Chad's Chase (Loving All Wrong Book 2) (36 page)

She knew Chad. She didn’t know
Chadrick
. Half-Russian
Kah-had-reek.
Heir to the Devil’s pitchfork.

This woman with her easy life, her increasing wealth and fame, and her husband who loved her so much it seemed he was going mad, did not know the real Chad.

I did.

“Do you love him?” I questioned.

She took umbrage at this, her shoulders squaring in defense, pussy-cat gray eyes narrowing. “I love my
husband
.”

“Well, if you truly love your husband, be a good wife, carry his child, and keep your nose out of my and Chad’s business. It’s safer for you.”

I turned and walked off before she could shoot a rejoinder.

Why did I say all that? I had no idea. I guess I was just jealous about the whole “
he’ll treat you like no other woman exists in the world but you
”. Right. She should know. Why did she get the queen treatment and I got the rough, abusive treatment?

Maybe because she’s never tried to kill him or abuse him before?
my snarky mind suggested.

Clutching the apparels while trying to keep the sheet around me intact, I re-entered the bedroom and found Chad still on the balcony. No longer on his phone, though. Just gazing out at the rolling green hills.

“Pssst,” I hissed, dumping the garments on the bed.

Chad turned around, saw me, and padded into the room, all wind-tousled hair, rippling abs, sexy V, and artistic tattoos on glowing olive skin.

“JK burned our clothes,” I told him, “so we have to wear theirs.”

Chad nodded once like he couldn’t care less, took up his jeans from the pile and started getting dressed. “All the shouting, marital problems?”

“Yep,” I confirmed. “She’s pregnant. He’s ready for it. She’s not.”

“Hmm” was all he gave out.

Chad had on his clothes before me and sat down at the edge of the bed to tug on his boots, and I rushed on my pieces in a slapdash manner just so I could sit down next to him and tug my boots on, too.

“Did you have feelings for her?”

A pause, then, “Yes.”

“Strong?”

His movements, as he tied his laces, got unnecessarily aggressive. “Yes.”

I moved from my right boot to my left. “What happened?”

Done with his boots, Chad stood up from the bed, and I could feel him staring down at me. “She wasn’t mine.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of all this. Knowing it hadn’t just been Liz. He’d had “strong feelings” for another woman also.

What I’d like to know is, when the fuck did he have time to love, miss, or mourn me? How could he claim he always loved me when he was busy loving other women? Was I a dolt to be believing his bullshit? Maybe.

But what did it even matter, huh? If he fessed up and told me he hadn’t always loved me, would I care? No. I wouldn’t. Because even if he hadn’t always loved me,
I
always loved him. For my whole life. Even when I hated him, I loved him.

If I should be honest with myself, my enthusiasm for Chad’s assignment had not been because I so desperately wanted revenge, but because I so desperately wanted to see him again. Even if it was just to kiss him right before I blew his brains to kingdom come.

I had never hated him.

Was just disappointed.

When I was finished with my boots, I straightened up on the bed and found him standing there, hovering, watching me.

Moving in front of me, he stooped down and placed his hands on my kneecaps. “Don’t ever doubt that it has always been you, Jhay. I loved Liz, but nowhere near how obscenely in love I am with you. You have always been inimitable in my thoughts. Memories of you were indelible. But a part of me…a part of me had to let you go, while another part still hoped. Hope at least that your hate for me hadn’t erased me completely from your memories. Stupidly hoped that one day the good memories would outshine the bad, and you’d come find me, because searched as I did, I couldn’t find you. So I got the tattoo. A year after, I found it wasn’t enough. I kept missing you. Missing you. Kept searching and couldn’t find you. So I went again and got the lyrics on my side. You never asked me about the lyrics because you don’t even realize they’re for you. You don’t know, Jhay. You don’t know how important you are to me.”

He looked down at his hands on my knees, took a minute, then looked back up at me. “I was falling for Saskia, it’s true, but I could’ve never shown her my real face. You know me. You know the real me. You knew me before I became
me
. I never have to hide from you. You see my ugly, my monster, my sins, my wounds, and you still love me. You fear me, but you don’t run. You’re sending yourself to doom with me.” A loaded sigh. “We were eight years apart, Jhay. What could we have done? It was impossible. It would’ve been labeled statutory rape, wrong, disadvantage, manipulation, abuse… Now we can call it….” He trailed off, as if to say “whatever we want”.

“Love.” I touched the side of his face. “We’re still eight years apart, but now we can call it love.”

He leaned into my touch. “I fell for them, but for you I fucking face-planted. You’re matchless. I know you don’t believe my words because you’re trained not to trust,” he said softly, “but know that I do my best to never, ever lie to you. About anything. You’re the only one I can be myself with. And I enjoy that freedom. I won’t ruin it with lies.”

“Only half-truths?”

He shook his head. “I might
keep things from you
to protect you…”

There was nothing more to say, because due to our past, the betrayals, treachery and duplicity, not just from him, but also from my mother, I might never reach a point where I’d believe his words, or anyone else’s, not even my own, so I curtailed the conversation with a simple “Okay.”

Realizing that nothing he said would ever convince me, Chad stood up, took my hands and pulled me from the bed, accepting defeat and moving on. “Feel any different about your brother being alive now? Ready to apologize?”

Not really, but I nodded. “Guess so.”

He slung his arm around me. “Let’s hope Hell’s out of vacancy and Satan doesn’t call us home today.”

“He better not,”—I uncharacteristically gyrated my hips—”because, dude, I’m wearing eight hundred-dollar panties today.”

T
he end is now
, a voice whispered in my head.

I had a bad feeling. The second we drove through my brother’s open gates and saw the red sports car from yesterday belonging to Org’s men, I knew today was either the end or the beginning.

Even if Org’s guys were supposedly protecting me, finding their car parked inside my brother’s residence was off. One, I wasn’t in there. And two, the residence was gated, so how could they have gotten in, unless with coercion?

“What are they doing here?” I asked Chad.

His tone and entire demeanor weren’t of the man I knew. “I lost them in the hills last night before I drove to my right address. Didn’t want them knowing of that place. They’re just here to find out your whereabouts.”

I leaned forward and opened the glove compartment, took out his handgun and readied it with more aggression than needed so he’d know I was irritated. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a little fucking girl. You know that’s not why they’re here. You know we can’t reverse out now because we’re trapped. I know you counted three suspiciously idle cars parked five blocks within each other on the way here. You know like I know that something is up. So fuck you. Stop trying to spare me.”

Nothing.

Then, “Five. I counted five idle cars.”

“Then why didn’t you turn around?!”

Rolling up beside the sports car and easing the gear in park, Chad turned his head and gave me a look like I was the most inhumane person alive. “Because your
brother
is here.”

“But these are Org’s men. What do they care about Ricardo being alive or not?”

Providing no answer, Chad reached under his car seat and came back up with a
Walther P22
semi-automatic handgun, then opened the door to get out. “Stay in the car.”

“That’s it?” I asked, mouth agape. “You’re just going to march in there with nothing but a handgun? You don’t have more weapons in the trunk or something?”

He was irritatingly impassive, eyes stark and accepting. “I can smell him. Just…stay in the car, Tweety Byrd.”

Unfolding smoothly from the low sports car, he shut the door with a simple backward flick of his hand, then strode without falter or uncertainty up to the house, gun held loosely in his hand like it was a cheap accessory he didn’t care for. He seemed resigned, convinced that this was the end.

And what did he mean he could “smell him”? Smell who?

Surely, Rafail wouldn’t come here himself. Rafail did nothing himself. He hid behind threats and manipulations, orders, and money power.

Suddenly I realized it: Chad, if not afraid of anyone, was afraid of his father. If Rafail was really inside that house, Chad would not put up a fight. He would let him kill him. He would let Rafail win.

The prime reason he wanted me to remain in the car. Because if Org’s men were inside, too, they were there to protect me, not him. They would do nothing to stop Rafail from killing Chad.

Stay in the car…

He knew today was not my day to die.

It was his.

Fuck staying in the car!

Renting the passenger door open, I leaped out of the car and tore up to the house.

The front door was wide open, and someone was standing in its frame, facing inside, back facing outside. I made out the overly muscular figure and the military haircut. Sambo.

Walking up to him, I poked him in the side with my gun—not threateningly—and asked, “What the fuck is going on?”

Sambo turned to me, never minding my weapon. Expression one of victory and complacency, he scanned my face and then my body for a minute, before he stepped aside and held his hand out in a gesture for me to enter.

I brushed past him into the house, and the first thing I saw was Clementine’s petite body in pink pajama bottoms and a blue tank top soaked with blood, her stomach riddled with bullet holes, like the person who did this emptied an entire magazine on her, with the intention of ensuring the newborn’s death.

Second thing I saw was Chad kneeling beside Clementine, the upper half of her lifeless body propped up in his arms, while he rocked to and fro, to and fro.

The expression he wore, remorse and anguish, told me Clementine meant more to him than I’d imagined. Her death had a shattering impact on him, because I’d never seen him so enfeebled before. Either that, or he was breaking. Breaking under his father’s cruelty, of eliminating all the women he loved from his life.

Third thing I saw was Ricardo. Mouth duct taped, body tied to a chair just a few feet away from his wife’s body. Helpless. Unmanly tears streaming down his face. I didn’t even have to guess that he was subdued and bound first, then forced to watch his wife and unborn child get murdered.

I slid my eyes from Ricardo, only to have them land on
him
.

The Voice.

Rafail Niiveux.

He came himself, after all.

Ensconced in my brother’s lavish, exaggeratedly large sofa. Completely relaxed. Looking like any normal, clean-hearted human being. No evil arched brows, no smarmy smirk, no threatening eyes. Just…normal.

In a slick, three-piece suit, dark blond hair gelled back from his face, black eyes watching me, he coolly greeted, “Hello, little Byrd.

Goose bumps raised all over from his voice alone. That voice… Had ruled me and ruined me. That voice was chilling. Creeping with claws down my spine.

I took a breath and counted to ten. I refused to fear him. I.
refused
. To fear. Him.

Rafail was somewhere in his sixties, but could easily pass for someone in their early forties, he was so fit and ageless. Lean and tall like his son, with eyes as black as their incorporeal souls.

I noticed there were two stiff pairs of legs sticking out from behind the couch he was sitting in. Another dead body. But of who? No one else was in the room. At least no one deliberately visible.

My heart ran around dizzily inside my chest, my mind advising me to hotfoot it out of there. But instead I gripped my gun tighter and dipped in a curtsy. “Rafail. I see you’ve grown some balls.”

Rafail’s soul-shivering laughter rang out. “Well, I suppose someone had to get the job done.” He tsked. “You have turned out to be such a failure for me, Jhay. You were my next-best, but you have let your heart choose your path.” His accent had his words all curled and twisty, like he was having a hard time speaking straight English. He could speak to me in Russian, but I guess Sambo would be left out of the loop.

“Chew a bullet, Rafail,” I spat like venom from a snake. “You were planning to kill me the minute I killed your son.”

“Lies.” Lips compressed, he shook his head. “So many lies. But it does not matter now. You must know, my son will not kill me. He has had plenty of opportunities, but he has not. He will kill anyone. Even the ones he loves, yes? But he will not kill his Rafail. He is the best assassin The Organization has ever known. Think, Jhay, if he wanted me dead, he would have killed me a long, long time ago. I am his father. He is me. So he will not kill me. Even now when he knows I am here to kill him, he will not. He is ready to die. Look, see for yourself.”