Chapter 53

* Ryder *

“Did you eat?” I didn’t want to take time away from her to go deal with everything she’d shared right now. And besides, my plate was already full to the brim, and I could do with a break. It didn’t help that the only person I really wanted to talk to about everything that was going on was the one person I wished to keep that ugliness away from.

“No, I thought I’d wait for you.” She blushed, and I kissed the tip of her nose, wondering how long it would be before this feeling of giddiness went away. I hope never; I hope I never grow to take her and our time spent together for granted again. I still get a hitch in my heart at how close I came to losing her forever.

In fact, it still feels like a dream come true that she’s even talking to me, and that welcome I just received is something I thought it would take me years to earn. Not that I’m complaining, one of the things I knew about her is her forgiving heart and how easy it used to be for me to get back into her good graces, but this time, even I didn’t want her to take it easy on me. But now I know why she has.

From everything that she’d told me that the old woman had said, we were both played. If I hated those people before because of what they did to me, my hatred has multiplied tenfold in the last half hour or so because they’d hurt her even more than I knew.

As hard as it was for me to accept the hocus pocus nonsense, as Lyon calls it, there was no denying that some of this shit was unexplainable. Knowing that my drug use started with them, with Mary and Scott at least and that Matt, the man I trusted to guide me spiritually, the man I’d turned to for help me when I was at my lowest, was only using me, is something I can’t overcome.

“Ryder, I can see you’re thinking about it, so do me a favor and don’t try to go after these people on your own.”

“What makes you think that I would?”

“Because I know you, but I’m scared, don’t do anything, okay? Let’s wait and think of the best course of action. If they’ve gone to this much trouble to get what they want, they’re not going to give up so easily.”

“I know, and that’s what I’m afraid of for you. I don’t want you getting hurt anymore. I won’t let anyone do anything to you again, Elena. Do you understand? I can’t… I just can’t. Do you know how much it’s killing me just sitting here doing nothing after everything they’ve done? But I know I can’t rush into anything for your sake because I don’t want them coming after you again. By the way, you haven’t mentioned Noel and Nicole. What was their part in all this?”

As much as those two were always hanging around, I’d be surprised if they didn’t play a major part in the whole mess. I always knew they were no friends of Janie’s, that they were using her for some reason or another, but I felt so little for her I never cared to tell her what I thought.

I’d felt bad about some of the things I’d put her through until today when I learned that because of her creepy obsession, this whole thing was made possible in part. No doubt Mary would’ve found someone else to take her place if it came to that, but she was the perfect tool for them to use. The fact that she wanted it too only makes me hate her more.

But knowing Mary and the fact that she had at some point in the past tried to get me with one of her daughters, even going so far as to set up a foursome with three of them, it doesn’t make sense that she hadn’t pushed for that. Then again, I’d seen Nicole in a not-so-very-pleasant situation, so maybe that’s why the old hag had backed off from that idea.

Yuck, it has been a long time since I thought of that situation, years, in fact. Is that one of the reasons why Mary wanted to keep her hold on me? Why she found someone to do the dirty work of keeping an eye on me from the inside? Namely, my so-called wife?

I was not sure why. I was pretty sure her daughter wasn’t the only one in this town who got a little too close to her pets. But then again, if the world knew that the daughter of one of the so-called it families, a family the whole world looks to for inspiration, was into bestiality, it might not go over so well. Yeah, I can see her trying to keep that under wraps, it’s not a good look, after all, and she’s big on making the world see her and her talentless brood as the next best thing since sliced bread.

“Now that you mention it, we did talk about that as well, but it’s one of the things that I’m still confused about, so I didn’t want to mention it until I got it straight in my mind. The thing is, apparently, Mary had wanted you to marry Nicole at some point, but she changed her mind, and no one knows why. Knowing her greed and predatory instincts, it seems rather odd, don’t you think? That she’d give you to Janie instead of one of her own daughters.”

Now she was getting too close to things I didn’t want her in the middle of, not that Nicole was more than an animal lover, but the whole trafficking thing that they were trying so hard to keep hidden, which those questions would no doubt lead to, so I had no choice but to change the course of the conversation. “Who knows what goes on in that old woman’s head? Maybe she thought it would be taboo to marry me off to one of her daughters after she seduced me herself years earlier.”

I wanted to throw up just saying that, and the look on Elena’s face showed how angry and upset she still was about that whole thing, so it really was time to drop it. “Let’s put this aside for now, baby; let’s get some dinner in you; you shouldn’t go this long without eating.”

Too late, I remembered how they’d trashed her online about her size, something I knew from her doctor was a side effect of the medicine she has to take whenever her illness flares up. Right now, she is a little thicker than she used to be when we were together, but I don’t know what they’re talking about because I actually like this look.

She’s a woman now and not a teenage girl and truth be known, I prefer her natural blooming curves to the dry-ass women who starve themselves or do other unearthly shit to their bodies in the name of staying thin. Her natural beauty is the type that nothing can fade; those eyes, her eyes, are like my windows to the world; I can see everything I want in them.

“Thank you, baby.” I stopped with my hand on her back on our way downstairs to have dinner.

“For what?”

“For not changing, for staying true to who you are. I’m so damn happy that they didn’t get to change you and that you remained strong even when I didn’t. Thank you.”

She didn’t look as if she knew what I was trying to say, and I couldn’t explain it any better; I just knew what I felt, and what I felt was immense gratitude that of the two of us, I was the one who took the fall. Had they done this shit to her and not me, Lyon wouldn’t have had to send his people here because there would be nothing left of Mary and her ilk to find.

The world has always seen me as a hotheaded kid who was always getting into shit. But even I didn’t know that my heart could become this enraged to the point of murder. I want to kill every last one of them.

Everyone who had a hand in this, but since there were innocent lives at stake, I couldn’t go off the rails and commit such an act, not until the people who lost their freedom were found. After that, I’ll do everything within my power to destroy our enemies.

We ate a quiet dinner together for the first time in years, and all the old feelings came rushing back as if there had been no interruption in our lives. We talked about things we’d missed in each other’s lives; she teased me about threatening her through music, and I told her how her song had woken me up from whatever stupor I had been in.

We tried to avoid it, or at least I did, but there was no way to ignore the elephant in the room. “So, this spell thing, what exactly did she do?”

“I don’t know the how of it; the way it was explained to me is that she and someone she knows, someone close to her, started working some kind of magic against me to get to you. And it started when she was very young, even before we knew who she was.”

“But why me? I don’t understand that part of it. There were so many other teen idols when I came on the scene; why did she pick me in particular?”

“Well, Char seems to have a few ideas about that, which are very confusing to me as well.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for one, she seems to want to be me. I’m not sure if that’s me professionally or just me, and I don’t think Char knows either way. She just said there’s a sense of Janie wanting to take over my life. And this has been going on long before you two got married.”

“I went online and did some research after hearing all that, and she seems to have spent a lot of time studying me, but it started when you and I started dating, so I’m not quite sure which one of us she was really following. But I will say she knew a whole lot about me and spent a lot of time discussing me on social media, some of it in a not-so-healthy way. It’s almost as if she was obsessed.”

“So, she was stalking you.”

“It looks like she was stalking both of us. I’m not sure how much her wanting to be me has to do with you and her. Honestly, it seems like she has some kind of sick obsession with both of us. Now we know she was your fan; that much is obvious, at least to the public, but where I come in is still a mystery.”

“Didn’t you ever wonder why she kept going after me even after she’d won?”

“That’s because she hadn’t won. I told you, but maybe you didn’t believe me. I never gave her what was yours, Elena, not once. Even when I was high, I mostly stayed high to forget us and to escape thoughts of you. So, she was actually doing me a favor by dosing me up.”

“The truth is whatever she was hoping to get out of this was never realized because I knew from the second after getting married that I had made the biggest mistake of my life, and I wasn’t quiet about it. Had I not been so messed up because I didn’t remember the threat against you, I wouldn’t have stayed. I think part of them keeping me drugged was so that I didn’t remember, but it didn’t make me any fonder of her.”

“Somewhere in the back of my mind, I always knew that I was meant to be with you and no one else. So even with my memory not at its best, some part of me held onto that, and it showed. My heart, even my very soul, was always fighting its way back to you, but I didn’t know it, didn’t realize that that was why I was only living as half a man. The drugs just helped to camouflage that very well, I guess, and so no one ever guessed at the truth, except maybe Janie. I’m sure she knew what I was thinking every second that I was away from you.”

I could see why Janie was acting so crazy in the press, especially where Elena was concerned. The fact that she’d gone to so much trouble to get me only to have me ignore her behind closed doors and shun her, the fact that I never forgot my love for Elena and wasn’t shy about mentioning it every chance I got, must’ve been a living hell for her.

But knowing all of this now, hearing about the things she and her family had done makes me wish I’d done worse. When I think of her, my blood boils, and the anger is almost too much to bear. I can only be grateful that I never found her attractive and that no matter how hard she tried, she was never able to get me into her bed. Looking back on it now, that must’ve been quite a blow because not even drugs could get me to touch her.

I know she’s been asking for me in the hospital, but I refuse to even acknowledge her existence for now. I know at some point I’m going to have to play the game, but right now, I want her to hurt as much as she hurt my girl for all these years. I want her to suffer as she’s made others suffer. I can’t lay all the blame at her feet, though, because there’s still my part in all this, and I plan on making it up to Elena as best I can for the rest of my life.

But Janie, oh, she needs to suffer not only because she’d scammed me into marriage to satisfy her own disgusting obsession but because she’d tried to make my Elena pay for me not loving her by attacking her in the press. She’d used the fact that we were married to torment the woman I love more than anyone else in the world, and that is something I won’t ever forgive.

I still only knew about half of all that had been done while I was out of it, but I’m sure the deeper I dig when I get the chance, the more I’ll find. The worst of it for me so far are the times they’d used my social media platforms to take shots at her. How must she have felt all those times thinking that I had said and felt those things about her? It breaks my heart to think that she’d spent even a second believing that I felt any of those things, and I want to hurt them even more for that.

“The more I think about it, why would Mary, Scott, and Matt be so interested in your marrying her? I can see her parents, sure, but why them? What did they get out of it?” She’s always been smart, and it was only a matter of time before she came to that conclusion, but I couldn’t let her continue down that road of thought.

She kept going, though, and there was no safe way to stop her without giving anything away. There’s a safe bet that she wouldn’t come even remotely close to the truth of their involvement, though, and I hope it stays that way. If she knew what those monsters were really up to, it would break her heart. Now it’s my job to see that never happens. From now on, I’ll do everything I can to mend the tear that they and I had put there.

***

After dinner, we were both approached by Lyon and his men. She was once again introduced to everyone since they were going to be around for a while, and I think that’s when she first realized I had no intention of letting her go back to her house for longer than it would take her to pack her stuff.

“There’s been a development; we need to move fast,” Tyler spoke after the introductions were made.

“What kind of development.”

“Well, it’s a good thing, I guess, so no need to panic. You have to evacuate your old house. In about an hour, men in hazmat suits are going to show up there, and so are the paparazzi; you’ll have to go back there for a while to make it appear as if you were there all along.”

“What’s going on?”

“It’s about to become public that your wife is in the hospital, and things are going to go from there. Nothing for you to worry about.” The way he looked at me, I knew he was talking about the things I didn’t want Elena involved in, so I just nodded my head and went along. They’d been with me long enough that I knew I could trust him and Zak and, by extension, Lyon, Mancini, and the others.

“She’s in the hospital? What happened to her?” Elena looked at me with a worried expression. It will never cease to amaze me, that heart of hers. That she could feel for Janie after everything that she’d done is something I doubt I could ever achieve, even with all my spiritual guidance. Spiritual guidance, my ass, they’d turned me into a mockery. How low do you have to be to do that to someone who came to you in all sincerity? Especially with me being so young at the time.

It’s going to take a while for my mind not to go off on these little tangents every once in a while, sometime before I figure out who I am and who I want to be when this is all said and done. I can’t go back to being the same guy I was when we first met, and I for sure don’t want to remain the same as I had been the last five years, but just who the hell am I really?

I don’t have the answers, but I do know who I want to be, though. I want to be the man Elena would be proud to have by her side. I want to be everything she ever dreamed of and more not only to make up for what I’d done but because it’s what she deserves and more. “There was a situation; I’ll tell you all about it when I come back, don’t worry. Let me go take care of this for now, okay.”

She nodded her head, but I could see that she was still worried. I excused us away from the others and walked her back to our suite of rooms upstairs. “There’s nothing for you to worry about. She just had an allergic reaction to something and was taken to the hospital. I’m gonna go take care of this and come back to you as soon as possible.”

“Is this really happening? But Ryder, if our fans realize that we’re together while she’s in the hospital, won’t that make us look bad?”

“That’s why we’re here; no one knows about this place or that we own it. You’ll be going back to New York soon. By then, this will have blown over.” Or take a different turn, but I didn’t mention that out loud. I got the feeling that the nieces were behind this new move, and since the men had no more idea of what they were up to than I, there was no way of telling what was coming next.

I cupped her face between my hands and looked at her in the moonlight, still finding it hard to believe that this was all real. “I love you so much, don’t ever forget that again.” I pulled her in close and kissed her forehead before kissing my way down her closed eyelids onto her cheek before I made my way to the corner of her lips.

She opened like a flower and let me in, and I sunk into the kiss like a drowning man, pulling her little body in closer so that I could feel the beat of her heart against my chest. I came alive, we both did, as our bodies remembered each other, and it was hard to pull away when time started to get away from me.

“Soon, I’ll be back soon.” I kissed her nose and forced myself to walk away, promising myself that it would be the last time.