Broken Bonds (Club Imperial Series) (21 page)

Chapter Twenty

“Ouch.”

It was the only thing Nathaniel could think to say as he rose back to consciousness. His eyes flickered open and he found a white ceiling light above him and the oddly familiar feeling of an IV pushing at the corner of his arm.

“I thought I told you I didn’t want to see you here again?”

He rolled his head to the side and found Garabaldi standing there. Nathaniel smacked his lips and tried to get them working again. “Nice to see you too, Detective,” he managed.

“Do not try to sit up, Mr. Walsh,” Garabaldi said, grabbing the remote for the bed. He started to crank the bed up.

“Are you playing nursemaid?” Nathaniel smirked, his voice rough.

“We’re waiting for your statement,” he answered. “You need to tell us who shot you so we can keep the ass in jail.”

“Lance,” he grumbled out. Clearing his throat, he tried again. “Lance Dayton. Shot me in the…uh. I don’t even know where.” He looked down his body and found most of the bandages on his upper thigh and lower abdomen. “Hip? Leg?”

“Both,” Garabaldi said. “Went right through.” He pulled out a recorder and pressed play. “Could you state your name for the record, sir, and what allegation you’re making?”

“Nathaniel Robert Walsh, Co-President and COO of Walsh Distribution and Manufacturing. I hereby name Lance Dayton as the person who shot me in the leg and hip and tried to kidnap Sylvia de Gaulles and tried to kidnap Emerson Madeline Westerly with intent to murder.”

Garabaldi clicked it off and walked over to the door, kicking it open. “You’re good. I got what I need.”

Victor walked in, not smiling. This was an attitude Nathaniel didn’t like. Franz walked in behind him, looking somber as well. And…

“Where’s Emmy?”

“I’m gonna take this down to the station.” The detective avoided his question. “We’ve got an assload of stuff that’s going to hold Cortez and Dayton for a long time. I’m pretty sure they’re both going to be no-bailers. I’ll keep you informed.”

“Thanks, detective,” Victor said, watching him walk out.

“Where’s Emmy?” Nathaniel repeated his question.

“What do you remember about the whole thing?” Victor leaned against the wall.

“Everything, right up to where he shot me and I saw something inside Emmy snap,” he said. “I passed out from the pain? I guess?”

“You’ve been out for four days,” Victor spoke slowly. “You lost so much blood you coded.”

“Fuck you I did not.” Nathaniel didn’t believe a word of that.

“Yup,” Victor said. “He nicked your femoral artery with the shot. You’re lucky he didn’t hit your balls too. You were bleeding out on the side drive and one of your high school buds, Killian, did a fast and dirty on your leg to keep you alive. You still lost a lot, and coded in the truck on the way here. They got you back, obviously, but they had to push nearly a gallon of blood into you.”

Nathaniel stared at him. “I almost died?”

“No, not really.” Victor shook his head. “They said the code was because of low BP and once they got the blood in you, they weren’t afraid of it happening again.” Victor sat on the bed. “You’re a lucky son-of-a-bitch, you know that?”

“So where’s Emmy?” he asked. His stomach felt like Fred Astaire had taken up residence. “Please, tell me she’s alive.”

“She is.” The tone of his voice was flat and he paused before he went on. “She left.”

“Left?” Nathaniel asked.

“Left.” Victor nodded. “She was arrested, questioned and gave her statement. I bailed her out, and before I could talk to her, she and Allison were in the car, backing down the driveway. Her only note was that she wasn’t going to skip bail or the hearings and trial, but nothing else. Just gone.”

“Where?”

“Franklin is on her.” Victor motioned him not to worry about it. “He’ll probably have her in a day or so.”

“Why would she have left?”

Franz stepped out from the wall. “She’s outed.”

“Outed?” Nathaniel asked.

“The whole of the party knows she’s a Domme,” Franz explained. “Even if it had been months since she’d been there. She doesn’t want them to embarrass you, or shun you for being around her.”

“I don’t care about that,” Nathaniel stated firmly.

“Well, I know that,” Franz agreed. “But she’s very conscious of it. Lance did it to her all the way through college. She had to stay away from him as much as possible. For some reason her friends didn’t see Lance for the deviant freak he is.”

“What’s the story with him?” Nathaniel asked. “I know it should be Emmy’s to tell, but I want to know. Why does she keep calling him the Yellow Bastard?”

Franz sighed, and sat in the chair. “He’s a sexual deviant. You understand what that means coming from a Dom, right?” Nathaniel nodded. “He was exploring options when he came into Imperial five years ago. He was paired up with different mistresses and techniques, like we always do when someone is trying to find their niche. It happened slowly, but he gradually revealed his sadistic side. He really got his jollies from pain. Torture. Giver or taker. It was his thing. We don’t have a problem with this usually. Pleasure from pain is the motto. His was…perverse. Not so much the taking; he had a limit. But he wanted the pain, and…well, you saw what Emmy could do with that whip. She’s amazing with it. So we booked him an appointment with her.

“I had no idea they knew each other,” Franz lamented. Nathaniel could hear the guilt in his voice. “He only caught a glimpse of her before she walked back out of the room. And that was that. He started in on the rumors and the jabs. And that’s when we started to find out his give on the sadism was way more than his take. Emmy’s circle of friends welcomed the charmer.

“She went to pick up her friend from her house one day and found…God, how did she put that, nothing any person who understands BDSM should ever even imagine, never mind witness. Her friend had told her she was intrigued by erotic asphyxiation, but when she walked in the room, it wasn’t erotic. It was just asphyxiation and Lance looked like he had no intention of taking her down as he jacked himself off to the sight of this poor girl dying.

“Emmy cut her down and didn’t get a chance to call the cops before Lance was gone and the girl begged her not to. She went along with it, but Lance started threatening her. Telling her she was his.” He stood up and paced to the wall. “Fuck, I should have known it was him!”

“How could you,” Victor said, folding his arms. “No one got a look at his face and Emmy lost the memory until Saturday.”

Nathaniel raised a hand to calm his brother. “Go on,” he instructed.

“Emmy and her friend warned Natalie to stay away from Lance,” Franz said, leaning against the wall. “They warned her and warned her. Natalie was just completely intoxicated with him. She started to show with bruises and cuts, and she insisted it was just kinky sex. Emmy explained to her if she didn’t want to do it, all she had to do was say no. Because at the time, she thought Lance was following the rules. No meant no, and you could use a safe word.”

“He wasn’t.” Nathaniel was getting the picture.

“Not by a goddamn long shot,” Franz said. “Natalie went on a date with him and never came back. They found her car, her clothes, her keys, her phone, but never her body. Emmy had Albright and Dunham dig around and they found Lance had quite a few missing women in his circle. She managed to get him ejected from their group of friends, but it was nearly the end of college when that happened, and he did serious damage to her cello career by virtue of who he was.

“She calls him the Yellow Bastard because of
Sin City
. The senator’s son has a penchant for pedophilia and murder, and his father clears any wrongdoings that might crop up. That’s what she saw happening. Dayton was covering all of the messes his son was leaving behind him. And when Lance got a chair in the orchestra on viola, that was it. She was out of there. Which is how she wound up as your admin, Victor.”

“So if he likes pain so much, why was he cowering from her?” Victor asked.

“Because she had murder in her eyes, and he’d never seen that before. At least, not directed at him.” Franz punched the wall. “Why didn’t I realize it was him?”

“Dude, stop,” Victor said.

“No!” Franz whirled around. “I should have realized. Now Emmy drove away from the best fucking thing that’s ever happened to her because he did this in pubic.”

“You didn’t know this was going happen,” Victor said.

“Don’t you tell me—”

Victor stood up straight, unfolding his arms. “Don’t you dare go Dom on me. You didn’t know. You couldn’t have known. Lance was a wild card. We knew he was bad, we just couldn’t pick out why. Now that we have Emmy’s statement, they can get the ball rolling.”

“She shouldn’t have to suffer like this,” Franz growled. “She’s had so much shit go down in her life and
that
,” he whipped his finger out to point at Nathaniel, “is the best fucking thing to ever happen to her. She deserves every. last. thing. you can give her.”

“God, you’re hot when you get all papa bear.” Victor smirked.

“Get a room.” Nathaniel rolled his eyes. “I’m going after her. Once Franklin finds her, and they release me, I’m going after her. She can run, but there’s nothing to run from. There are so many different stories we can lay on those society people that would cover the whole thing up. After all, Loony Lance is in jail for shooting me. Who are they going to believe? Him? Or the girl who did what she had to do to save her fiancé?”

Franz’s phone rang and he pulled it out. He looked at the number, and flipped it open. “Dorn.” There was a pause, and his face changed to surprise. “Really. Yeah, I will share. Great news. Thanks, Garabaldi.” He flipped it closed and looked at the other two. “Well. Emmy apparently suspected where Lance had buried Natalie’s body, and they just found it. In Dayton’s lumber mill.”

“Hot damn!” Victor exclaimed. “We’re in for the gold!” He pulled out his smartphone and started a flurry of texts. “We’re about to become Walsh-Tyndale-Dayton!”

~*~*~

“Would you use the damn crutches?!” Victor screamed at him.

“No!” Nathaniel yelled back. “I don’t want to!”

“Stop being such a child and use the crutches. It’s only a week and I don’t want to drive your ass to physical therapy for the next four years.”

Nathaniel ignored him and hobbled into Tiffany’s. He walked through the doors and straight to the counter where he could tell the engagement rings were displayed. He sat down and the person behind the counter decided to ignore him.

He waited patiently. There was time; Emmy was good where she was for the moment, Franklin had said. She’d contacted her cousin in Philadelphia and was doing some apartment hunting. He peered into the jewelry case, checking out all the different stones and settings and Victor sat down next to him.

“You should have worn a pair of real pants, not those Carhartt things,” he said. “They won’t take you seriously.”

“It shouldn’t matter what I’m wearing.” He shrugged his shoulders.

“You know, bro’, lemme explain this to you,” Victor said, folding his hands on the glass case. “You can say that all you like, ‘it shouldn’t matter’ ‘it doesn’t matter’ ‘who cares’ ‘not their business’. And I like that attitude, really. But the truth is, people are judgmental assholes. They are going to check out your shitkickers and Carhartts and see ‘iron worker’ and wonder what the hell you’re doing in Tiffany’s. It doesn’t matter that you’re about to become the co-president and COO of one of the biggest industrial and farm supplier in the continental US with a bankroll the size of one of your freight trains. They see ‘no money’. Just like all those people back in the ‘Burgh are right now only seeing Emmy as ‘freaky Dominatrix with a whip’. You have to do damage control on this. You want to protect her, right? Put on a damn Armani and let me hire you a PR person to cover this for you two.”

Nathaniel looked at him. “PR? You think that’s really a good idea? It’s kind of really obvious there’s something going on.”

“Not if the PR person is quiet and unobtrusive,” Victor explained. “Dude, come on. Trust me.”

“Fine, fine.” Nathaniel gave in. “And call Tina and have her send down a…something.”

“Christ, thank you.” Victor pulled out his phone. He motioned at a person who was standing and doing nothing at another counter. The person walked over and smiled at them. “My idiot brother wants to buy an engagement ring. Would you be so kind?”

“Of course.” The man smiled and walked behind the counter.

“I’m going to go look at the guys rings,” Victor said.

“Woah, hold the horses.” Nathaniel grabbed his arm. “You need to tell me something?”

“Nope.” Victor emphatically denied his brother’s accusation. “Just a gift.”

“You’re buying him something already?”

“Yeah, but we’re going slow. I’m still stung from Greg and it’s…shit.” Victor wilted a little. “Why am I faking myself out like this? He’s already got a drawer in Galloping Ridge.”

“A drawer, wow,” Nathaniel said, the mocking clear in his voice.

“I’m scared as hell, Nate,” Victor admitted. “But I have never been drawn to someone like I am to him. He’s just so raw. And male.”

“Yeah, I thought Greg was a little too dandy for you,” Nathaniel answered.

“You never liked him.” Victor pouted.

“The only thing I liked about him was his cheating on you and you getting Sylvia out of the deal,” Nathaniel said. “Sorry, rough truth.”

“Fucker’s in jail now anyway,” he answered. “And I get most of the money he defrauded me out of back. Which I’m going to just shove in an account to adopt Sylvia a sibling in a few years. So, I’m going to go buy Franz a little something. And hope to God he doesn’t do me wrong like Greg did.” He stood up and was getting ready to walk away, but stopped and looked back at Nathaniel again. “By the way, I owe you an apology. You told me not to knock it till I tried it. Lesson learned.” He walked away.

Nathaniel was confused for a moment
. What the hell is he talking about?
He turned to ask him and suddenly realized he’d just learned way more than he ever needed to know about his brother’s sex life.
Ew
.

He spun back to the counter where the man was waiting with his keys out. He looked in the case and sighed. “I want a three stone. Center stone needs to be big, oval, flawless and clear. And I want rich, blood red rubies on either side. Diamond quality.” He looked at the man. “And I need it for Sunday.”

“It might take a day or two to locate the rubies,” the man mused.

“We’ll work with it,” Nathaniel said.