Twins for the Mafia Heir (The Warwicks #3)

7. Achilles

Chapter 7

Achilles

F inding the tower room empty was bad enough. Finding the missing hostage standing over my daughter-

My heart is not functioning properly right now.

Neither is my vision.

I blink, and I’m in a hospital room, Madeleine’s hand in mine. The machine’s arrhythmic beep becomes an endless drone. I scream for the doctors. People flood the room. I’m pulled away from the bed, from her-

“Get away from my daughter,” I hear myself say from leagues away. “ Now .”

Raleigh steps back immediately, backing up until she hits the wall. The path between Sidony and me is clear, but I still feel frozen in place. My ears must be failing too, because all I hear is the drone of that machine.

Sidony gets to her feet, her eyes wide. “Daddy!” she cries, and runs toward me. I should be running toward her, but I still can’t move. My daughter grabs onto my leg, clinging hard enough to cut off circulation, but that’s fine. The pressure wakes me up at last.

I bend down and snatch her up into my arms, Lilac penguin plush and all. As soon as her weight settles against me, I feel like I can breathe again. She presses a messy kiss against my cheek, and I cup the back of her head with my hand.

“Welcome home, Daddy,” she mumbles into my shoulder.

I try to tell her thank you, that I love her, that I missed her, but I can’t decide which words to use. “Hello, little princess,” I manage to say. “Hello. You didn’t wait up for me, did you?”

“The scary men came again,” Sidony confesses, and I nod. Another nightmare. I can usually tell if she’s had one at just the sight of Lilac in her arms.

“Did this woman say anything to you, dove?” I ask. With a huge effort, I suppress the fury I feel when I look at Raleigh.

Sidony straightens in my arms, and to my surprise, she’s beaming. “She says she can make her hair blue!” Sidony announces. “With ink. And- she says her name is Raleigh!”

That… all sounds fairly innocuous. But what’s even more strange is that Sidony isn’t trying to hide in my shoulder or keep completely silent. I’ve tried many times to introduce her to children her own age. When that failed I tried to introduce her to anyone at all . Aside from Mrs. Garrow and the occasional stray cat that wanders across the property, Sidony doesn’t socialize with anyone.

So what the hell did Raleigh do to make her instantly able to smile?

I stare in warning at the woman in question. Raleigh hasn’t moved from the wall, and has even pressed both her palms against it on either side of her to show she holds nothing. She meets my eyes for only a moment before looking away.

“What else did she say?” I ask Sidony, who considers carefully.

“That my name is awesome ,” she concludes.

Leaving Sidony again after that feels like tearing my own teeth out, but I have to find somewhere to put Raleigh for the night. Besides, my four-year-old is up so far past her bedtime she might as well get up for tomorrow. I need to put her to bed properly or she won’t get another wink of sleep, and I’m not doing that in front of Raleigh.

Sidony’s room is attached to mine by two private doors with a tiny linen closet between them- from back when husbands and wives couldn’t undress in the same room without their attendants being offended. Having this suite was one of several conditions I had when Fantasia demanded I move into Wesley Hall to be closer to her. If I had to be here, then Sidony had to be close to me. Sidony’s door usually stays locked when I’m not home, and she can come and go through my door with my permission.

While this arrangement has proven to be relatively secure- I’ll be having a very stern word with Mrs. Garrow about why Sidony’s door wasn’t locked tonight- it haunts me always that it is almost certainly a contributor to my daughter’s loneliness, and that it feeds her anxieties.

After I’ve set Sidony in her bed and promised her five times I’ll be back in just a moment, I guide Raleigh through the doors to my own room. It’s not ideal, but now that she’s not only slipped her restraints and lock picked her way out of her temporary cell… this is where she’ll have to stay the night.

The few hours left of it.

Thankfully, it seems like Mrs. Garrow is better at tending fireplaces than she is at locking doors. Mine is already roaring, and the room is more comfortable than the hall.

“What were you trying to do to my daughter?” I demand the second the door closes behind me.

Raleigh turns back to me, her eyes looking unusually flat and grim. “Nothing, Achilles. I was looking for a way to escape and I opened her door. What am I supposed to think when I find a child in this place?”

“That this is her home and she belongs here?” I ask incredulously.

“And this is a good, safe place for a little girl to be?” she shoots back. “Because I grew up in a house like-” She cuts herself off, sucking in a breath to steady her trembling words. “I was worried about her and I wanted to make sure she was okay. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t another prisoner .”

That’s a slap, and I refuse to let myself feel its sting. What I’m terrified of, what’s making my hands shake and my vision red, is that she could’ve easily used my child, my helpless four-year-old, as a hostage-

Just like I’m using Raleigh.

Raleigh takes another calming breath. “I would never hurt a child, Achilles. Never. Even to save myself.”

I want to argue with her. I could shout if I didn’t think Sidony would hear. But Sidony’s own words- her smile- they tell me the truth.

That Raleigh was kind to my daughter. Despite everything, she managed to charm her.

It’s possible there’s an agenda there, but what? Raleigh had the chance to grab Sidony when I first entered the room, and instead, she calmly backed away, understanding and respecting my concern.

“How did you get out of the tower?” I ask her instead. I’m not ready to relax about Sidony yet, but I need to think on what’s happened. Arguing more about it will get me nowhere.

For the first time Raleigh drops my gaze. “I learned how to pick locks from one of the men on the estate,” she says.

“And what did you use to pick the lock?”

She hesitates, and I sense she’s trying to come up with a lie. I don’t give her the chance.

Stepping closer, I put my hands on her hips. Instantly, she tries to jerk away, but I hold her firmly.

“What are you-?!”

“Searching you, since you won’t tell me the truth,” I say curtly, and drag my hands up and down her body. She hisses and stiffens when I plunge them into the back pockets of her jeans, then the front, and I’m careful not to react. All I find is lint, so I continue. Kneeling before her, I cup her thighs in between my hands, her calves. I roll up the hems of her jeans and feel around the tops of her sneakers. When I pull off the shoes and shake them out, I net myself only a few tiny bits of gravel.

Standing again, I find Raleigh’s face and neck beet red. This is somehow more intimate than her sitting in my lap on the plane. I feel under her arms, the back of my palm brushing against her small breasts, then down her arms to her wrists.

The second before I find what it is I’m looking for, Raleigh shies. I tighten my grip and feel her galloping pulse under my left hand- and something hard under my right. Shoving up her sleeve, I find the wire bracelet and tug it off. Raleigh’s jaw tightens as I hold it up between us, examining the way one end of the stiff bracelet looks a little worse for wear, like the pattern has been undone and redone before.

I should have noticed this on the plane. Just another thing I missed from being too goddamn shaken up.

“What exactly was your plan?” I ask her.

Raleigh jerks back from me, and this time I let her. “What the hell else?” she snaps, tugging her sleeve back into place. “You shot my friend, abducted me, and showed me your crazy sister who either wants to kill me or force me to marry you. What do you think my plan was?”

She hasn’t been this visibly upset all day, I realize. Up until this point, she’s kept a veneer of calm over her distress, but now that mask is cracking.

“I think that even if you made it off the property, I’d find you before the sun rose,” I tell her bluntly. “The Warwicks own this city, Raleigh. Everything you do inside it, we know about. Don’t forget that again.”

Raleigh’s jaw tightens. “You’d be surprised how good I am at disappearing.”

Interesting. Thomas’s sister truly is getting more fascinating by the hour.

And Fantasia really will kill her if I refuse to marry her.

“It was my intention to keep you alive until your brother starts making payments,” I tell Raleigh. “And it is my intention still. Unfortunately for both of us, Fantasia’s got her own ideas in her head now.”

Raleigh’s anger flickers, revealing the fear behind it. I’m not trying to frighten her, but maybe that will encourage her to accept this proposal, even after this escape attempt.

I step closer, lowering my voice. “You told Fantasia you’d be willing to marry me to give us legal claim to your part of your family’s fortune. If you are still willing to do that now…” I suck in a breath, my chest clenching. “Then so am I.”

Raleigh blanches. She steps away from me again, but she doesn’t realize how close she is to the fireplace. I snatch her by the hips and pull her back just before her heel hits the flames, accidentally bringing our bodies flush. Quickly I step back myself, putting a few respectable inches between us again.

“I promised I wouldn’t let you come to harm,” I tell her, ignoring how her face is even redder than it was when I was feeling her up. “Hopefully this proves that I wasn’t lying to you about that.”

Raleigh looks away, her lips pressed tight. “What it tells me,” she says after a moment, “is that you’ll do whatever it takes to get my family’s money.”

Well. At least she’s more pragmatic than I thought this morning when she threw herself in front of my gun. That will raise her chances of survival all on its own.

Raleigh’s jaw jumps. “But you’d really marry your… cousin?” she asks, with no small amount of disgust.

I sigh through my nose. If Fantasia is angry at me for letting this slip, it’s her own goddamn fault. “Fantasia and I are only half siblings,” I tell her. “We share a mother, but I don’t possess a drop of Warwick blood. This entire situation is not ideal, but at the very least, it’s not incestuous.”

Raleigh huffs out a sigh and looks back up at me. “I don’t want to die,” she says frankly. “So if marrying you is how I avoid that for now, then I’ll do it.”

My throat tightens. What grim declarations the pair of us have made.

Unbidden I remember the park where I proposed to Madeleine. The sun had been shining, the autumn leaves tumbling down all around us. I carried the ring with me everywhere like a talisman, uncertain when or where or how I even wanted to propose but knowing I had to marry this woman, or I’d never be happy again. That was six years ago. I was twenty-nine then, older than a man of my standing should be when marrying for the first time, but with Madeleine, I felt ten years younger.

And when she stopped before the fountain and turned to me, and the sun caught in her blue eyes, I fell down to one knee and poured my entire heart out to her.

Tonight, I don’t have a ring, and I don’t have a declaration. I don’t even know this young woman I’m offering to marry. But I brought her here. Against my better judgment, I ruined the rest of her life.

It’s only fair I ruin mine in exchange.