Sins of the Father (18 page)

Chapter 20

~Ophelia~

Sawyer!

He came out of nowhere, pouncing from behind the screen, tackling Frank to the floor. And now they both wrestled for control of a deadly weapon.

I shoved my way through the crowd while others fought uselessly to get to the emergency exits. Heads and arms and people trying to take pictures with their damn camera phones blocked my path. An elbow caught me in the ribs as I abandoned the clogged aisle to climb over a row of chairs.

I scaled row after row, losing one of Sawyer’s shoes along the way. Here and there, I caught flashes. Glimpses of Sawyer and Frank. Not enough to tell who had the upper hand, though.

The noise level in the room was deafening. My ears buzzed with people screaming and crying and shouting at one another. I called Sawyer’s name again and again as I clawed my way forward, but he couldn’t have heard me. All concerns of propriety abandoned, it was every man for himself.

“Move!” Someone shoved me from behind, sending me sprawling on the cool tile floor.

Lying flat on my belly, I watched beneath the chair ahead of me without breathing as Sawyer pried the weapon free of Frank’s grasp. Voices exploded all over again as uniformed men and women poured into the room and the gun went skidding across the floor.

“Sawyer!” I scrambled to my feet and practically hurdled the front row.

The police had pulled Frank off of him and were ordering Sawyer to his feet. Everyone was shouting, barking commands. Multiple guns were pointed at Frank.
And
Sawyer. I was terrified.

“Sawyer?”

“Fi.” His gaze darted over the weapons and he threw up a hand in my direction. “Stay back.”

For once I didn’t do as I was told, choosing instead to launch myself at him. I collided with his chest, forcing him back a step to steady us both, and his arms closed around me.

“Dammit, Sparrow.”

“Are you okay?” Day old scruff scraped against my palm as I cupped his bruised jaw. “Did you—?”

“Ophelia?”
Oh, crap.
My hands fisted in the front of Sawyer’s shirt and I froze. I hadn’t even considered what I’d say if my father saw me. “What are you doing here? How did you get here?”

What will everyone think? What will they say?

Would the police think I was involved? Wasn’t I? Was I about to be arrested?

Sawyer’s embrace tightened, anchoring me. “I brought her.”

Bushy brows lowered over my father’s eyes. “
You?”

“No.” He couldn’t do this. If Sawyer said anymore . . . I shook my head, but he pointedly ignored me.

“I forced her to come. She had no choice.”

“You were in on this?” My father’s face always took on this redish tint when he got really angry. He was practically glowing now.

“No.”
No, no, no.
What was he doing? There were police everywhere and my father wasn’t a lenient man.

“You kidnapped my daughter?”

My heart seized. “Sawyer,
no!
”

“Yes, sir.” Sawyer’s eyes sank to mine and the fire in them . . . it had extinguished. “I did.”

“What are you waiting for?” My father motioned to the officers standing around watching as their colleagues escorted Frank, cursing and spitting, from the room. “Arrest him!”

“No. Daddy, you can’t do this.” The police fell on Sawyer as I pleaded with my father. “He saved your life.”

“And he
kidnapped
my daughter.”

“Daddy, please, he didn’t—”

“Fi.”

“He’s a good person. He didn’t do anything—”

“
Fi.”

“Please, Daddy, don’t—”

“
Sparrow.”

The room blurred as I whirled around. Sawyer was standing between two uniformed officers, his hands cuffed behind his back.

“It’s okay.” He forced a smile and it broke my heart to see him like that. “Everything will be okay. You can go home now.”

“No.” I stepped closer and the guards stiffened. “Sawyer . . .”

One of the officers tried to stop me, but I slapped his hand away and threw my arms around Sawyer’s neck. I felt his cheek press against the back of my head. The best he could manage given the circumstances. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not fair.” He’d been my shield, my protector, through all of this. Without him my father and I might not even be alive. And they were going to punish him for it?

“It is.” He spoke quietly, nuzzling the side of my neck. “You just tell them the truth. I mean it. About everything. I deserve whatever I get.”

“No.” Tears clogged my throat. “Sawyer, I lo—”

“Don’t say it.” His lips brushed against my ear and I squeezed my eyes shut. “You deserve so much better than me.  It’s time to set yourself free, Sparrow. Go find your happiness.”

“Enough of this nonsense.” A hard hand closed around my upper arm and yanked me backward, sending me stumbling to my father’s side.

“Let’s go.” The officer tugged Sawyer from my frantic grasp and marched him toward the door.

“No,
wait!
”

My father’s grip tightened in warning, causing me to cry out.

“Fi?” Sawyer strained to see me until they led him around a corner and out of sight. “It’s okay, Fi. It’s okay.”

“Get off me!” I tore my arm from my father’s grasp. “How can you do this? He just saved your
life
. He saved—”

“You’re acting like a spoiled child,” he hissed, his gaze sliding over the sea of onlookers—business men and women, police officials, reporters, journalists, cameras . . . “They were monsters. How would it look if I did anything else?”

By the end of the hour we were going to be front page news if we weren’t already. No doubt live updates were going out on Twitter and Instagram as events unfolded. Nationwide headlines were coming our way. And that was
all
that mattered. It was all he cared about.

Reed Tanzen wasn’t fazed by a gun pointed in his direction. He hadn’t even hugged his daughter who’d been missing for nearly a week. He didn’t care what happened to me. Or to Sawyer. Or to anyone else.

Frank was right. “
You’re
the monster. Is it true? What Frank said? About his sister? About all those people? Did you kill them?”

“Pull yourself together this instant. I don’t know what ideas that low-life thug put in your head, but I will not have my daughter—”

My hand flew before I made the conscious decision to do so. The crack surprised me as much as the burning sensation in my palm. My father’s cheek sported an angry red print.

Cold, hard eyes glared daggers at me. “Get her out of here.”

I was shoved into the waiting hands of one of his many lackeys.

“No, please. Daddy, please don’t do this.”

“
Now.
”

Rough hands manhandled me toward the exit.

“Daddy. Daddy,
please
. . .”

“Mr. Tanzen? Mr. Tanzen? Care to make a statement?” My pleas were quickly drowned out by the flock of vultures descending with their cameras and recorders.

Chapter 21

~Ophelia~

Home, sweet home.

Polished floors and sterile surfaces. Furniture that looked beautiful, but felt like sitting on cement. Every knickknack selected by a personal shopper and aligned precisely to accentuate the décor. Each framed picture, perfectly staged, right down to the sparkling white smiles. I almost longed for a hard cot and itchy hay.

My room was the only place in the entire house I felt comfortable. I’d barely left it in the six weeks I’d been home. Wanting to ‘spare me the media circus’—after parading me in front of the cameras for a tearful welcome home announcement made by my mother—I’d been placed under house arrest until further notice. The school had been called and informed of my sabbatical. And I’d been told in no uncertain terms what walking out that front door meant for my future. Or lack thereof.

It didn’t matter. I didn’t really care one way or the other. Mom and Daddy had barely been home, ghosting in and out for an hour here or a meal there, but they never stuck around long. And I had nothing better to do.

Going back to school felt like an exhausting prospect. I floated from one day to the next feeling lost. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Shrink after shrink came to the house to check on me. I sat hour after hour on that hard sofa, staring off into space while they talked at me. I knew what my father was paying them for, but not one of them could change my mind about what I wanted.

Unfortunately,
he
didn’t want me. I’d written Sawyer three letters since his arrest. They all came back. Unopened.

Frank and Sawyer both pled guilty, so there was no trial, and I’d been barred from the sentencing. I didn’t know if that was my father or Sawyer’s doing, but I received word later. Frank got four years for kidnapping and extortion.

During my interrogation, I left out the part where he beat me. Yes, he hurt me, but he was hurting, too. In ways that I couldn’t imagine. Maybe I was stupid. Maybe I was a coward. Maybe I felt a sense of comradery with him through our shared distaste for my father. Whatever my reasoning, it kept the charge from becoming
aggravated
kidnapping, reducing his sentence considerably. The attempted murder charge they’d been toying with was dropped by the wayside in exchange for his plea, mainly because my father was willing to do anything to make it all go away quickly and quietly.

Sawyer’s remorse and his actions in bringing an end to the crime lent themselves to his three-year sentence with the possibility of parole in six months.
Six months.
He was confined to hell for six months. And he wouldn’t even read my letters.  

I did find one way to occupy my considerable time, though. The minute I was released from the hospital after an overnight stay and a lot of awkward questions, I started poking around. At the office my father had top of the line security, but at home he had a laptop with Wi-Fi and passwords that took me less than two weeks to crack.

Since then, I’d poured through one document after the next. A lot of boring numbers and technical jargon I couldn’t understand for the life of me. In truth, I could have been staring right at the information I was looking for and never even known it.

Where I found my answers was buried deep in his inbox. The man was a techno-packrat. I don’t think he’d ever erased a single email ever. There were folders, upon folders, upon folders of them. Broken down by projects and individuals. It took
days
of reading and I was only a fraction of the way through when I came to one from a woman named Sheryl Linter.

She sent several over the span of what looked like eleven months. The first was a report stating the possibility of environmental contamination due to some procedures they were utilizing in production. Another was a technical analysis of the problem. There were several reports on the local impact—people getting sick, people dying. Only the last one received a response.

To: Sheryl Linter
From: Reed Tanzen
We must maintain schedule at all costs. Continue operations as normal.

I stared at those two simple sentences for over an hour. Short and to the point. The point being that they were to ‘continue operations’. Operations that were killing people. ‘At all costs’. Even the cost of human life. Of Frank’s sister’s life. In order to ‘maintain schedule’.