Chapter 12

CHAPTER TWELVE

Victor

B ringing Simon into the main offices of Victory Holdings was a terrible idea. I believed that for purely selfish reasons, though. I hadn't counted on Eddie, my former best friend and co-conspirator in all the rotten things I'd done with omegas over the years, being right there. I definitely wasn't ready to have the alphahole I'd once been thrown back in my face, or in Simon's.

But when my uncle's personal security guards showed up, trapping us in his office, I knew things were about to go from bad to worse.

"Let me pass," I told them, summoning every bit of alpha I had in an attempt to intimidate them.

The security guards were also alphas, though, so my ploy didn't have much effect.

"We've been told to apprehend you if you trespassed on Victory Holdings property," the largest of the guards said, taking a step toward me.

Instinctively, I extended an arm to block him from Simon, nudging Simon farther behind me as I did.

"He isn't trespassing," Artemis defended me. "Victor Woodbury is part owner of Victory Holdings."

"Not if Mr. Woodbury has anything to say about it," one of the smaller guards blurted.

The one who seemed to be in charge glanced at him with a scowl, then turned back to me. "You're trespassing on Mr. Woodbury's property," he said.

It was possible he was telling the truth. I had a vague idea that my uncle owned the office building that housed Victory Holdings, and several other businesses, even if he didn't own Victory Holdings itself. I'd done the same thing, buying real estate with my own money, like the building in Norwalk. I didn't know for certain, one way or another, so I held my ground.

"Where is my uncle?" I demanded. "I want to talk to him to get to the bottom of this misunderstanding."

Misunderstanding my ass. Uncle Vincent was trying to get rid of me, not just as a company officer, but as part owner of Victory Holdings. The security guard who had blurted must have overheard something.

"I'm not at liberty to disclose Mr. Woodbury's whereabouts," the entirely too loyal guard said, squaring his shoulders like he was about to get physical. "I've been charged with apprehending you if you attempted to enter these premises."

"Apprehend?" Artemis scoffed. "You're not the police."

"I have Mr. Woodbury's full authority," the guard said.

We weren't going to get anywhere arguing. I needed to take action.

I grabbed Simon's hand, trusting that he would follow whatever I did.

"Get out of my way," I said, moving forward, like I would bowl the guards over.

The two minor guards stepped aside to let me pass. The loyal guard tried to stand his ground, but shifted at the last second when I bumped him with my shoulder.

He only faltered for a moment, though.

"I have orders to apprehend you," he said, a little louder than before.

He reached out, but instead of grabbing me, he clamped a hand around Simon's arm.

That was it. I felt a spike in Simon's fear as our bond suddenly widened, and I saw red.

"Don't you dare touch him," I seethed, whipping around and raising a fist.

It was just going to be a threat, but my inner alpha snapped into full-on feral protection mode. I lashed out, punching the guard across the face and sending him reeling.

"Whoa!" Eddie exclaimed from the hall, where he and some of the other board members had been watching. "Jesus, Victor. He's just an omega."

I ignored Eddie's snide comment, grabbed Simon's hand again after letting it go to throw the punch, and charged out into the hallway. I bumped glancingly into Eddie, but the others all rushed to get far out of my way.

"Come on," Eddie said as he fell into step behind us as I whisked Simon down the hall, Artemis with us. "Is he really worth all this fuss? Is his hole made of candy or something?"

As much as I knew I needed to get us out of the building and somewhere safe immediately, I couldn't let the insult to my omega slide.

I jerked back to Eddie and seethed, "Don't you ever talk about my omega, or any omegas, like that ever again."

Eddie laughed nervously. "Come on, Victor. It's just a joke. And besides, omegas are naturally horny and submissive. They'd be lost if they didn't have us dominating them."

I have no idea what he was thinking, he was probably trying to prove some point, but he reached out and touched Simon's face.

For the second time in as many minutes, my reaction was instinctive and intense. I still held Simon's hand with one of mine, but with the other, I gripped Eddie's neck and slammed him against the wall, pinning him there.

"You're a disgrace to the name of alpha," I hissed, tightening my grip as he struggled and gasped. "And if you ever so much as look at my omega again, I won't be responsible for what I do."

I let go just as Eddie was starting to turn purple. He dropped to the floor, gasping for breath. I stared at him with absolute loathing, but it wasn't for Eddie, it was for the alpha I'd once been. There wasn't nearly enough difference between us for my liking.

"Let's go," I said, turning to check on Simon, then nodding to Artemis.

Without a word, the three of us headed to the end of the hall, where Brenda was watching us with wide eyes and a cell phone held to one ear.

With a jolt of adrenaline, it dawned on me that Brenda was speaking to my uncle. I picked up my pace, pulling Simon down the corridor with me, and reached out to take Brenda's phone.

"No! No, you can't—" Brenda tried to protest.

"Uncle Vincent," I growled into the phone.

"Hello?" an unfamiliar, male voice asked from the other end of the call. "Who is this? Is this Victor Woodbury? This is Officer McSweeney from the Barrington Police Department. We've had a report of a break-in and violent disturbance at the offices of Victory Holdings and?—"

I didn't wait to hear the rest. I pulled the phone away and ended the call, then grabbed Simon's hand again and started for the stairs off to the side.

"What did Vincent have to say?" Artemis asked as I hurried Simon down one floor to the level where my office was located.

"That was the police," I said in dark tones.

"Shit, Victor," Artemis said, falling into step with Simon between us again as we hurried down the hallway toward my office. "This is getting far more serious than a little corporate douchery."

I didn't say anything, but I definitely agreed with him. There was more going on than just Uncle Vincent trying to remove me from any position at the company. Whatever move he was making, whatever counteractions he'd been taking as I'd worked to minimize his influence within the company, I had the sinking feeling it extended beyond this building.

Those suspicions grew when we rounded the corner and saw the closed door to my office guarded by two more thugs in security uniforms.

I stopped dead and cursed inwardly. Uncle Vincent was playing hardball.

"This way," I said, wheeling back, then heading through the door into one of the service stairways.

"What's going on?" Simon asked as we charged into the echoey, metal and concrete staircase and headed down.

"I don't know," I said. "Not for sure, but I don't want to stick around here to find out."

"It's likely to be some sort of trap," Artemis agreed.

I nodded as we descended the stairs as fast as possible. "I need to know what's going on, but I don't want to stick around here, where my uncle clearly plans to corner me, to find out."

"Smart," Artemis said.

We descended two more floors, but I could tell that Simon wasn't going to make it the rest of the twenty-odd floors we still had until we reached ground level easily. And besides, chances were someone was waiting for us on the ground anyhow.

"Wanna create a diversion?" I asked Artemis, pausing at the next landing we reached.

Artemis smiled, like we were just having fun. "Sure," he said. "You okay to get out on your own?"

I glanced to Simon, who watched me exactly like I'd ordered him to as my slave. The trust and hope in his eyes was humbling.

We were going to get out of here in one piece no matter what it took. I wouldn't let my omega be stuck in danger for any longer than he needed to be.

"Yep," I said, glancing back to Artemis. "I need to figure out what's really going on here. And I need to make contact with Vivien to see if she knows."

"Gotcha," Artemis said, nodding. "With any luck, the rest of the building doesn't know what's going on yet. I don't think anyone expected this to turn so action-movie-ish so fast."

"I'm going to stop it from heading that way," I said, then clapped Artemis on the shoulder. "Stay safe, okay?"

"You know it," Artemis said, thumping my arm, then heading for the door that would take him into one of the other offices. "I'll see what I can find out that might help you, too. You know I'm on your side."

"I do," I said, then grabbed Simon's hand again.

Artemis was on my side. He was one of the only true friends I had, and I trusted him.

As Artemis headed into the office on that floor, I led Simon down a few more flights of stairs.

"Are we going all the way down this way?" he asked, panting.

"No," I said, heading for the door three floors down from where Artemis had parted ways with us. "If they're waiting and watching for us to leave, they will expect us to come out on street level from this stairway. So we're going another way."

I headed pulled at the door of the floor we'd just reached, thanking my lucky stars that it wasn't one of the floors where the fire escape doors were kept locked. Most of them were, but both Artemis and I had gotten lucky, which was encouraging.

The reason the door wasn't locked was because the floor we stepped out onto was under construction. I recognized at once what used to be the offices of an accountancy firm that had gone out of business. Someone else had clearly claimed the space. Everything was covered with plastic drop-cloths and the sound of a worker's radio blared from the far side of the space.

I took Simon around the outer edge of the room to the open door that led to the hallway where the banks of ordinary elevators stood. One of the workers noticed us crossing through the space, but he only watched us, baffled, instead of saying anything.

We had to wait for the elevator to come, but by another twist of luck, it was empty when it arrived.

"I don't know what we'll find in the lobby," I told Simon. "And I hate to admit it, but I don't know how deep the shit we're in is."

"It seems pretty deep," Simon said breathlessly as the elevator took us down.

"Yeah."

That was all I could manage as the swoop of the elevator reflected the sinking feeling in my gut. My hope was that we'd seen the trap Uncle Vincent had set early enough to get away before things got too bad, but there wasn't any way to tell for certain.

I held my breath as we reached the ground floor and as the elevator doors slid open, and I braced myself for a fight. We stepped out of the elevator immediately and right into a few people who were bored at best and confused at worst.

I almost breathed a sigh of relief. We'd made it down before any of my uncle's security guards could seal the building. I hoped that meant there weren't enough of them to put the entire building on lockdown in order to catch me.

"Mr. Woodbury!"

I turned and stood a bit straighter as Janet, the valet, approached us from the door to the parking garage. Simon and I were already headed that way, so I just picked up my pace to meet her.

"Your keys," she said, thrusting them into my hand. "They've got the entrance to the garage blocked, but I parked your car on the street, like I said."

"Thank you," I said, accepting the keys, then immediately heading for the opposite entrance.

I wanted to say more, and I would definitely reward Janet as soon as I had a chance. How she knew in advance what was going on was a mystery I would solve later.

It turned out that Janet's forward thinking might just have saved my and Simon's bacon. My SUV was parked half a block down from the building's main entrance. Simon and I were able to reach it, get inside, and pull away before a pair of my uncle's guards rushed out of the entrance we'd just left from.

"That was close," Simon panted, glancing back over his shoulder at the building as I drove away as fast as I could.

"I just wish I knew what it was a narrow escape from," I said, driving as fast as I dared on city streets in the middle of the day.

Simon shifted to face forward again. "Would your uncle try to physically hurt you or worse?" he asked.

I didn't want to answer that question out loud. I didn't want to worry Simon.

But my omega deserved the truth.

"He might," I said, gripping the steering wheel tighter. "I hope he wouldn't, but I can't say that for certain unless I know what his ultimate aim is."

"I don't want to worry you," Simon said, his cautious concern endearing, "but didn't you say that if one of the three of you who own Victory Holdings were removed from your position within the company, it would cause a cascade effect that would break the company up…unless one of you died?"

I smiled, but there was no humor or happiness in it. "I wasn't going to mention that, but yeah."

Simon blew out a heavy breath. "He's your uncle, your family," he said.

"He loves power," I replied. "And I guess there's the whole thing of him being disappointed in me for wanting to go in a different direction with the company."

"But to actually try to hurt you?" Simon asked quietly, shaking his head slightly.

I wished I could shield Simon from the kind of people I'd surrounded myself with in my life so far. I wished I'd never been the kind of alpha who actually considered Eddie a friend and who enjoyed himself while treating omegas so horrifically. There were so many things I regretted in my life, and it felt like they were all catching up to me now.

I drove us straight to my Barrington home. Like in Norfolk, I owned the entire beachfront condo where I had my penthouse apartment. The risk of my uncle going after me there existed, but I trusted my building manager and the staff he'd hired to be loyal to me and no one else.

Sure enough, we didn't run into any trouble when I parked in my usual spot in the garage, then took Simon through the building's lobby and up to my apartment. Everything felt normal and calm, just an ordinary Tuesday in the ritzy section of Barrington's beachfront. My apartment was untouched, exactly the way I'd left it when I'd headed out to Norwalk on Friday. The cleaning crew had come, but that was it.

"Is this where you live most of the time?" Simon asked, looking around the apartment as I shut and locked the door behind us, tossing the keys on a small table under a row of hooks where I had some antique hats on display.

"Most of the time, yes," I said. "Although I only moved into this place a year ago, after I decided to turn over a new leaf. I like being near the ocean. It soothes me."

"Me too," Simon said with a smile for me over his shoulder as he walked toward the French doors that led out to a balcony overlooking the beach and the ocean beyond.

I rubbed my face and headed into the kitchen area, no idea what to do next. I needed a drink, that much was certain, but I only felt like water at the moment. I shrugged out of my jacket, tossed it over the counter that separated the kitchen area from the living room, then took two glasses out of the cabinet.

The whole time, I kept my eyes on Simon as he studied the view. He looked good wearing my suit jacket. Almost better than when he was just naked. Almost.

As if he could feel me watching him, Simon turned back to me and let out a breath. If I didn't know better, I would have said that breath was relief that it was just the two of us again and things could go back to the way they had been during our fantasy.

It turned out I was right. Simon stepped away from the windows, then sank to his knees in his slave kneeling pose.

"Whatever I can do to help, Master, I'm here for you," he said.

They were the most beautiful words I'd ever heard, but they broke my heart.

"I don't deserve you," I said, taking the two glasses of water into the living room, setting them on the coffee table, then sinking to sit on the sofa so that I was closer to Simon's level. "You're too good for me, Simon. You're beautiful and perfect, and you've put up with so much from me already. And you heard the things Eddie said. I'm not a good person. I've abused omegas before. I don't want to do that to you now."

Simon's eyes grew wider and filled with panic as he anticipated what I was going to say next.

"I think you should go home now. Go home and forget I ever existed."