With that, they swaggered back to the car.
But before she closed the door, Georgia left me with one final, venomous remark.
"Ryan, do you think her barbarian husband was stupid? The man is dead, not even a body to bury, yet he still left her pregnant. What bad luck!"
The Ferrari roared away, leaving me in a cloud of exhaust.
I stood there, unmoving.
My hand drifted to my pocket. Touched the cold, heavy metal of an old Nokia phone.
That was the only thing Sebastian James left me.
I thought of that bear of a man—soaked in blood in his final moments, yet still wearing that goofy grin as he shoved the phone into my hands.
"Wifey, this thing is built like a tank. It's got a life-saving talisman inside for you."
I wiped a smear of blood from the corner of my mouth, my gaze turning to ice.
*Bad luck?*
*We'll see who's really cursed.*
For the next two days, I made myself visible. Lingered around the Henson Group headquarters like bait dangling from a hook.
Same rags. Same broken posture. At night, I stayed in a dilapidated rental unit nearby, the kind of place where the walls sweated and the pipes groaned like dying animals.
I knew they wouldn't be able to resist.
Sure enough, two nights later, the trap sprung. A group of men stormed the rental, knocked me unconscious, and dragged me into the dark.
...
"Aria, you really shouldn't have come back right now."
Matthew Henson's voice drifted through the fog in my skull.
"I warned you to behave, but you just had to provoke me."
My eyelids cracked open. Sterile white light stabbed into my retinas. The sharp tang of antiseptic flooded my nostrils, mixing with something metallic—old blood, maybe, soaked into the grout between the floor tiles.
I was strapped to a surgical table. Leather bit into my wrists when I tested the restraints.
*Immobile.*
Georgia Pruitt stood nearby, pristine as a porcelain doll and twice as hollow.
"Matthew, she's doing this on purpose." Her voice dripped with poisoned honey. "She wants to cause a scene right when Blackstone Capital is conducting their inspection."
She tilted her chin toward him, batting those doe eyes. "If Blackstone finds out the Henson family is harboring a crazy woman—one pregnant with a bastard, no less—do you think they'll still finance us?"
My vision swam. Matthew's expression blurred at the edges.