Devilish - A Demon Stepbrother Romance (12 page)

Chapter Nineteen

              I tapped my feet against the bottom of the car as Liam turned up the long winding driveway up Harrison Dell’s huge home. I watched the beautiful trees as they passed by my window.

              This wasn’t exactly how I had imagined it.

              I hadn’t imagined taking my moment of revenge as a dinner guest. I hadn’t imagined attempting to take my revenge and being wrong. I hadn’t imagined having to do a second take on taking my revenge.

              It all felt…wrong.

              I looked over at Liam. He sat shadowed in the driver’s seat as he smoothly brought the car up the drive. He looked so in control, so competent. It used to pain me a little to realize that the real Liam, my stepbrother, would’ve fallen short during my mission for revenge. He had been too good, too soft, too sweet. He would’ve wanted me to walk away from this. He would’ve said I was too good to sully my hands like this.

              I looked at Liam’s strong jaw, stubbled and rough. But
this
Liam, he would never say those things. I wasn’t too good. I wasn’t too sweet. I was vengeful. I was angry. I was full of rage. And I needed someone who would support me. I needed someone who would fan the flames of my anger. And having
this
Liam has made me feel less alone in my darkness.

              With every passing day, I felt more secure under Liam’s watch. He protected me, guided me, and most of all, stood by my side. I hadn’t realized how much I depended on his presence until just now. Now, when I was being forced into separating from my steady dark angel, I realized just how much I needed him.
Wanted
him.

              Halfway up the drive, two black suited security guards stood on either side of the way. The one on the left raised up his hand as we approached. Liam rolled the car to a slow stop and rolled down his window.

              “Miss Sophia Madewell?” the guard asked looking into the car window.

              “Yes,” I answered.

              He nodded back at his partner. “Okay, we’ve been instructed to escort you up the rest of the way, Miss Madewell,” the guard said. “Your driver can park at the secondary garage down the east side and can wait there.”

              I felt a flutter of panic. So Harrison had really meant to corner me alone. I looked at the guard. “But he’s not—” I started, wanting to tell him that Liam was not my driver but my bodyguard, my brother, my dark angel from hell—
anything
to buy me a few more minutes of his calming presence.

              But Liam raised a hand. “Alright. I’ll wait in the secondary garage for Miss Madewell,” he said. He gave me a look. It was clear he thought it better to keep his identity a secret for now.

              I stared at him. I could read his eyes as if his thoughts were printed clearly within them.
You can do this. I will be there with you.

              This was it. I couldn’t dissolve into panic and hysterics now. I had come too far. I nodded and stepped out of the car. The guard to the right helped me out and escorted me up the rest of the drive.

              I turned around once to watch Liam turn the car around and drive off in the opposite direction of me. God, how far was the secondary garage? Harrison was so paranoid that he had Liam park not in the main house garage but at a
secondary
garage?

              As my guard dropped me off at the front doors of the house, I took a moment to collect myself. I straightened up and felt my gun press solidly against my lower back. I knew my knife was strapped to my right leg.

              Knowing I would be facing some kind of danger tonight but unsure if it would happen before or after dinner, I took care to dress in silk pants and blouse that allowed me free movement but still was appropriate for cocktails.

              Feeling as ready as one could possibly be in such a situation, which wasn’t very ready at all, I knocked on the door.

              But I only got one knock in.

              The lightly burnished oak door swung open, already set slightly ajar.
Well this is a good sign.
I stepped into the house before I pulled out my gun. I kept it tucked behind me as I walked slowly into the house, staying close to the walls.

              “Harrison?” I called out. “Mr. Dell?”

              The house echoed with my voice. I passed the arching living room and the beautifully decorated kitchen. The lights were on in all the rooms. I saw the dining room at the end.

              Keeping my hand firmly around my gun’s grip, I took a second before stepping into the entrance of the formal dining room.

              And right in front of me, at the head of a ten person dining room table, was Harrison Dell with his head flat on the table, a small dark bloody hole at the center of his forehead.

              All I could hear was my heartbeat as I stared at Harrison’s large face, now pale and cold in death. His lids were only half closed and I caught a glimpse of a pupil, staring blankly out at me. He had a look of slight surprise.

              “What the hell—” I murmured to myself before crying out in pain.

              I looked down at my left thigh.

              There right in the middle of my thigh was a neat little silver dart. Or at least, what looked to be a dart. As if moving through water, I reached down and, biting my lip, pulled out the dart.

              It was tipped with a small syringe.

              “A mild sedative. A low dosage form of a tranquilizer really. You’re going to feel a bit woozy in a few seconds.”

              I instinctively raised my gun up. I looked up at the far end of the dining table, the part I hadn’t even thought to look once I had caught sight of Harrison Dell’s dead body.

              There at the opposite end sat Senator Sebastian Folsom, sipping what looked to be a glass of whiskey.

              He seemed completely at ease, his cane leaning against the table by his side. He motioned to a chair with his whiskey hand. “You might want to sit down, Soph,” he said, as if passing off a friendly tip.

              Already I could feel the edges of my vision swimming. “You…” I said, hesitating on my words more from shock than from the dart, “You drugged me?”

              Senator Folsom lifted up a tiny silver gun from his lap. “I sure did, sweetheart,” he said. He took a sip of his whiskey. “There were two reasons for it and I’ll explain them both to you once you take a seat. Also, put that gun away before I shoot your arm off.”

              I remained standing, holding out my gun. I stared at the Senator. I was so confused and whatever drug was flowing through me now did not make it easier for me to think. The Senator with his white hair and friendly face was sitting at Harrison Dell’s dining room table with a tranquilizer gun. And he had just shot me with one of those tranquilizers.

              “Sit, Sophia,” Senator Folsom said, his voice taking on an edge of steel I had never heard before.

              It was all spinning in my brain. Senator Folsom, the sweet, crippled politician whom my dad had always felt so protective for. Senator Folsom who had always fought for the underdogs and was always battling the uninteresting battles like road budgets and dam inspection quotas. That same Senator Folsom was now sitting at Harrison Dell’s dining room table, looking at me as if I were a bug to be squashed.

              “Sit, Sophia,” he repeated, his tone now taking away any hint of softness.

              “Why?” I asked.
Why are you doing this? Why are you here? Why did you shoot me?
All thoughts swirled through my mind in a tornado of confusion.

              “Because you should’ve stayed in the ground I put you in! You should’ve stayed dead!” he roared as he pounded his fist down on the table, making Harrison Dell’s head jostle in a grotesque manner. He took a breath and ran his hand over his hair, smoothing it down. “Now sit down before I shoot out both your knee caps and
make
you sit.”

              I grabbed a chair and collapsed into it just before my legs gave out. My gun clattered to the floor as it fell out of my hand. It didn’t matter anyway. I could hardly feel my fingertips anymore. My whole body was starting to feel detached and numb.

I watched as Senator Folsom grabbed his cane and rose to his feet. It was hard to keep my eyes focused on him. Everything kept coming in waves, making me feel disoriented and nauseous.

              But I knew one thing—I had been wrong. God, I had been so wrong.

Chapter Twenty

              With wavy vision, I watched as Senator Folsom walked over to me with his distinctive gait. He leaned on his cane heavily as he rounded the table, heading straight towards me.

              “You know,” Senator Folsom started, as if continuing a normal conversation, “it took nearly all of my years of being in politics to keep most of my composure when I saw you at my dinner several weeks ago.” He stopped in front of me. He looked over me as if assessing how quickly the drug was working. With how hard it was to keep my head staying upright, I thought it was working superbly. Senator Folsom seemed to agree. He nodded to himself and took a sip of his whiskey. “How did I do? Could you guess I was seething with anger at what looked like the ultimate fuck up in history?”

              I shook my head. Or at least, I thought I shook my head. “No,” I whispered. He had looked truly surprised and relieved at seeing me alive. He had looked like Uncle Sebastian.

              Senator Folsom smiled, pleased. “Good, good,” he said heartily. “I’m glad to hear it. I thought I had done a tremendous job as well.”

              “What’s going—”

              “You realize now that the Blue Boy vans weren’t from me, right?” he interrupted. Using the hand holding his whiskey glass, he scratched his nose. “I would never have been so sloppy or stupid. That had all been Lawson, that idiot.”

              I stared at him. He knew about the Blue Boy vans? The tranquilizer had me woozy and disoriented but it was just weak enough to keep me from passing out. I could hear everything the Senator was saying but I wasn’t sure I was processing it fast enough.

              “That had been Lawson?” I murmured, quite sure my words were slurring.

              “Of course!” the Senator cried out. “Give me some credit here, Sophia. I am a meticulous man. I would never just send a van over to shoot a few bullets haphazardly into a side of a house!”

              So the Blue Boy vans
had
been Lawson. But then what about….?

              “Wait,” I said, feeling overwhelmed. “I’m confused. I thought—”

              “It all started about forty years ago,” Senator Folsom started, ignoring whatever I had been about to say. “Do you know where I studied in college?”

              “Harvard,” I answered promptly, forcing my eyes to focus on just
one
Senator Folsom.

              “No, no, no,” he admonished. “That was for law school. I studied at Columbia for my undergraduate degree.” His large eyes, usually so wide and open, turned steely as they pinned me. “New York. I studied in New York.”

              I nodded, unsure what other response I could give.
Liam, where are you?
The secondary garage had been far enough away that I hadn’t even been able to see it from the drive. Had he run into trouble?

              “And forty years ago, there was a young, upstart punk who was running the streets as if he was the king of the fucking universe,” the Senator continued, his voice taking on an edge. “He sold drugs, he sold weapons, he even had a ring of pimps with some poor wretched women trapped underneath them. He was a terror to New York and grew very powerful, very fast.”

              Senator Folsom grabbed a fistful of my hair and yanked my head back. I cried out as pain shot through my scalp. Even feeling as incapacitated as I did, the pain was real and sharp and was the only thing that was able to cut through this hazy drugged fog.

              “Do you know who I’m talking about?” Senator Folsom murmured, his voice even and calm.

              “My father,” I gasped, trying to pull my hair free from his grasp.

              The Senator gave me a long glare before throwing my head back, releasing me from his unbelievably strong grip. “Your father,” he sneered. “Eric Madewell. Who soon became the head of the Made Mafia.”

              Tears had involuntarily sprung to my lashes when the Senator had grabbed me. Pain seemed so much more pronounced now. The drug, whatever he had shot me with, seemed to only heighten physical sensations while incapacitating movement.

              “But he…he wasn’t that at the end,” I mumbled. “My dad. He changed. He was different when you met him.”

              Senator Folsom eyed with a look of bright amusement. The look changed his expression completely into one that hinged almost on the maniacal. “When I met him?” he echoed. “When do you think I met him, my dear?”

              I wasn’t sure. I had grown up having the sporadic visit from Uncle Sebastian nearly all through my life. I had always figured they had met when dad had become financially influential enough to back a political candidate.

              “I don’t know,” I finally said.

              Senator Folsom put down his whiskey glass and leaned over my chair. He stood over me like a giant, looming down with a look of crazed pain and history. “I met your father forty years ago in the streets of New York after he had murdered my sweet Angela.”

              I stared at him dumbly.
What?

              “My sweet Angela,” Senator Folsom said, his voice tinged with that softness of long lost history. “She would’ve been my wife, a senator’s wife, if it hadn’t been for her soft heart and your father’s brutality.

              “We were both students at Columbia and were walking back to our apartment after studying all night at the library. Admittedly, our place was not the nicest apartment. A small flat on the edge of Harlem. But it was all we could afford and we made it our own little oasis.”

              The Senator shook his head, as if trying to move past the images of his long ago apartment. “That night as we walked, we heard a woman screaming. Angela, being the sweet woman she was, had run to the voice, wanting to offer any kind of help she could.”

              The Senator paused, as if letting the memory of the event soak over him. “Two hookers and a lousy pimp is what she found,” he said flatly. “The pimp was beating the women senseless for whatever reason. Before I could stop her, Angela stepped in and tried to pull one of the women he was beating away. The pimp, who had only been using his fists on his hookers, pulled out a knife on my sweet Angela.”

              I watched as the Senator’s face darkened shade by shade. “As I held my Angela, trying to press down against her slit open gut, unable to leave her at all to call for help, the pimp told his hookers, ‘Come correct unless you want Eric Madewell to deal with you.’ And then he left.” He paused. “The hookers left as well. The hookers, who Angela had tried to help, left without even a backwards glance at the woman dying before them.”

              “The hookers, the pimp, they had all been part of the Made Mafia, do you see?” the Senator demanded. “So I made it my mission to find this Eric Madewell and give him a taste of vengeance for my sweet Angela. And after three weeks, I found him. He was leaving Lucco’s, the steakhouse in Brooklyn. He was surrounded by an army of thick necked goons but I shoved my way through, trying to show this man who exactly he had robbed me of.”

              Senator Folsom’s eyes were now clear and focused, free of old haunting memories. He looked directly at me as he spoke carefully. “Your father waved off his bodyguard and cornered me in an alley. He claimed he hadn’t known about Angela’s murder but said he didn’t care otherwise who the ‘dumb bitch’ had been. And then he proceeded to beat the ever living shit out of me. He broke my hip in three different places, a lower vertebra, and my right thigh and left me for dead that night.”

              I looked at the man with new eyes. His limp, his constant and well-publicized gait and use of cane, had been because of my
dad?

              Senator Folsom never broke his gaze with me. “So imagine my surprise when years later, this punk kid who had an ocean’s worth of blood on his hands became a multi-billionaire conglomerate. And then imagine my even greater surprise when several years after that, he comes to me and wants to donate to my campaign. He had no idea who I was. He didn’t remember me.” Senator Folsom snorted. “Then again, I was probably just one of the man nameless strangers he had attacked and nearly killed over the years. Why would he remember me?”

              My head spun and not just from the drugs. This was all news to me. But even though I was surprised to find out my dad had been the one to cripple Senator Folsom, I wasn’t entirely shocked hearing his evil deeds.

              I had learned early on about my dad’s crooked past. He
had
done very terrible things. And he
did
have a pimp ring under his mafia belt back in New York. So that pimp who had murdered Angela could very well have been part of the Made Mafia syndicate.

              But my dad had changed
so
much. It was true—his actions were unforgiveable and heinous. But because of his guilt and reformation, Madewell Ltd was the highest giving charity donator of all billion dollar companies. Central Hartford had created a string of charter schools for poor and disadvantaged inner city children all from Madewell funding.

              New York had gotten donations for homeless shelters, educational programs, and hospitals from Madewell. In fact, I remember the day my dad had drafted a program that would help educate people from the street in modern vocational trades so that they could create more legitimate lives for themselves. Former drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes were welcomed and encouraged with no questions asked. Tuition was free.

              Eric Madewell had never said a word about his horrendous guilt over his past doings but I saw it in every dollar he gave, every program he fought for, and every political candidate he backed.

              That was why he had sought out Senator Folsom. Dad liked politicians who seemed to genuinely care to make a difference no matter how small the matter or how obscure the issue. He liked that Senator Folsom was so passionate about having safer dams and proper road management in rural cities. And so he had contributed and helped the Senator during his campaigns.

              Eric Madewell was most likely not in heaven right now. But he made sure that his road to hell was paved with a few less bad deeds. And that, in my eyes, was what change and good was all about.

              “You were dad’s friend,” I said slowly, my tongue feeling like it weighed a hundred pounds.

              “Biding my time, my dear. I was biding my time,” Senator Folsom said loudly as he leaned on his cane and walked back and forth in front of me.

              “Waited till just the right opportunity. And it came with Lawson when he proposed that stupid alliance,” Senator Folsom said shaking his head. “Of course, I made sure to tell your dad how much I thought it was a gamble and how hesitant I was about it. But I hinted to Lawson how having the alliance would only strength RL Co. and weaken Madewell. When the alliance was agreed upon, I just pretended to have been outnumbered and promised your dad I would help to pay him back for all his generous donations.

              “With now very clear potential suspects, I hired what I had thought were the best men to break into your house and give your father exactly what he deserved—his heart being slowly burned out his body as he watched his wife and daughter die before him. I
thought
I had succeeded. And in fact, before you showed up miraculously at the dinner, there had been talks of investigating the members of the alliance about the heinous murder. It was perfect. Nothing led back to me.”

              I remembered my bones snapping, my mom crying out for the men to stop raping her, my dad coughing up blood as he was pummeled again. I remembered simmering in agonizing pain as I wondered who had executed such a terrible fate to us.

              And here he was, Senator Folsom.

              I felt like I was about to throw up.

              “You weren’t supposed to have survived and you’ll have to enlighten me on that one but I was determined not to have plans derailed,” Senator Folsom continued. “It was a trial to keep Lawson on the leash. That man was so greedy, he was stupid. He took one look at you and immediately saw dollars flying out the window.”