27. Chapter 27

"We weren't coming to kill you, we weren't even coming here until tomorrow to talk to you but then we were told you were making a run for it to avoid a confrontation with us," I say, confused.

The tension in the room is palpable as Simon and Matthew lower their weapons, confusion evident in their expressions. I fight the urge to keep my gun aimed at them, forcing myself to lower it alongside Beck and Rick, though none of us fully relax.

A sudden sharp sound pierces the air, causing all of us to jump. Rick and Beck tense, ready to raise their guns again, but I quickly signal for them to stand down.

"A confrontation about what? What is going on, Phoenix?" Matthew asks, stress and confusion etched into his face, his eyes searching mine for answers.

"How about how you sent letters to Ashley, forcing her to leave us twelve years ago, or how you planted a bomb in Nix's car," Beck accuses, his voice surprisingly calm. "Just for those things alone, I want to make you hurt."

"Stop!"

The word echoes through the room and I glance around, searching for the source of the voice, but there"s no one else in sight. "Ash?" I call out, concerned.

"Don't kill them, there is something else going on here, it"s not all adding up," her voice comes again and I try to pinpoint where it"s coming from as she speaks. My brows shoot up when I realize she is speaking from the phone system's speakers somehow.

"Ash, they took twelve years of our lives from us," Rick growls, his sharp eyes lock onto Simon and Matthew, his finger twitching near the trigger of his gun. But Ash"s words give me pause.

Simon raises his hands in a placating gesture, his eyes darting between us. "But we didn"t," he insists, his voice tinged with desperation.

I look at him, my confusion evident. My head tilts as I assess them, trying to gauge the truth behind their words. Guilt is written all over both of their faces, so I"m not sure I believe them now.

"Let me rephrase," Simon continues, his tone somber. "Yes, we did initially interfere. I"ll admit that what you said is true, Beck. But we stopped interfering six years ago when Ash started working for us."

His words hang in the air, the weight of their implications sinking in. My mind races as I try to make sense of it all. If they truly had stopped interfering, then Ash is right, something isn't adding up.

"Maybe we should all calmly sit down and see if we can put all the pieces of this puzzle together?" I suggest, and Rick's head whips in my direction with a growl. Giving him a look, I mentally hope he calms the fuck down enough until we get to the bottom of whatever is going on.

Finally, he jerks his head in a nod. I also get a much calmer nod from Beck as he moves to the side of the room and motions the uncles out ahead of us. They both sigh, knowing that we could very well just shoot them while their backs are turned. But they put their guns in the holsters they are both wearing and precede us out of the room.

"Are you far, Mon Ange?" I ask, directing my voice toward the closest phone.

I hear her sigh of relief echo through the offices, the edge of panic that I heard now eased. "Not far, Kace has given his best impression of a formula one driver, we should be pulling up in a few minutes. Elsa?"

"Yes, boss," comes a second voice through the speakers.

"Can you do something about the cops heading that way?" Ash says and I suddenly realize that I'm hearing them both as though they are on a phone call themselves. Whatever Elsa did to project Ash through the office is pure genius.

"I have already canceled the alert and put it in their system that it was a false alarm," Elsa responds, and even I'm breathing a sigh of relief at her words.

"Okay, thank you. We are just pulling in now, see you in a minute," Ash says and then another sound comes from the system as the call disconnects.

Wandering out after the others, I notice they"ve taken seats around a meeting table off to the side of the room. They"re all tense and stiff in their seats, each one seemingly lost in their own thoughts.

I perch on the edge of a nearby desk, crossing my arms over my chest, feeling tense. We"re all on edge, eager to uncover the truth, but aware that we have to wait for the rest of our family to arrive. After a few more tense minutes, the sound of the elevator doors opening breaks the silence. "Holy fuck," a voice exclaims, and I furrow my brow, realizing it"s neither Ash nor Kace"s voice.

Jessica follows Ash and Kace into the room and I have to push aside the flash of anger I feel at her presence. I raise an eyebrow in Ash's direction and she shakes her head. "Like I said, there's more to this than what any one of us knows," she offers but still walks directly to me. I reach out and drag her into my body with a hand on the back of her neck, burying my nose into her hair and inhaling the scent that is just her. It calms the chaos I'm feeling on the inside, but we can't linger, and I'm not the only man who needs her.

Letting her go, I then gently push her toward where Beck and Rick are sitting. Kacey is already there, his hands gripping both of their shoulders briefly, but he lets go and sits down at the table when Ash approaches. She simply steps between them and instead of reassuring one over the other, she simply crouches down slightly and pulls them toward her until they are wrapping arms around her in a group hug.

Sighing again, I give Jessica a nod. We may have our issues, but if Ash thinks she needs to be here then I can play along–for the moment. She takes up a similar position to me, leaning against a desk instead of sitting at the table with the others. We are both still close enough to the table to hear and take part in the discussion but for me it"s a way of making sure nothing gets out of hand, for her I'm assuming it's her way of feeling safer surrounded by criminals.

Once everyone is seated, I exhale slowly, trying to gather my thoughts. "Let"s start with the letters twelve years ago," I suggest, addressing Simon and Matthew. "Why did you send them to Ashley?"

Simon clears his throat, his expression pained. "We aren't proud of it, but we may have had some feelings toward Ashley that played a part," he says with a grimace. "But also, you were all meant to be our legacy, our heirs to take on this empire when we could no longer run it. When we realized you were sleeping together, we were angry, and all we could imagine was that you would be a distraction to each other. We thought you would end up fighting and tearing the whole place down."

Matthew scrubs his hands down his face, and I can finally see the exhaustion on his face. "We thought she would call us to help, that we would be the logical choice to turn to in order to save you. The possibility that she could completely disappear never once occurred to us. People always leave a paper trail, they usually have to use their name somewhere until they can get something else fake set up."

I see Jessica flinch and my eyes briefly narrow in her direction before Simon starts talking again.

"Even without the paper trail there are cameras everywhere, she should have appeared on footage somewhere but she never did. She vanished, and once she did there was no way to fix what we had started," he stresses as a look of shame crosses his face.

"And how do you justify trying to kill Nix?" Ash responds, her face a blank mask.

Matthew looks in my direction and I can see how much he is hoping for my forgiveness. "That wasn't our intention. The device we placed on the Mustang was small and in a place that you shouldn't have even gotten a scratch."

We had already come to that conclusion ourselves, but it's still reassuring that what we assumed was correct.

"When you contacted us six years ago we felt like it was our chance to make everything right again. We would have given and done anything for you at that point to fix what we broke," Simon says softly, his attention and words spoken directly to Ash in a plea.

She frowns finally as her eyes search their faces, perhaps for the truth or some sign of a lie. "Then why did you send me the letter six years ago?"

Genuine confusion fills both of their faces at her question, and their response alarms me. Even before they answer her, I know what they are going to say.

"We didn't," Matthew says with a shake of his head. The truth is written in their expressions and in his voice.

"But who else would have known about the letters?" Ash asks, her own confusion speaking volumes.

I hear Jessica groan softly but it draws my attention to see her close her eyes, a pained look on her face. "I told him," she grits out of a clenched jaw and when she looks at us, I can see the unadulterated anger in her eyes. "I told that asshole about them after you told us, so he would go along with the plan to help you."

Ash's expression becomes unreadable again as she takes a moment to process this new information. She briefly looks around the room before refocusing on me. "Let me guess, you got a phone call that made you come here straight away instead of waiting like we planned."

I dip my head to acknowledge that her assumption is correct and she turns to the uncles. "And you got some tip warning you, I'm assuming a warning of something worse than just the guys coming to discuss this with you." They nod in response and the pieces click into place in my mind finally.

"It was Jason, wasn't it?" I ask for clarity.

Ash looks back at me, her expression sad, like everything she knew was suddenly turned upside down. "It's been him all along," she says, and I frown in confusion. She leans forward, resting her elbows on the table as she presses her fingers against her temples and takes a moment to breathe.

She lets her hands drop and looks around the room at each of us. "Jason supplied all the documents for my new identity when I ran. He must have been monitoring everything to do with that identity, so he knew when I left the military and went looking for you. He knew about the original letters thanks to Jess, so he copied those because he already knew that threat worked the first time. He made it easy for me to find him when I needed some other identities and identification in order to do things that weren't legal. He even made sure to make me aware that Jessica was now working with a federal agency, so I would steer clear of her. Everything has been manipulated by him so that I had to rely on him for a lot of things, inserting himself more and more into my life. He never foresaw me running into you again because of Colt though."

Rage has filled me with every word. He has been like a manipulative puppeteer, pulling the strings of all of our lives. But he's about to get his strings cut.

"This could have ended six years ago if you had admitted to the truth, why didn't you?" Beck directs the question to the uncles and I hadn't thought the look of guilt and shame on their faces could get worse, but it does.

"We were going to. When Ash told us not to tell you she had reached out, we spoke about admitting the truth to all of you. But I'll admit we became cowards; we were afraid of the fallout," Simon admits sadly.

Ash scoffs, a loud sound in the quietness of the room. "Oh yeah? So how's that working out for you now?" she asks angrily and I have never seen the uncles look so small as they do when they shrink in the face of her rage.

My hands clench into fists, the urge to lash out almost overwhelming, but I control it. "Jason's going to pay for this," I growl, my voice thick with anger

"We need to find him," Rick says, his voice low and dangerous, his eyes burning with a fiery intensity that matches my own.

Jessica stands up from the desk she was leaning against with a heavy sigh. "I know where he is."