Fight for my woman.
I’m going to fight for our future.
And that future doesn’t involve a day when I let a lowlife scumbag hurt an innocent wedding planner.
“And he’s going to do it either way,” I go on, watching waves of anxiety flicker across her face. “Listen to me, Melody. This bastard doesn’t let anything go. He can’t allow you to scar him and then—and then what? Give you a slap on the wrist? No, if you go in there, you’re dead. If we send in the police or my security detail, Gertrude is dead. But if I go in alone, if I make him feel powerful long enough—”
“Long enough for what?” she snaps.
“For me to get close,” I snarl, venom shooting through my veins.
She buries her face in her hands.
“Oh God,” she moans. “Oh my God.”
“Do you trust me?” I say, touching her face and subtly moving her chin so that she’s looking at me.
“Yes,” she says without missing a beat. “Of course I do. We’re going to have children together, Mason. I trust you with my life.”
“Then trust me with this,” I say. “I swear to you, I will always protect us. I’ll always protect our family. And from what you’ve told me, Gertrude is becoming like family to you. So let me do this.”
Tears bead in her eyes but then she hardens her face, making a conscious effort not to cry.
She paws at her eyes and stiffens her lips.
“Please save her,” she whispers.
I push open the door, grinning grimly when I hear the familiar squeak, the same damn squeak the landlord said he was going to get fixed and never did. The place is abandoned now and has clearly been home to squatters and junkies, the carpet picked apart and littered with bottles and paper wrappers and other detritus of the street.
It’s easy to find Hardhat.
I just walk into the room that used to be the main office.
It’s no longer home to a few small desks and a filing cabinet. Not that we ever filed anything. Now, it’s just a wide-open room, a few chairs huddled around a burnt-out fire of charred newspapers.
Gertrude sits in the center of the room on a plastic lawn chair, her hands bound and her feet tied to each leg. Duct tape over her mouth stops her from speaking. My chest lightens when I see that she’s unharmed and that she still has a fierce glint in her eye, the one Melody has described to me more than once.
Last night, she told me, “She might be getting older, Mason, but she’s like a lioness. I once saw her chew a client out for trying to squirm out of paying. It was a real Jekyll and Hyde moment. But in a good way. She’s incredible.”
Now, she’s just the same, even as she sits there powerless.
I read the message in her blazing gaze easily, Is Melody okay?
I nod shortly, proud that a woman as strong as Gertrude has taken such a liking to my woman.
The rest of the room is a cesspit for scumbags. I count seven goons standing at the other end of the room, two of them smoking, one holding a lead pipe.
All of them are covered in tattoos and one is even taller than me, and wider, though his muscles have that puffy doughy look people get from too many steroids.
I search the room for guns.
Nothing.
Except for the one that Hardhat casually tosses from hand to hand as he emerges from the shadows and stands in the light of the naked, flickering bulb.
He’s wearing a combat jacket, cargo pants, and boots, clearly thinking himself some sort of militiaman or soldier and not just a two-bit crook.
“You, my friend, are not Melody,” he says, flashing a grin that displays golden canine teeth.
He wears the evidence of Melody’s ferocity like a badge of dishonor, a jagged pink scar from just under his eye down to his lip.
“Getting a good look?” he snaps, causing the men behind him to bristle. “You know how stupid it is you coming in here, pretty boy? You can’t code your way out of this one. What, you gonna offer to make us an exploding toaster next?”
His goons laugh like the obedient little fucks they are, stepping forward so that they’re closer to their master.
“Well?” Hardhat moans. “Are you really shitting your britches so bad you can’t even talk? How much are you offering us?”
“Offering you?” I say, unable to repress a smirk.
“Yes, yes,” he says, gesturing with his pistol, half-aimed at me and half-aimed at the floor. “You came in here to offer us some cash to spare the old cunt and the cunt’s adopted daughter, right? So how much? And don’t forget, I know your net worth. That’s public information.”
He scratches at the razor-wire tattoo on his bald head with the barrel of his gun.
“What is it, fellas? Two billion?”
“Three,” a man says, stubbing his cigarette out on a tattooed forearm as if that’s supposed to intimidate me.
My heart is hammering.
My nerves are sore and alive.
But that’s just a human response, a mammalian reflex, and not my instincts.
Because my instincts are fucking ready.
To defend my woman.
And everything that matters to her.
Hardhat blows out air through his teeth.
“Three,” he says. “Now that is impressive. And it all started here. I’ll tell you what there, slugger. You give me a cool billion and we’ll be on our way.”
“Sure,” I say.
He narrows his eyes, his shit-eating grin wavering.
“Sure?” he says.
And I see it in his eyes, the suspicious hunger, the look that says he knows this is ridiculous and I’d never agree to that, but he’s interested despite himself.
Because he’s a lowlife and he tried to make my woman into his sex slave.
All he cares about is money, money, and his fucked-up code that really is just an excuse to inflict more pain.
“Absolutely,” I say. “I’ll have to move some things around, but that’ll be fine. There’s
