Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Ambrose

I MAKE THE drive to the Tolliver’s Treats factory once a week to deliver chopped wood from the forest. They burn through it fairly quickly these days to boil the maple for their candies. They only use it for a few wood-burning stoves that make their premium treats—if they boiled all their maple that way, I’d have half the forest chopped down in a few months.

The rest of their candies are mass manufactured, but Tolliver’s has always advertised the premium treats as special, as if boiling maple by burning the same wood they tapped it from makes it better somehow. It doesn’t.

This used to be my father’s job, but I took over without a single question from anyone when he died. I’ve done it for a decade now in his stead and for all anyone else knows, my father has simply moved on to other employment…or maybe they can guess that he’s dead. I don’t fucking know. No one in this place gives a shit and we all mind our own business.

The floor manager signs-off on the delivery and hands me my weekly check. I turn to stalk out of the factory before the bitch sees me, but it’s pointless to try and avoid her because she always sees me.

“Ambrose,” she calls, stomping across the cement factory floor in her inappropriately high heels. “A word, please.”

Maura Tolliver, the second wife of Beau Tolliver and the balls of their company. She’s here more often than he is, and she rules with an iron fist. Their company expanded to sell around the globe when he married her seven or eight years ago, and it’s because she’s a ruthless bitch when it comes to her business.

She’s a ruthless bitch, period.

I shove my hands into my coat pockets and turn to look at her as she glides toward me. “I’m busy, Maura.”

“We both know that’s not true.” She comes to a stop in front of me. “My office. There’s something we need to discuss.”

I dare a glance back at the floor manager, who lifts her eyebrow and pinches her lips together to suppress an awkward smile. She thinks I’m still fucking Maura—they all do—and if I gave a shit about what other people thought of me, I might be embarrassed by it. But my mind doesn’t have the capacity for caring anymore.

Maura turns with an expectant lift of her eyebrow and tromps away, swaying her pert, thirty-seven-year-old ass in her ridiculously tight pencil skirt, thinking it will entice me to follow. It enticed me to follow a couple of years ago, but dealing with her now is tiresome. Still, I follow, because the power she has over me frightens me. I know too much, and I’ve done too much for her to ignore her whims.

I follow her up the open, metal steps to the second floor, the whir of machines and the buzz of the factory floor still echoing all around. We walk across the loft landing to her office. She unlocks the gray door and waits for me to enter before shutting it behind us, cutting off the never-ending factory sounds and locking it again.

I expect her to round on me, use me and abuse me like everyone else has in my pathetic life, but strangely, she doesn’t, and it sends a shiver down my spine.

She slowly crosses, almost somberly to her wooden desk floating in the center of the space, and she lowers into her chair behind it. “I need your help with a very important matter.”

I let out a gruff sigh and drop into the chair opposite her desk. “What is it this time?”

“This is a discreet matter. It hasn’t come out in the press yet. I returned home around noon, and I’ve been with the police the last few hours discussing this terrible thing that’s happened.”

“What are you talking about?”

She sighs, feigning something that resembles sadness. “My husband, my son, and my stepdaughter are all…missing. I came home from my business trip and discovered an empty house, though our vehicles were all there. Beau’s shoes were at the front door where he always takes them off. My stepdaughter came home for her holiday break and her car was there, but she was gone, too. And more suspicious was the fact that my son’s car was in the driveway—he wasn’t supposed to be coming home at all. But they’re nowhere to be found and we can’t get a hold of them by phone or text. The police suspect foul play.”

I give her unflinching eye contact, noting the emotionless way she shares this with me. “You must be devastated.” Sarcasm bites my tone.

She fakes a somber expression. “I am, yes. It’s devastating not knowing where they are.”

“Cut the shit. What do you want from me?”

She pushes to her feet and circles round the desk, each slow click of her heels against the hard floor echoes menacingly and makes me tense. She slips between me and the desk, leaving little space between us, and she leans her ass back against the edge.

“I need your discretion with this.” She reaches out to grab my hand, holding it between her palms as if she cares about me, though I feel nothing. “I need you to find them.”

“What makes you think I can find them?”

“You’ve tracked down people for me before.”

“Not missing people.”

“I know you can help me with this. I know you will help me.” She moves my hand beneath her pencil skirt and pushes it up her thigh. “You know I can make your life very difficult if you don’t help me. We always help each other, don’t we?”

I pull my hand away with a snap and stand so forcefully that my chair tips over.

She rises and steps closer. “I need you to find them and make sure they don’t return.”

“What?”

She pushes into my space. “You heard what I said. Find out what happened to them…and make sure they remain missing. For good.”

She reaches down to cup my flaccid dick. I grab her by the throat and shove her back until she slams against the edge of the desk, letting out a strangled puff of breath. She smiles against it, and it puts me off even more. She thinks she can still manipulate me the way she did years ago.

“You want them dead?”

“You know I love it when you’re rough with me,” she purrs.

I release her and step back, nearly tripping over the fallen chair. “I don’t want to help you with this.”

“It doesn’t really matter what you want, now does it? I’ve told you what I want you to do, so you’ll do it. What other option do you have? Tell the police what I’ve asked you to do?” She laughs through her words. “Of course, you’re not going to the police, because I’d tell them every sordid detail of your crimes.”

“Crimes you paid me to commit on your behalf.”

“Between you and me, Ambrose, I think you’re the only one who would be charged. Who would believe that I hired you to do anything?”

No one would believe me.

No one is on my side.

I’ve always been on my own…alone.

That’s why she latched onto me when I was young and stupid, and now I’m stuck, doing her fucking bidding. At first, I did it with the promise of sex, affection, attention. Now, I do her dirty work because I have no choice—because she holds all the cards with the evidence against me for the things I’ve done for her.

But I want out.

I want to be done with her.

I grit my teeth. “There’s more at stake for you here, Maura. You’re after the inheritance, aren’t you? The Tolliver family fortune? So, what do I get for it? If I make sure they never return…”

Her jaw tenses and she twists her lips, looking at me sternly. “Five percent.”

“Five percent of what?”

“Of our business. If Beau is dead, I’ll have full authority to make decisions about Tolliver’s Treats. That is, if Glory and Huxley are dead, too.”

“You really want me to find your family and kill them?”

“Yes,” she confirms. “And we’ll need bodies…or at least parts of their bodies to confirm they’re dead.”

“But why kill them all? Why do they all have to be dead?”

“Because that princess stepdaughter of mine is next on the will after Beau.”

I cock my head to the side, gazing at her discerningly. “And what about your son?”

She lets out a long, slow breath, as if this is hard for her, though we both know it’s not. “He’ll have to be killed, too. I don’t know where they are, but they’ve all gone missing at the same time. I have to assume somehow, their disappearances are all connected. If you find Beau and Glory, you’ll probably find Huxley, too. And if he knows, he’ll tell the truth.” She puts her hand over her heart in a fake, exaggerated motion. “My son always was too good for this world. I’ve accepted that he’ll have to die, too.”

I chuckle humorlessly. “You need medication.”

Her eyes narrow. “For once in my fucking life, I’m doing what’s best for me. Honestly, Ambrose, we’re all just a bunch of animals. Morality is the worst thing that ever happened to this world. It’s meant to be survival of the fittest.”

“You live a sad, pathetic life in your lonely little world.”

She grins. “I’m not sad and my life is quite joyous. I have power and I do what I want. What more could I ask for?” She pushes off the desk and saunters toward me again. “Do this for me, and I’ll give you what you’ve always wanted.”

“Oh? And what have I always wanted? Enlighten me with your insight.”

“Independence. Freedom. Peace. I’ll give you a bonus of fifty thousand dollars, and as soon as I liquidate the company, I’ll give you your five percent. It will be millions, Ambrose. Enough for you to live out the rest of your days doing whatever the fuck you wanna do. I’ll even give you cash if you want it, so you can live your simple, off-grid lifestyle. I’ll let you go, and I’ll never call on you again. You can disappear for all I care.”

“You mean, you’d let me go?”

I’m trapped here by the secrets she keeps—the things I’ve done for her that I’m not proud of, all the crimes I committed at her request.

If I had the promise that she’d let me go along with all of the secrets, along with the knowledge of the horrible crimes I’ve committed…If I had enough money that I’d never have to do any of that again, enough money to run away, disappear, build my house tucked away somewhere in the woods in a place where no one can find me…If I could live in tranquility without ties to Sugar Wood Forest, my parents, this fucking factory…

Itwouldbeeverything.

“Are you willing to kill for everything you’ve ever wanted?”

Before I can think through a response, I find that my head is naturally nodding, though I feel a hint of sickness roll through my gut. I am willing and that doesn’t sit well with me.

She grins and steps back before turning, moving to circle her desk. She bends, pulling open the bottom drawer and sifting through junk until she finds what she’s looking for, dragging it out. She stands slowly and brushes some dust off what looks like a picture frame in her hands.

“I suppose I should have this on my desk so the police don’t suspect I’m heartless. I’m sure you know what my family looks like from the media.”

“I don’t watch television and I’m not on social media.”

She looks at me with shock. “Well, what the fuck do you do with your free time?”

My forehead wrinkles at her rushed judgment. “I read. What the fuck do you do?”

She shrugs. “Didn’t peg you for the intellectual type.”

Fuckingbitch.

She comes over to me, standing beside me and turning the frame so I can see it. I sigh and turn my gaze to it. I recognize Beau, of course, because I’ve seen him in the factory with Maura.

But then…

A shock of lightning strikes through my heart as my eyes fall upon two blonde smiling teenagers who look far too familiar. My palms sweat and I scrub them against my jeans.

“My stepdaughter Glory Tolliver, and my son Huxley Hill. He never wanted to change his name when I married Beau.”

“That’s…This is…These are the people you want me to find and kill?”

“Yes.”

I should feel some relief for the fact that, inexplicably, I’ve already found two of them. Rather, the two of them found me.

Howhadtheyfoundme?

It’s as though the universe sent them to me, directed them to crawl beneath my boot, and ask to be squashed. But seeing them in this photo washes some strange sort of unease through my veins and I feel…uncomfortable.

“Do we have a deal, then?”

A lump rises in my throat, and I swallow it down. “Fifty grand bonus and five percent of the liquidated assets? Complete freedom from you and your bullshit…forever?”

“Those are the terms.”

“I want ten grand up front, in good faith.”

She looks at me, searching my eyes for confirmation that I intend to complete the task. I don’t know what she sees there. I want the money. I want the freedom she’s offering me, though the discomfort I’m feeling over this punches through every other beat of my heart.

Youweregoingtokillthemanyway…weren’tyou?

Youtoldthemyourname.

Therewasneveranyotheroutcome.

I choke out the words, “Consider it done.”

I leave the factory fifteen minutes later with my pockets full of cash that I hold fisted in my grip until I reach my truck. I climb in and slam the door shut, pull the cash from my pockets, and shove it all into my glove box.

Fuck.

I can be free from Maura Tolliver and have everything I’ve ever wanted. All I have to do is find Beau Tolliver and murder the little blonde birds who strayed too far from their nest and wound up in my cage.

Littlebird.

I press my eyes shut to be met with images of golden blonde tresses swirling in my mind—plump pink lips with green eyes, brown eyes with a chiseled jawline and the hint of stubble.

I shake the image of them from my mind as I shift the truck into gear and roll forward.

I can’t think of them as people. I can’t allow their faces to puncture my mind with sympathy. I have to do this so I can finally be free from this insidious, infectious place.

I have to kill them to be free.