and will be out in three if she behaves her stupid ass. I’m not worried, Gabe is still into her and willing to stick it out because, as it turns out, she’s the one who made sure the two buffoons who took us were so high that the dosage of drugs they gave me wouldn’t kill me outright.

Turns out she was as much a victim of this whole mess as I was; no one who is being blackmailed will react well and she chose her aunt Soph’s safety over me.

Not great, but totally understandable.

It’s done now and I am free.

And I got my guy too, so yeah, I won.

Doc says that my level of smug satisfaction and the way I usually gloat during our sessions does not bode well for my ego, but hell, I need a big one to survive Chase Marshall and his volatile moods.

“God have mercy on these vultures!”

The car pulls away quickly and I’m not really paying much attention to where we’re going until I see a large house come into view about two blocks from ours.

“Where…?”

“It’s a surprise, babe.”

“Another one? You already got me my job back. You let dad reconcile with me even though you sorta hate him, and you even bought Lena an apartment. What more could you possibly think I need?”

He doesn’t answer, just grins slowly and opens the door once the car rolls to a stop. He pulls me out and almost hustles me to the door. I’m aware of his excitement and can hardly contain a grin of my own.

“Chase…”

“This is the house I bought for mum. She’s coming over in another week, and I thought I could maybe get your help decorating the place before she gets here,” he says, his face serious and so open I feel like I’m looking into the sun for a split second.

“You’re introducing me to your mom?”

Chase stops and slides his hands in to cup my cheeks, his gaze skittering around, searching for words I think, before he looks at me fully and gives me a breathtaking smile.

“No. I’m letting you into…it’s time for Alex. I will never fully be that boy who laughed and took everything for granted, and you can bet your arse I won’t be soft enough to let you go, but I think, if I try hard enough, that I can let a small part of him exist again.”

My heart almost explodes at the thought of this strong, often angry, very much loving man, dropping his guard enough to be that same boy I’d fallen in love with all those years ago.

Not
too
much though, because I’m pretty sure this new Remy would eat the poor guy for breakfast and use his bones as toothpicks. But I appreciate that he’s willing to give me that small part of him that I’ve cherished for so long.

“I loved Alex a long time ago,” I whisper, feeling myself smile through the tears that are threatening to spill over. “He woke me up and gave me a part of myself I never knew could exist, but I would be lying if I said I want him back.”

That surprises him and I stifle a chuckle at the awe that covers his features when I gently kiss him and keep our eyes locked.

“I like Chase more. He’s fierce and mean and cold and he could probably kick the tar out of anyone who so much as breathes on me. He’s not always great to be around cause he’s moody as shit, and the guy is most definitely not easy to handle when it comes to my freedom, but I love him, all of him, and I don’t think I want to give him up for Alex.”

“Remy…”

“Plus, Chase is an animal in the sack and that’s not something I’m giving up anytime this century. Sorry, Alex old buddy, I love ya, but you can take your ass right on back to the past. I’m keeping my Animal.”

“I love you, Remington Marshall. It was a mission to get you, and God, the effort was bloody well worth it.” He attacks my mouth with a deep, brutal kiss that leaves me gasping for air and jelly kneed by the time he pulls back.

“I love you too.”

And I do. He’s the best bad bet I ever made, and I’m grateful I stayed all in for the hand that should never have won but took the pot.

Chase

I’ve fought through broken ribs and sprained ankles and even that one time when Dec challenged me and dislocated my shoulder, but I swear to God,
that
pain is nowhere near what I feel now as I watch Remy gasp and huff for breath.

“You get this kid out or I swear to God one of you bastards will lose an eye!”

I resist the urge to laugh, and watch as the nurses roll their eyes, trying and failing to hide the humor they feel.

“Rem, darlin’, you’ve been in labor less than two hours. You’ve got a long way to go,” Lena coos, leaning over to wipe a cool cloth over Remy’s brow.

Gabe just sits and winces silently from his place in the corner. I see Brick, Dec and Hensley shift uneasily from foot to foot. Technically, they aren’t supposed to be in the delivery room, but Remy insisted, saying they saved her life and deserve to be here for this miracle.

I personally think she wants them all to suffer as much as she is, but I’m not saying a bleeding word since their presence means I don’t have to go through this ordeal alone.

“Chase?”

I snap out of my thoughts and hustle over to her, feeling my heart rate increase at the thought of my baby being in pain. I’ve spent over a decade watching over her and protecting her and yet this is something not even I, with all my power and money can take from her.

“Yes, my darling.”

“Don’t leave me.”

“Never. You’re mine,” I whisper to her for the hundredth time, knowing that she’s not quite rational at the moment but that she needs the reassurance to combat the fear that this moment is bringing. “You will always be mine.”

***

“Tell me again.”

I chuckle and pull Alexander closer to my chest, my eyes lifting from his perfect little face to Remy’s tired, joy-filled gaze. Thirteen hours of labor and a lot of cursing later, my darling is exhausted but satisfied, her eyes drooping even as she fights her need for sleep.

I understand this well since I’m dead on my feet but unable to relinquish this moment of pure, perfect bliss.

“You win.”

She grins as her eyes slide shut, her mouth tilting in that smug way that I taught her but bloody hate.

“Tell me why.”

I feel a chuckle rumble up my chest and blow out a silent laugh so as not to wake the baby because I know I will be saying these words for a while to satisfy her competitive streak.

“You did something I can never do.”

Her smile widens and I roll my eyes, ignoring the deep raspy chuckles that come from every corner of the room. The guys and Gabe are propped up, their own gazes soft as they take in Alexander, and then my wife.

“Go on.”

I close my eyes and hear a feminine giggle come from Lena. She’s half asleep in the recliner beside Gabe.

“You’re strong and invincible and you rock, even though the curse jar is going to be full thanks to your clever tongue and inventiveness in that delivery room.”

“More,” she breathes, on the very verge of sleep.

I lean over and plant a soft kiss on her brow before pulling back.

“You won because you caught me,” I whisper, groaning when Brick starts making kissy noises and Dec starts gagging.

“Nope.”

“No?”

“Nope. I win because you caught
me
.”

###

“Oh my God! Disgusting! Clean up after your dog!”

I looked over my shoulder to see that, without my noticing it, the teacup poodle — at least, I thought it was the teacup poodle — had been trailing small, spherical turds for the past few yards. A man in a very nice business suit had crossed paths with that problematic trail, and was now attempting to scrape the bottom of one of his expensive-looking loafers on the edge of the sidewalk, fuming at what he found on its sole.

“Oh, dear,” I exclaimed. “Oh, sir, I am so sorry about your shoes. Why don’t you jot down an invoice real fast, and I’ll give it to Mr. DJ Stark for him to take care of?”

The man stopped his irritable scraping for a moment and cocked his head in interest. “Mr. Stark? You mean that rat is the famous J. Stark's dog? Are all of these his dogs?”

I struggled with my canine charges — all twelve of them — who were eager to continue our trek toward Central Park. It was the teacup poodle who had held us up, I wanted to reason with the Doberman that glanced balefully back at me. Don’t blame me.

“Oh, no, sir,” I laughed. “Mr. Stark is a very busy man. He wouldn’t have time to take care of all these dogs. Just the teacup poodle. Oh, and the Doberman. The Doberman is new. They’re pals, though. So, Doberman, teacup poodle, for Mr. Stark."

I steadily walked backward, the dogs begrudgingly following me, and picked up the tiny turds with my plastic bag during my entire monologue. The man stared at the dogs as if they were celebrities themselves, completely forgetting about the mess on the bottom of his shoe until I handed him a wet wipe and a tissue.

“I bet if you put them in like a plastic bag or something, you could sell them on eBay,” I stage-whispered, raising my eyebrows at him.

“Seriously?” He wrinkled his nose at me as the dogs barked at the passing traffic.

“People love weird celebrity stuff like that,” I told him. “At the very least, you could shop the story on TMZ or something. Send them a photo. Want me to take a picture of you with your phone?”

“With the dog?”

“Oh, no, I’m so sorry,” I said, my hand fluttering over my chest. “Mr. Stark prefers it that his dogs try to have as normal a life as possible, away from the flashing lights. He’d fire me in a heartbeat if he realized I let someone take a photo of the dog, knowing it was his.”

“That makes sense, I guess,” the man mused.

“Well, I better be going before the rest of these poop grenades explode,” I said, smiling as I whipped my dark braid to the side. “Sorry again about your shoe.”

I encouraged my pack of dogs forward, leaving the man standing, befuddled, with a shit-covered shoe. It was a beautiful day. Hopefully, he wouldn’t let that little close encounter ruin it. And at least he’d have a story to tell when he got back to the office.

It didn’t really matter that the story wasn’t true.

We rounded the corner, and the dogs, seeing and smelling the greenery just ahead, worked in tandem to yank me forward at a trot. I’d learned my lesson about walking dogs one of the first times I’d done it. Mix the breeds and sizes of dogs to give them less of a chance to ambush me. The first time I’d taken a group of dogs out from the boarding kennel where I worked, I’d unwittingly leashed up all big dogs. Our walk had been done at a dead sprint, and all of my coworkers had laughed at how bedraggled I was when I finally got back, panting and sore and only just beginning my shift.

This was a good group of dogs — minus the teacup poodle. Little troublemaker. It was barely house trained and had a bad temper. It was afraid of the Doberman, which was why I’d put them closest together. Otherwise, the tiny dog would bully whichever animal had the misfortune of walking beside it. The Doberman was the only animal that could keep it in line.

New York City was at its best in the summer, but that was just my opinion. I’d barely been in the city to experience all four seasons, but it was summer that had my heart. People peeled off their layers like unnecessary skin, lay in the grass like children to toast themselves in the sun, recharging themselves in the brightness before having to return to the buildings where they made their livings.

I envied them, the ones filling the tall skyscrapers that formed that iconic New York City skyline. I even envied the nicely dressed man who had stepped in one of the teacup poodle’s landmines. I’d moved here immediately after college, so sure of myself, so sure that I was going to get hired to work in one of those glittering buildings. It was the Big Apple, for crying out loud. There had to be thousands of jobs that were just perfect for me, waiting for me to step in and fill them.

I stayed in a hotel while I hunted for an apartment and a job, so certain that a job was a foregone conclusion and I would have to be on hand in the city to begin work immediately. After a full week of living in a hotel I definitely couldn’t afford, I had to downgrade to a hostel — dormitory bunkbeds, shoving my suitcases beneath the bottom bunk, hoping that their contents would be undisturbed by the time I got back, well after dark, from pounding the pavement, walking into the offices of the buildings I loved so much and getting turned down time and time again.

I’d majored in communications at my university, enabling me to solve every problem that would possibly arise (I informed bored-looking interviewers). I sashayed into corporate offices, travel agencies, publishing houses, everywhere, certain that I’d soon land in the place where I was meant to be, ready to impart the bank of knowledge I’d amassed during college. I wasn’t sure what it was that had made me so overconfident. My mother was a strong possibility. From a very young age, she’d filled my mind with propaganda about how I would do great and amazing things.

“Don’t settle for anything less than what you’re worth,” she’d commanded me. “You’re brave. That’s one good thing you’ve got going for you.”

Brave, but maybe a little stupid. It was my second full week in the hostel when I finally “settled” for a job — a dog walker at a kennel. It was a paycheck that helped me stop the hemorrhaging from my savings account. And when I augmented it by cocktail waitressing at night, I was able to afford to move out of the hostel and into my very own shoebox studio apartment. Sure, I had to share the bathroom with the rest of the floor, but at least I’d already gotten used to that at the hostel.

“Let’s go, everyone,” I announced to all of my furry charges. I picked up the last bit of offal — of course it was from the teacup poodle, who was definitely getting its owners’ money’s worth out of my services today — and started redirecting my pack back toward the kennel. It was a nice day, and I would’ve liked to keep them out at the park longer instead of locking them back in their crates, but that would be to the detriment of the next group I was supposed to take out.

“Sorry,” I told one of the mutts as it gave me sad eyes. “If you got to stay out longer, it wouldn’t be fair to everyone else staying at the kennel.”

Working there wasn’t so bad, I decided, avoiding getting tangled up in the leashes as the teacup poodle tried to finagle a walking position beside someone other than the Doberman. Not so fast, buddy. I wasn’t born yesterday. It was the “settling” that my mother had warned me against, though, which I thought about often. If she knew what I did to scrape together a living here in the city, I was sure she would demand that I return home.

Rural upstate New York, however, didn’t feel like home to me anymore.

I’d gone to college in a city that was roughly six times bigger than the town I’d grown up in, and I’d become accustomed to such luxuries as 24-hour grocery stores, coffee shops, malls I didn’t have to spend an hour in a car to get to, and my choice of restaurants. It was as if the world had opened itself to me while I was living in that city during college, and I knew that it would continue to impress me the higher I dared to reach.

“You are so special,” my mother told me. “You will thrive wherever you wind up.”

I was already spinning stories to her toward the end of my tenure at the hotel, disappointed that I hadn’t yet “thrived,” as she promised I would.

“I have a really promising interview tomorrow,” I fibbed to her over the phone, trying to soak in what I was realizing was going to be the last of my exposure to cable television for the foreseeable future.

“Oh, really? Do tell.”

“It’s a personal assistant to the CEO of a business — well, I won’t bore you with the details. But it’s a really good job, pays well, and there’s room for growth.”

“That sounds marvelous,” my mother gushed. “I just knew you’d tear up that city.”

It did sound marvelous, but there wasn’t a lick of it that was true. I’d been to so many interviews at that point that I knew my folly — it was so hard to get an entry-level position because seasoned workers were gobbling them up, so desperate for a job that they’d take literally anything available in their field. So of course I, with no professional experience, wasn’t going to get so much as a telemarketing position over a person who’d been in the workforce for ten years already and was looking to diversify his career.

“We’re back!” I announced, though the riot of barking from my dogs was all the announcement we needed at the kennel. I led the dogs back to their crates, ushering them each in before unhooking their leashes and hanging them up. The teacup poodle snapped at me half-heartedly as I closed the door.

“Yeah, yeah,” I commiserated. The pup probably missed its owners. It still had a two-week stretch of time with us. I hoped it would get over its hang-ups in the meantime.

I grabbed a bottle of water and took a brief breather back in the grooming salon.

“Do you think any of these dogs belong to famous people?” I asked the groomer, who was trimming a squirming corgi’s nails.

“No way,” he sniffed, not pausing in his clipping. He was so used to all manner of reluctant customers that he could successfully trim the nails with very little struggle.

“What do you mean, ‘no way’?” I cajoled. “New York is packed with famous people.”

“I think I saw one the other day,” he said absentmindedly.

“See? One of these dogs could belong to him, couldn’t it?”

“Absolutely not.”

“What makes you so sure?”

He fed the corgi a treat — aha, maybe that was his secret to success — and sighed. “Celebrities have their own dog people. They wouldn’t send members of their families to places where they might be forced to mingle with regular people’s dogs. Check the files. There is not a single famous dog here.”

“But maybe the celebrity uses a fake name to throw everyone off,” I reasoned.

“Believe me. Celebrities wouldn’t trust their dogs to just anyone. I have a friend who knew a guy who had to get a background check just to be under consideration to be a veterinarian for a celebrity’s dog.”

“You don’t believe that maybe just one of these dogs belongs to a celebrity?” I rubbed the corgi’s ears as the groomer unhooked its leash. “Like maybe this guy. At least a TV actor? A YouTube sensation?”

“Maybe a minor celebrity,” the groomer allowed. “But no one I’d stop on the street for a selfie.”

“Fair enough.” At least I wasn’t completely full of bullshit. I worried sometimes.