My heart races but my voice is calm, steady. “You made your point.”
“I like insurance,” he says. “You should know that, but you seem to need a reminder. Nathan’s at the hospital right now, and his current patient has a syringe in her pocket that would kill him in thirty seconds. I suggest you leave whatever gun you have on your person that Matteo missed in the car. Understood?”
“Yes,” I lie.
The doors to both sides of the backseat open almost instantly, and I react. I shoot the man to my left and then the one to my right, and step over him. But there are three more men, all pointing guns at me. And then there’s him, in the center of them all, tall, dark, and striking in a fitted black suit, so close I can almost see the evil in his charcoal eyes.
And my gun is aimed at him. “I am many things you didn’t realize I was,” I say. “Including a perfect marksman. Tell them to put their guns down. Because if they shoot or move you’ll be dead, even if I am, too.”
“I knew everything you were,” he says. “More than you did, and I could tell you things you burn to know—but not if I’m dead.”
My father. Those words rip through me and I know in that moment that Neuville is connected to my father’s death—and that’s all I need to know. “You have nothing to say that I want to hear.”
“Well, believe this,” he says. “If I’m dead, Gaston, my second, who I’m sure you remember, has been instructed to visit our friend Sara, which won’t upset him. He’s quite fond of her. He’s been watching her, you know.”
My blood freezes with those game-changing words. Kayden will protect himself. Nathan is far more than just a doctor and can do the same. I trust Sasha to have protected Giada and Marabella. But Sara is an entirely different story.
“I can almost hear you thinking,” he says. “Let me vocalize your thoughts. Is Sara safe? Are all those people protecting her as good as you are? The answer is no to both. She is not. They are not. Now, Kayden’s men are good, but there’s that layer of Americans between them and her, who all mean well, and are exceptional in their own country, but not in France. Paris. I own those places. Put the gun down or I’ll have a bullet put in her body now, and let her suffer while she waits for you to get there.”
“She is nothing to me,” I say. “A girl I met while undercover.”
He removes his phone from his pocket. “Then I’ll tell Gaston to fuck her, shoot her, and get rid of her.” His eyes meet mine, a brow arching, and evil radiates from him.
He isn’t bluffing. He never bluffs. I lower my weapon and Bastile, a brawny man with a goatee, who’s also Neuville’s personal bodyguard, snaps his fingers at me, silently demanding my gun. I look at him, remembering the many times he smiled at Neuville’s nastiness toward me, and his tall, muscular body looks like a mighty fine target for a bullet.
“The gun,” he growls.
Grimacing, I hand him the damn thing, which earns me a stomach-churning “Good choice, little one” from Neuville, who I force myself to look at. He then steps aside, placing me in profile, and grandly waves me forward, inviting me back to his world, and my personal hell.
I walk forward, cold air biting at my bare arms, but I feel nothing. No physical reaction. No emotion. This is about survival for me and death for him, and I’ll ride out whatever storm I have to in order to get there. One of his men opens the back door of a limousine for me and I slide inside. A moment later Neuville is across from me, the smell of him whiskey and cigars and bad memories. Almost instantly the vehicle is moving, and I know his urgency is all about escaping Kayden’s city.
“Where’s the necklace?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“You do know.”
“I don’t remember.”
His lips thin. “So I hear.” He studies me, his eyes heavy lidded, expression guarded. “Did you fuck my brother?”
“I never made it to your brother. Someone attacked me and I ended up in the hospital.”
“And then in Kayden Wilkens’s bed.” Without warning he is next to me, and a huge chunk of my hair is in his hands. “I hate the brown hair. Did he like it? Did Kayden like it?”
“No,” I say, my eyes meeting his. “I did this.”
“I see the rebellion in your eyes,” he says. “Good. That only makes me want to fuck you and punish you all the more. And I will punish you on the plane.” A needle jams into my neck—and everything goes dark.
I gasp for air and jolt to a sitting position to find myself on an airplane, engines humming, and Garner Neuville looming over me in his egotistical power-mongering way, a syringe in his hand. “They were right,” he approves. “Woke you right up.” He moves away, thank God, and sits in the leather seat across from me, the cold air chilling my bare arms, my fingers digging into the arms of the chair.
“Where’s the necklace, Ella?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s what I hear. I’m not sure I believe you.”
“Why would I lie?”
“Three hundred million dollars,” he reminds me.