The Gilded Cage Read online

  The sense of rage pouring off his twin transformed into an almost tangible force, rolling through Emery and into Fenn. Emery’s eyes were wide and wild. He thrashed, jerking his chair around, scraping the legs against the wooden floor. His brother made a hoarse, choked, howling noise, and Fenn knew what was going through his brother’s mind.

  Sophie. How had Emery been taken captive? Had his fiancée been hurt? Or had the man done what he’d done with Fenn and left Sophie alive? Please god, let Sophie be okay. He and Emery couldn’t lose anyone else they loved.

  Andrews laughed hollowly at Emery’s desperate struggles.

  Calm down. Fenn tried to reach that unusual path between him and his twin. Please.

  Sophie. The name was a silent burst of emotions. Fear, longing, anxiety, protectiveness.

  Fenn knew what that was like only too well. Hayden also had too many close calls.

  Andrews was not exactly the talkative type. He stared at Fenn and his brother for several long seconds before he walked over to a small wooden table. The scratched rosewood table had three cellphones on it. Their batteries had been removed and lay in a small heap on the table’s surface. Andrews picked one up and toyed with it.

  “I know my father was a cold man, but he was my father. I know you killed him in cold blood.”

  Emery made a throaty growl and Fenn knew what he was thinking. Cold blood. No, Antonio had been killed during the heat of a fight, during a struggle to save Sophie. What could Andrews possibly know about that?

  On the other side of Emery, Hans made a tiny move, barely more than a shifting of his body as though he was merely uncomfortable, but it drew Fenn’s attention. When their gazes locked, Hans’s eyes flicked to one phone on the table. A pinprick of red light gleamed at the base of the phone, unnoticeable unless a person was at just the right angle to view it. What in the hell was that? Fenn could see Andrews had removed all of the batteries, so none of the phones should have any power.

  An image shot through his mind lightning fast, of a black widow spider scuttling along the ground, that deadly flash of red upon her back.

  Then it hit him, a half-remembered conversation at dinner the night before. The Black Widow GPS. The newest brainchild at Lockwood Industries was a GPS device so tiny that it was barely visible to the naked eye. It didn’t require any power connection through another device, but was self-powered by a tiny internal cell. It had a five-mile range, the largest for a GPS of its size. In other words…while that little red light blinked, they could be tracked. They might yet stand a chance, but who would know to look for them? He’d had only one chance to warn Hayden and he wasn’t sure his attempt to write in code had worked.

  Andrews set the cell phone back down on the table and seconds later stiffened, his eyes narrowing as he stared at something behind Fenn and the others.

  “Well, it looks like someone just had to get involved.” He frowned deeply at Fenn.

  Someone was here to help? They would be walking into a trap.

  “It’s a bloody shame, but I can’t leave any loose ends.”

  The man wasn’t sarcastic, rather quiet and thoughtful, as though he didn’t wish to harm whoever had come to their aid.

  Fenn’s stomach roiled and he lashed out at the bindings, making his chair creak and groan, but the zip ties didn’t budge. If anything they cut deeper into his flesh.

  “One move and I put your rescuer down like a dog. Behave and she stays breathing for a little while longer.”

  She? Oh, God…Who was it? Hayden? Sophie? His mother…There were too many women in his life now that he couldn’t afford to lose. Which one was it?

  Fenn hated this. Every cell of his body was filled with rage and fear. He was completely powerless to protect whoever was just outside.

  Andrews strode past him and into the room just behind them. For a moment everything was quiet, then a heartbeat later someone screamed and Andrews grunted. An awful silence followed. Only Fenn’s frantic breaths cut through the roaring quiet.

  Chapter 25

  The empty bed had chilled her as Hayden woke just a little after dawn. Fenn had left her. Again. An ache deep within her chest made it a little hard to breathe. All she wanted was to be with him, really with him, and he kept leaving her. Still, it was probably a wise decision because her brother knew they were more than just close.

  Pale pink rays of weak sunlight filtered through the white curtains around the terrace. Hayden didn’t want to move. She was too depressed. Then a flash of white caught her attention on the desk. A single sheet of paper rested in open view.

  A note? The pathetic flair of hope inside her made her feel like a fool. Fenn didn’t strike her as a note kind of guy. Yet there it was: a piece of white paper on the desk.

  Hayden pulled the sheet around her body in a toga fashion and then tiptoed over to the desk. She picked up the paper, and with each word she read her heart shattered.

  Hayden,

  I hate to cut and run like this, but we both know this isn’t going to last. I’m going back to Colorado to think things over. Don’t come after me. I need time alone. Ask your brother. He knows how I feel.

  Trust me.

  Fenn

  For a moment, Hayden couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. No…he couldn’t…Traitorous tears singed her eyes as she closed them tight. Her fingers curled automatically into a fist around the note, crumpling it in her hand.

  Fenn Lockwood was gone. Again. And this time he’d cut her heart out and taken it with him. She’d been passed over by men before. She was too aggressive, too mouthy, too everything they didn’t want. Yet with Fenn, she’d thought he’d loved everything about her, even her sass. But he hadn’t; he’d played around with her and left. She’d been used. Her heart seemed to bleed from the inside out and her chest clenched so tight she couldn’t breathe.

  God, I’ve been a fool. She’d thought falling in love would be fun, simple, easy, and that when eventually she would have to part ways with him, it would be easy—not at all like her soul had been ripped from her body. But that’s exactly how she felt. These last few days had tilted her world on its axis and spun her in an entirely new direction and angle. She couldn’t go back to her life of before, not after having a taste of true happiness, true joy and true pleasure. Hayden wanted to walk alongside Fenn and build a life with him, and see the fruit of her labors on a ranch like the Broken Spur. She didn’t want to spend another minute living a life she couldn’t stand. Yet she was trapped. He didn’t want her coming after him.

  Hayden collapsed into the brocade-upholstered chair by the desk and smoothed out the crumpled note. She read the words again, despising how they scraped against the raw wounds in her chest, but she couldn’t look away. Tears clouded her vision and fat drops rolled down her cheeks. She despised crying but she couldn’t stop, not in that moment. Her walls were breaking down, turning to ash, and she was vulnerable to every heartbreak that might come her way.

  A rap on her door barely intruded in her consciousness.

  “Hayden?” Wes eased open the door, his face immediately darkening as she slowly turned to look his way. He still wore a dark, custom-made Italian suit, without a tie and the top two buttons undone. Only he could make that look comfortable, Hayden sniffed. She missed Fenn and his blue jeans and soft cotton button-up shirts, and the way it felt to rub her bare skin against him. Damn him! Damn him for leaving her!

  “He left me, Wes.” Her voice was a whisper as she held out the note. The need to be comforted, cared for, loved, was so strong in her that she pulled the bed sheet tighter around her as though it could shield her from the world, but she knew it could not.

  Her brother approached and slid the paper out from underneath her hand. She bit her lip, watching his face as he read the note.

  She’d expected outright anger or any sense of his protective streak, but it didn’t come. Only a quiet contemplative expression created tiny furrows in his brow.

  “Why did he underline the words ‘tru
st me’?” Wes asked as he pointed to them.

  “For emphasis?” Hayden’s tone was bitter and her eyes burned.

  Wes’s slightly raised brow told her he wasn’t interested in dealing with her attitude.

  “Obviously,” he said. “Why, though? Fenn is not the sort of man to emphasize something unless he really wants to make a point. Think back, Hayden. Has he ever said those words to you in another situation?”

  Memories, whispered words of conversations that had passed between her and Fenn, fluttered like the pages of a book as she desperately searched her thoughts. Her cheeks flushed with heat as realization dawned on her. He had asked her to trust him in bed, and when they were on the mountain about to die. Each time he had asked for her trust and she had known that he wouldn’t hurt her, wouldn’t abandon her. Those words had come to symbolize something important when he spoke them. That he was there with her, protecting her. When he said “trust me” she knew she wouldn’t be alone. So why had he used those words in a note that shattered her heart?

  “What is it?” Wes cupped her chin and angled her face upward so he could see her eyes.

  “I didn’t think he’d leave me whenever he said that. It was always a promise that he was going to stay and not hurt me.” It was hard to explain what she meant aloud.

  Wes read through the note again. “I know how he feels about you. It says that you should ask me.” He cocked one hip, leaning against the desk as he handed her the note back.

  “How does he feel?” Her heart thumped with nervous anticipation.

  “He cares. Deeply. I warned him that you needed a man who wouldn’t cage you, or clip your wings. He knew that even before I told him. I could sense he wouldn’t do that to you, but more importantly, that he wouldn’t leave you either. You belong to him; whether you both realize it or not, it’s the truth. He wouldn’t leave this note, unless…” Wes’s eyes narrowed and he suddenly jerked his cell phone out of his trouser pocket. He dialed a number and waited. Nothing.

  “Who are you calling?”

  Wes tried another number and another, his face growing paler with each passing second. “Get dressed now. We don’t have time.”

  Hayden jumped to her feet, her body spiking with adrenaline as she sensed something was very wrong. “What? Tell me, Wes.”

  “Emery isn’t answering his phone. Neither is Cody, Sophie, or Hans. Something isn’t right. We have to get moving.”

  The sheer panic that swept through her made her knees go weak, and she threw out a hand to catch the bedpost so she wouldn’t collapse.

  Her brother didn’t wait for her. “Meet me at the garage in five minutes. I’ll explain then.”

  Wes’s command jolted her into action and she scrambled into jeans and a sweater.

  Exactly three minutes later she was climbing into Wes’s Range Rover and they were shooting down the road at a frightening speed. Wes tossed her his cellphone.

  “The Black Widow GPS application is up and running. We can track Fenn’s phone. Tell me where he is, and I’ll get us there.”

  Hayden studied the phone’s screen. A street map showed a blinking green dot. She knew where that dot was: only two miles away at another old abandoned property, one she had often investigated as a child with her friends. There was only one reason he would be there and not Colorado.

  “He’s at the Defaux House,” she told Wes and then waited for him to explain. When he didn’t she pressed him. “Wes, what’s going on? Does this have to do with the hit man?” Her gut told her it was so but she didn’t want to believe it. It might mean she was already too late to save Fenn.

  Wes pressed the gas pedal harder, and his knuckles turned white. Trees outside the window blurred into an emerald curtain along the road.

  “He must have been taken. Somehow, the man got to him. No one is answering their phone. It’s happened. Despite all of our plans. Thank God, Emery lo-jacked Fenn’s new phone.”

  “Lo-jacked? Wouldn’t the assassin leave their phones somewhere else? Or maybe he took the batteries out. You can’t track phones if they don’t have their batteries in them, right?”

  Wes shook his head. “Not entirely true. Emery’s new Black Widow GPS has its own cell powering it. You can attach it to anything, and it will power itself. It’s the size of a microdot but it works beautifully. Besides, this man wouldn’t leave their phones somewhere. He’s probably going to make killing them look like an accident—at least that’s what I would do. He’s set it up to look like Fenn’s going back to Colorado. Why not have Emery and his bodyguard go as well? He could easily take the three of them out of the picture and arrange for some sort of accident to kill them and no one would be the wiser that they had been assassinated.”

  Hayden stared in horror at her brother. How did he even know to think in such a cold blooded manner?

  His gaze flicked to her face, and he cursed under his breath. “I’ve been training for a day like this, Hayden. Royce and I knew it was only a matter of time before whatever chased Emery into his reclusive lifestyle would resurface. Emery gave me all of the information needed to track his phone, as well as Hans’s and Fenn’s. We’ll start with Fenn because we know he’s been taken for sure.”

  With a sharp spin of the wheel, Wes turned off the main road and onto a gravel one. He quickly pulled onto the grass at the side and hid the SUV from view of the Defaux House by parking it behind a thick copse of trees.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  “We’ll be harder to see from here. We need as much of an advantage as we can get and driving any closer will alert whoever is in the house that we’re here,” he explained hastily.

  She stared at her brother in shock. Who was this man? He sounded more like James Bond than her brother.

  “How do you know about all of this?” His assumptions were logical, but in the heat of the moment, she wasn’t able to think as clearly as he was able to. It was obvious he was used to thinking about these sorts of situations.

  Wes kept his focus on the road. “Emery wasn’t the only one who benefited from Hans. He taught me and Royce a few things. Where do you think I learned to shoot? After learning from him, I made sure you were trained too. That’s why you’re a decent shot.” A sad little smile teased the corners of his mouth.

  A thousand little pieces of her brother’s life began to fit into place. The guns, the tracking device, the solemn knowledge of how to protect, to defend. Her parents had never shown any interest in protecting either her or her brother, so Wes had apparently taken that burden upon himself. Had he lived in a state of fear these past years? She hated to think he’d carried that burden all alone.

  “I didn’t want to lose anyone else I loved. Especially you, Hayden.” Wes turned off the Range Rover and they both turned to look through the thick trees at the Defaux house. It was a dilapidated structure, with wild ivy smothering the rotted wood, and saplings growing through the weakened brickwork. It looked more like an abandoned temple to a forest god than an abandoned house that was only seventy years old.

  “I’m so sorry, Wes.” She reached over and touched her brother’s hand. She didn’t want to think he’d sacrificed his youth and innocence just to protect her. She wasn’t worth that type of love. Her parents had convinced her of that years ago. By their standards, both she and Wes had been huge disappointments to their parents’ dreams. She ought to have been a dutiful wife to some rich man on the island, and Wes was supposed to have joined their father in his Wall Street endeavors, not chase pieces of art across the world, burying himself in ancient history.

  He shrugged. “It’s what brothers do.” He reached across her to open the glove compartment, where two handguns were tucked beneath the driver’s manual. He handed her one and took the other for himself.

  “Switch places with me. I need you to take the car back to Emery’s house and find out what’s happened. The cell service near this house is bad, you’ll have to get back out on the main road. Call the police, call the FBI,
call Royce. Call anybody you think can help. Do you understand?” He opened his door but Hayden grabbed his arm.

  “No. You go to Emery’s. I’ll go after Fenn.”

  “No!” Wes growled and tried to pull free.

  She didn’t let go. “This hired hit man has had more than one chance to kill me, but he hasn’t. He won’t. I feel it in my gut, Wes. Let me go in. I’ll take the chance.”

  “Like hell. I’m not going to let my baby sister go into an assassin’s den.”

  Hayden leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Yes you will, because I know what I’m doing.”

  “I don’t care if you know what you’re doing. You’re my sister. I’m not leaving you here.” He gripped her arm, holding her prisoner in her seat.

  She touched his hand. “If Emery is still at his home, he needs to be protected. You can call the cops and the FBI, whoever you want, but someone has to go in there and save Fenn.”

  “Yeah, and it’s going to be me,” he growled.

  “No,” she snapped, her temper flaring. “He’ll kill you, Wes. But he might not kill me and I’d bet my life on it. Go save Emery and come back for me, okay? Please?” She pried his fingers off her arm and leapt out of the Rover before he could stop her.

  When her brother didn’t tackle her to the ground, she knew he’d left, just as he needed to. He would be more use in rallying the police and protecting Sophie. She, on the other hand, was going into a deadly situation and relying only on her gut instinct that this crazy killer would not actually kill her.

  God, what the hell am I thinking? But she had no time. She needed to get in there and slow down whatever he was planning. If Fate was on her side she might even be able to stop him.

  She held the gun she’d taken from Wes and in a crouching run headed for the old mansion. The side door off the main house hung half off its hinges, its robin’s egg blue paint peeling and faded. Hayden darted toward it, but when she reached the door she knelt, one hand resting on the cool dew-dampened grass. Her other hand gripped the gun. She waited, listening for every little sound. There was a faint voice, a man’s rumble as he spoke, and the soft shuffle of steps. Other than that, the only sounds were the distant chatter of birds waking up in their nests. Then the voice went silent, and the crickets closest to her stopped their rhythmic stirring.