The revenge the insiders, p.1
The Revenge (The Insiders), page 1
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
St. Martin’s Publishing Group ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
To all the readers who love the Insiders trilogy.
I hope you enjoy The Revenge as well!
Thank you for your support!
ONE
Kash
There was someone in my apartment.
I didn’t know this because of some sixth sense. I knew this because I’d received ten different alerts. The guy tripped the back perimeter alarm with the first door he opened. That was the first one sent to my phone. Second alarm was the security team picking him up on the video feeds. Third alarm was when the intruder got into the building. Fourth alarm, when they went up the back exit stairs. Fifth alarm, when they got to the sixteenth floor. Sixth alarm, when they went through the door to my floor.
Seventh alarm, when they got through my front door.
The eighth went off when he stepped inside the apartment door.
I checked my phone once it buzzed again.
That was the ninth alarm, and they were in the back bedroom.
Tenth alarm, they were in the walk-in closet.
“You sure about this?” Josh, a security guard who was fast becoming my right-hand man, asked. He was somewhat replacing Erik, who asked for a leave of absence because of his own family.
I didn’t say a word, but I looked up to the back camera and saw the green light was on. He was watching, and I mouthed up at him, “Shut. Up.”
He laughed in my ear. “Just reminding you that you do have an entire detail of guards back here, waiting on your command. They’ll rush in, immobilize the guy, and you can waltz in like fucking Batman.”
I rolled my eyes.
Josh was on a kick about the caped crusader, and it never made sense to me. My phone went off again.
“We have eyes on him,” he said. All cameras were turned on if there was a breach in security. He continued, his tone cold and professional now, “He’s moving to the bedroom door. He’ll be there in three, two…”
I turned.
“One.”
The living room light was off.
The bedroom door they were approaching was just beyond it. Bailey preferred a smaller, cozier layout in our apartment. I had downgraded with her in mind after her second kidnapping attempt. All the doors and rooms made her uneasy, and sometimes less was easier to handle, so we went down to a two-bedroom place. Our bedroom and an office were on the other side of the kitchen.
My phone buzzed again. “He’s opening the door.”
I could hear it in real time, but I didn’t look.
If they’d had a weapon, I wouldn’t have allowed them access to the building. They would’ve been captured after the first perimeter was broken. But security had done a scan and nothing was on them. All they had were their phones and a set of keys. We couldn’t be sure if the intruder was male or female at this point, but we did know they didn’t have a wallet—thank you, full-body sensors installed on each set of doors.
I left my phone, wallet, keys, everything in my pocket.
With my head down, I walked through the living room and went right at them.
“They eased back. They’re behind the bedroom door,” Josh said in my ear.
I went in.
A normal person would be worked up.
I knew they were there. I knew where they were. I knew as much about them as I could.
What I did not know was why they were there.
I did not know their intentions after making their presence known.
I did not know if they were going to attack me or jump out and yell “Surprise!” I doubted it was the latter.
What they did not know was that I knew they were there.
So going through that door, I was the one with the element of surprise.
While I appeared calm and my heartbeat said I was, I was not calm.
I was the opposite of fucking calm.
I cleared the door, and Josh’s voice sounded. “Now!”
I whirled.
They were lunging for me. I could finally see them; the intruder was male. A weapon flashed in his hands, a weapon that had not been flagged by the full-body scanners.
He didn’t come from behind me.
He was right in front, and my hands were up.
I reached for him first, using my elbow to slam the weapon out of his hand. As his eyes met mine, they went wide, and I body-slammed him down to the floor.
I could not let up.
Not for one second.
I went down with him, knees to his chest, but he was twisting, trying to get free.
I let him go, but as he started to stand up, I tackled him again. A full body slam any lineman would be proud of, and I flipped him around so he was facedown. My arm went around his neck. My whole body went on top of him, securing the chokehold.
He couldn’t move.
But he tried. He fought. He tried to twist. He tried to throw me off. He tried to find a weakness. He tried to knock out my legs.
I never gave an inch. I only tightened my hold.
And then, as blood rushed through my body, my eardrums feeling as though they were about to pop, my vision blurring at the edges, his entire body jerked, strained, squeezed, and then he began to go limp.
I still waited.
There was always a lull, a time when they tried to pretend they were unconscious. I didn’t fall for it, and this time it proved true, because he came alive suddenly. He thrashed harder, more violently, rougher, and with a choking, gurgling sound, he went limp for the final time.
I released him, seeing the door opening from the corner of my eye.
Josh walked in, his weapon drawn. A line of men trailed behind him, and all came to stand in a circle as I got to my feet. It was only then that I kicked his body over and got a good look at him.
He was still breathing. His chest was rising steadily.
Josh glanced across the room. “Scanners didn’t pick up that switchblade.”
I grunted and knelt down.
I reached for the bottom of his ski mask and took hold.
“You think he knew about the security measures?” Josh asked.
I paused and looked up. “What do you mean?”
“We scanned for weapons. He was only allowed inside because it showed he didn’t have any. That blade must’ve been well hidden on his body to get through. I’m saying maybe he knew you knew he was coming. That’s why he only had that blade on him.”
It was food for thought.
My blood was still pumping fast and hot inside, and it didn’t matter. I wanted answers, and I needed another hard workout with the boxing bag because this hadn’t been enough for me. It hadn’t quenched the fury really building inside of me, simmering there all my life.
I didn’t answer Josh.
I whisked off the ski mask and stepped back.
The men grunted, a few stepped back.
And me … I was looking at me.
TWO
Bailey
Three weeks later
The dress was itchy.
It was made of some super-strength alien fabric that hugged my body like latex, but it looked like gaudy cloth fabric. And it was plaid. Holiday break and all, and my friend Tamara, the hairdresser extraordinaire, swore I had to wear this red, black, and silver plaid dress contraption.
I hated it.
If I was going to mourn my mother, at least let me do it in comfort. This Lycra bodysuit invention gone wrong was adding insult to injury here. Chrissy Hayes would’ve thrown a fit at seeing her in this.
Her.
Crap. I was doing it again.
I winced, because here I was, thinking of myself in third person once more. It’d become a habit I picked up over the last three weeks, ever since I had to report in detail to the cops how I witnessed my mother’s murder. Chrissy Hayes’s murder.
Seraphina asked if I wanted something to drink the other night, and I’d responded with, “Yes, Bailey would love something to zonk her out. A valium and vodka, please.”
My little sister had nodded, turned to fill my order, then stopped. She turned back.
I cringed, catching what I had said, but she only asked, “Vodka and valium?”
Crap.
I coughed and covered, “I mean an orange juice please. Maybe some champagne with it?”
She nodded and went to do it, accepting that drink order instead. Mimosas were almost the norm in the rich, high-society world that Seraphina had grown up in. I was newer, coming into the family this past summer, after a kidnapping attempt because I was Peter Francis’s illegitimate child. Shock and awe to me because, one, I had no clue my childhood hero was actually my father; and two, Chrissy Hayes had a whole lie set in place that my dad had been killed in th
But fast-forward from that first kidnapping attempt, because life happened at breakneck speed after that.
I had left Chrissy behind, thinking it was for her own safety, and moved into the villa of my dad’s right hand and somewhat adopted son, Kashton Colello. Who was hella hot, with smoldering cognac eyes, a jawline that made my knees weak on a regular basis, and those high and chiseled cheekbones. Kash wasn’t really adopted, but he’d been taken under Peter’s wing and, feeling all sorts of gratefulness, Kash dedicated his life to taking care of the entire Francis family in return.
He went above and beyond, bringing me into his own home.
He had me tell my new siblings (I had always been an only child, and voilà, now I had three) that I was a friend of his and most definitely not their sister.
Yeah. See. He went above and beyond. I’m not all the way meaning that in the positive way, but it was beyond, for sure.
Lucky me, my brother Matt figured it out before long. Then I had a friend and an actual brother. And while I was dealing with the new life situation, the hotness of Kashton Colello had started to burn inside of me.
It blazed hot. Boiled over. And yep, he and I ended up in bed together.
There were kisses. Hot nights. Climactic nights.
During all that time, I fell in love and bam!—then I found out who Kashton Colello actually was, and thinking he’d been brought in under my dad’s wing was an understatement. Peter had kept him from the entire world because he was hiding out in his own way, from an evil, sadistic, murdering grandfather named Calhoun Bastian.
Kash had lost both his parents to his grandfather, and he’d been terrified that Calhoun would kill the rest of the Francis family. It’d been the main reason I was left out in the cold, so to speak. My father knew about Calhoun and thought it’d be safer for me if no one knew I was his daughter. Hence the father I never knew I had, and ironically, I had inherited his brain and his looks. We had the same dark hair that was so black that in a certain light it looked like there were streaks of blue. Honey-brown eyes.
I’d also inherited his computer skills.
That meant I could hack my way into almost anything, including looking up and violating a dozen firewalls if I wanted to find my father. So the whole veteran-accompanying witness testimonials that were fed to me had been needed, since I was given a name of a real guy that did die.
I hadn’t hacked my way into finding out the truth. I wish I had, now.
I sucked in my breath, the plaid fabric scratching my stomach, just over my ribs, and I cursed in a hiss.
I really hated plaid.
I hated the look. I hated the feel of it. I hated even the smell of it. And yes, it definitely had a smell. Stale death. Bottle that crap up and someone would make a fortune in a nasty prank sort of gift. Can you imagine? Instead of sending a bag of dicks or an envelope stuffed with exploding glitter, you send a can of perfume and they open it to smell stale death?
I’m a genius, I tell ya.
Though maybe it’s just me, since I’ve only been smelling stale death for the last three weeks.
It was that long ago when we put the closed casket of Chrissy Hayes six feet under. Everyone had come out in droves. My graduate school classmates. My new friends. Professors from Hawking, classmates and teachers from undergraduate, and even people from high school. Then again, almost the entire town of Brookley showed up. Chrissy Hayes was a community legend. A nurse in the local hospital, who kicked ass in the Christmas ugly sweater competitions year after year. She was looked at like a daughter by most of the vets from the VFW, or a sister, or they just wanted to fuck her. ’Cause my mom got a lot of that, too. She was hella hot, if I do say so myself.
So there were a lot of those guys at the funeral. Guys who had dated her. Guys who wished they had dated her. Most looked at her fondly, and if they didn’t, they pretended for the day, because they took one look at the thirty-plus security guards stationed around the church, wake, cemetery and they got fake real quick. I don’t think there were a lot of those anyway.
Neighbor Carla came.
And my family.
So many of my family members came.
My grandma and grandpa. Aunt Sarah. My uncles. All my cousins. Most of them were giving Kash, Peter, and Matt stink eye, but then Seraphina and Cyclone came forward to meet the other side of my family and all of them melted. You’d have to be the psychopath who put a bullet through my mother’s brain not to soften at the sight of my little sister and brother. By the end of the weekend, Cyclone didn’t move from my grandma’s side and Seraphina walked hand in hand with my grandpa, only switching out to hold my Uncle Rich’s hand, too.
They weren’t the only family who came.
Peter’s side came, too.
His two brothers, their wives, their ex-wives, and their children. Peter’s parents had passed long ago, so it made sense why Seraphina and Cyclone took to my own grandparents so fast. And thank God I didn’t know anything about their mother’s parents, because either someone said something or maybe Payton, their aunt, had slunk away somewhere for the last month. She wasn’t there when Kash said he thought it was best if we moved into the Chesapeake estates’ main house—not just his villa but the actual house—and I hadn’t seen her since. Marie and Theresa had stepped up, and I was just glad Marie was there. Marie, who had been my first nemesis at the family’s estate, and now she’d been the glue holding everything together. Theresa ran the kitchen, but she was the second glue. She was like a crown molding.
Or maybe for me.
Maybe they’d both been the glue holding me together.
I didn’t know. That was too much thinking, something I was trying not to do so much, because when I started thinking, I started remembering, and want to know a smart person’s personal nightmare? Having a photographic memory and replaying your entire childhood, where you were raised by your recently buried mother, over and over and over and … You get my drift.
So, yeah.
Not thinking. Another habit I was trying to pick up.
It worked some of the days. Most days, not so much.
“Bailey.”
Ah. There they were. It was the latest person Kash sent.
I’ve been standing in a room, by myself, staring out the window, not talking to someone, and there was always a timer. It wasn’t just my family, but it was my friends, too. Torie. Tamara. Even Melissa and Scott. They were around, taking turns checking on me. The only one who was in tune with me, who knew I’d probably stepped away so I wouldn’t lose my mind, was Kash.
My man.
I loved him.
Thinking back to the girl I’d been when I first met him—she never stood a chance. It was like her job was to fall for Kash. It was written in the stars. It was inevitable. But all the shit that came afterward hadn’t been included in the fine print. She had no clue that choosing her father over her mother, choosing to fall in love with Kashton Colello, would eventually make her lose the one person who’d been there all her life.
Brain, shut off.
That was my own checkout.
When I started thinking thoughts like that, I automatically shut down. It was a door closing, and on the other side was a mess of catastrophe, hysteria, panic, hatred, loathing, and just so many emotions.
The girl (see, still talking in third person here) needed to go into zombie mode. So that’s what I did.
It was at the same time that the person chosen to check on me stepped next to me, and I turned even before they spoke another word. It was Matt. His face was closed off, but there was a distant hint of concern in his eyes. He had a glass of bourbon in hand, but to be honest, he rarely went without it lately, and he took one look at me, sighed, put his free hand in his suit pants pocket, and then turned to look out the window with me.
He murmured, right before taking a sip, “I don’t blame you one bit.”
I was hiding.
He knew it.
I now knew he knew it, and just like that, without another word spoken, we both looked out the window. I had no clue where we were. That was another given these days. I rarely knew what we were doing, where we were going. I just went. I showed up. I stood around. I sat around. I rarely spoke, and then eventually Kash would come get me, or he’d send someone for me, and then we’d go home and we’d repeat it the next day.
