Captivated Read online

  They returned to Julien’s mother’s office and Julien opened the door that led to the back porch. She wrapped one arm around his back and kissed him.

  “No, no,” Salena said, wagging her finger. “We want to lower his blood pressure, not raise it.”

  “Oops.” Remi pulled back. With one private smile at Julien, she whispered, “It hurts to say goodbye to you. So I won’t. I’ll see you on the other side.”

  He kissed her forehead, and she left him and Salena alone in the office. The last thing she saw was Salena shoving a needle into Julien’s arm and Julien collapsing onto the floor.

  As she drove away from Capital Hills, two ambulances and a police car passed her. She knew exactly where they were going, and soon Merrick would be on his way here as well.

  Julien and Salena were doing their part. Merrick would do his part soon. Only one thing left to do tomorrow morning.

  Her turn.

  Chapter Eight

  Mr. and Mrs. Brite

  At dawn, Remi got out of bed like usual, got dressed to go riding, and headed to the stables. Arden Farms was so large that workers drove golf carts between the stables, but she preferred to ride one of the working horses—usually one of their Tennessee walkers. This morning, however, she picked Benvolio. There wasn’t a horse on the property that could jump like Benvolio could. Perfect.

  “Don’t be mad at me,” she whispered to Benvolio as she tightened the girth. “I’m going to do something very stupid, but I won’t let anyone blame you.”

  She fed Benvolio an apple and stroked his long nose. “You won’t get turned into glue for this, I promise,” she said, brushing a tangle out of his mane. “I’m crazy in love with someone and you’re going to love him too when you meet him. So just trust me, okay?”

  Benvolio didn’t answer with anything but a nuzzle against her shoulder. She took that as a sign she had him on her side.

  She stepped into the stirrup and swung her leg over his back. With a twitch of the reins he started down the path toward the practice track. She warmed Benvolio up with a few cross-rail jumps. Good. They could do this. As she neared the track she saw her father leaning against the fence like he had for as long as she could remember. Coffee cup in hand, newsboy cap covering his bald spot, and an intense look of concentration on his face as two of their strongest four-year-olds pounded down the practice track.

  They passed the finish line, and she saw her father hit a button on his stopwatch. Finally he looked away from the track and noticed her. She waved at her father. He waved at her. And just as he was starting to look away again, Remi gave Benvolio the signal to break into a canter. She pointed him at a low fence, and he obediently jumped. Even though she knew she’d have one hell of a bruised ass from this little stunt, Remi let go of the reins in midair and fell from the saddle.

  She hit the grass with a thud that rattled her teeth. Any other time she’d been knocked off a horse, she’d gotten right back up again. But not today. Today she was on a mission.

  Instead of getting up, Remi closed her eyes.

  Only seconds later she sensed herself being surrounded by people, nervous and scared. She heard her father’s voice shouting for a doctor. She heard one of the trainers saying they should call 911 immediately. People called her name, patted her face, tried to pry open her eyelids.

  Ten minutes later, she was in the back of a speeding ambulance. Her father had yelled he’d follow right behind in his car. As she was being loaded, she pretended to come to just long enough to ask her father to bring her mother, too. He promised he would.

  Now it was on.

  As soon as she was alone in the ambulance with the EMTs, she miraculously recovered and started talking. The EMTs said she’d be checked at the hospital for a concussion and monitored for a few hours. Of course she would. She knew exactly what would happen once she got to the hospital. In her twenty-six years she’d fallen off horses and bumped her head half a dozen times and had gone through this routine every time. She hated that she had to scare everyone like this, but she knew Merrick was right—this was the only way to guarantee both of her parents would be away from the farm long enough for him to do his digging. The guilty feeling gnawed at her, but considering her parents had involved the farm in possibly illegal activities, she decided giving their parents a brief scare was a fair trade for the hell they’d put her through.

  Luckily, at the ER she was considered a low-priority patient as she was awake, alert, and seemingly unharmed. She was shunted into a side room and semiforgotten. Every fifteen minutes a nurse would peek in the door and make sure she was still conscious. The nurse asked if she wanted her parents back in the room. She politely declined the offer. Instead she turned on the television and found nothing on but soap operas.

  So this is what Julien went through—sitting alone in a hospital room staring at a television and waiting for his life to start.

  Finally, Merrick texted her.

  Got it, was all the text said plus a rocket-ship emoticon.

  Get here, she wrote back, and just because she loved him a little bit today, she added a smiley face.

  And a banana.

  Half an hour later, Merrick walked through her hospital room door. He had a file folder in his hand, two ledger books, and a sheaf of printed pages.

  “Is that it?” she asked, as he sat on her bed and tossed the papers in her lap.

  “All of it.” He wore an ear-to-ear grin. The only thing that made Merrick happier than getting into trouble was getting someone else into trouble. “Read.”

  She read through everything he’d brought her—thinly veiled messages from Balt, payments recorded in her dad’s old-school ledgers that weren’t on the official set of books, and a damning e-mail from Julien’s father to hers that implicated them all.

  On the one hand she was thrilled they had hard evidence. On the other hand, she was more furious than ever.

  “I’m going to kill them,” she said once she’d finished reading.

  “We’re in a hospital. If you try to murder them, the doctors will just revive them,” Merrick said.

  “They might try to kill me,” she said. “Probably good we’re here.”

  “I won’t let them, Boss. I’d kill for you, die for you, I’d even take a bare bodkin for you.”

  “You’d take a dagger for me?”

  “I thought a bare bodkin was a penis.”

  “It’s a knife.”

  “I’ve seriously been misreading the subtext of Hamlet then.”

  “Come on. We have two sets of parents to freak out.”

  She grabbed the pile of papers, and together they found her parents waiting in the lobby. Her father was on his phone, no doubt checking in with the farm. Her mother was flipping through a magazine without making eye contact with any of the pages.

  “Good news,” she said to them. “I’ll live. No concussion.”

  “Oh thank God,” her mother said, and reached out to hug her.

  “You gave us a little scare there,” her father said, stoic as always.

  “I’m about to scare you two a little more,” she said, refusing to return the hug. Merrick’s find had implicated not just Julien’s mother and father in this mess, but both her parents as well. “Merrick, what room is he in?”

  “He’s in 5515,” he said.

  “Who? What are you talking about, young lady?” her father asked, narrowing his eyes at her. “And is that my ledger book?”

  Remi took a step back and crooked her fingers at her parents. “I have someone you two need to meet,” she said. “I think you’ll like him.”

  The elevator ride to the fifth floor was a bit awkward, but Remi refused to answer any of her parents’ questions. “You’ll see...” was all she said. On the fifth floor they walked past the nurses’ station. A young nurse demanded to know whose room they were visiting.

  Remi sighed. She was afraid this would happen. It was okay. She had this. “Julien Brite, room 5515.”

  �€