Chapter 98

Liam’s POV

I knew the park Logan meant, so I headed there first. After parking sideways, taking up three or four different spots, I didn’t care, I rushed to the playground and searched everywhere I could. Midmorning, the place was practically deserted. Only a few older folks were walking along the nearby path. None of them paid any attention to me.

Still, I rushed towards everyone I saw to ask them if they had seen anything. They hadn’t.

I wasn’t going to give up. Sophia had captured the three people most important in the entire world to me. I’d never rest again until I had those three back at my side, safe and sound.

My adrenaline keeping my growing fear at bay, I reentered my car, then drove across town to Sophia’s house.

The front door had been recently kicked open if the splinters around the lock were anything to go by, likely by the police last night. That meant the premises had been searched.

But that didn’t mean the police hadn’t missed something. Or that Sophia hadn’t left and come back.

The door was so busted that the lock was entirely dysfunctional now. All I had to do was push on the door and it swung inwards, opening.

I crept into the foyer, then paused to listen, even holding my breath.

The icemaker rattled from the fridge in the kitchen. The air conditioner kicked on.

But other than that, nothing. The house was silent.

“Shit,” I cursed, and turned back toward the door.

Where else could Sophia have gone? A friend’s house? A club?

I walked three steps out of the house toward my car before I stopped.

Turning back to the house, I remembered the pool house out back. Likely the police searched back there last night. But had anyone checked since then? Or did they only come to the main house?

Determined, I rounded the side of the house and headed towards the pool in the back.

Aria’s POV

I blinked a few times, bringing the world slowly back into focus. My head ached, a painful throb, but that was evidence that I wasn’t dead, which was good to know for now.

My body was arranged so that I was sitting on an uncomfortable chair, the legs of which seemed to be metal, while the body was made entirely of plastic straps. It looked like the kind of chair that might sit out beside a pool on a pool deck.

But I wasn’t outside. Instead, I was in some kind of smaller apartment looking building, furnished simply, with a couch and some chairs. There were doors in the back with large windows, but those windows had been covered with curtains. Still, the light shone through them, telling me that not much time had passed since I’d been drugged.

Unless an entire day had passed…

That was a harrowing thought.

Fully awake now, I tried to stand, only to find my arms tied together at the wrists behind the chair, and my ankles tied individually to the two front legs.

Sophia sat on one of the arm chairs, pulled closer to me than the rest. She looked even more like hell than she had the night before. Her runny mascara had caked on her cheeks now and rubbed off in a few places, showing splotchy red skin underneath.

Her t-shirt had a couple holes in it. The cuffs of her sweatpants had grass stains on them. Her bare feet were dark brown with dirt. The dark bags under her eyes had only increased, as if she hadn’t slept at all last night. Her eyes held a wildness to them, looking back and forth too quickly, like she was wired from too much coffee or drugs.

She held her gun in her right hand, the barrel of it resting along her knee. Her finger rested near the trigger but not directly on it. That didn’t make me feel any better.

With her wild eyes, she must have seen that I was awake, but she didn’t acknowledge me.

I hated waiting. “Where’s Joe?” I asked.

She nodded her head toward a nearby door. It could have been a closet or another room. I wished I could have had confirmation that he was alive, but knowing he was in there and not out here with the gun was going to have to be good enough for right now.

“And William?” I asked.

In a snap, her gaze focused on me. “That’s none of your concern.”

I didn’t want to press my luck. I could only hope that she was keeping the two boys together, and they that were both blissfully unaware of what was happening here. Maybe they were in that room playing with their cars. That hope helped me consider my own dwindling safety.

If I wanted to have any hope of saving Joe and William, then I needed to survive this. Somehow, someway. I had to survive.

“All of this could have been avoided, you know,” Sophia said. “If you had just left Liam alone, none of this would have gotten this far. Liam would have been mine, fully and completely, and we could have had a happy life without you.”

She couldn’t honestly believe that, could she? From the stories I’d heard, Sophia had delusions about Liam from the start. She’d fantasized about herself with him, but Liam had never really wanted her in response.

I still needed to see a DNA test, but it was becoming abundantly clearer to me that if either Sophia or Liam was lying, Sophia was the more likely culprit.

After all, she was the one with the gun.

“Let’s talk about this,” I said.

“There’s nothing to talk about. It’s too late, don’t you see that? I didn’t do anything to you last time. You left Liam, disappeared, and everything was fine. But then, as if returning from hell itself, you returned into our lives and stole him away again.”

“I didn’t know he was working for the team when I accepted the job,” I said. “Everything that led me here was pure coincidence.”

“You must think I’m the biggest idiot in the world, huh?” she spat bitterly. “Like I’m supposed to believe you weren’t jealous of the happiness I shared with Liam. For six years, you stayed away, and he was mine. He raised my son, and you couldn’t stand that. You are such a slut, you probably don’t even know who the father of your baby is.”

I knew exactly who the father of my baby was. Sophia was the one who didn’t know. It wasn’t her fault, she had been drugged, but for her to throw that accusation at me screamed of her own self-loathing.

“I know who the father of my baby is,” I said. “So do you. And so does he, if he would take a moment to check the timeline.”

“No,” Sophia said, pushing herself to her feet. She stormed toward me. “Don’t you dare say it!”

“How is it a surprise?” I asked her. “Liam and I were married. Of course he’s Joe’s father. Of course he is.”

“No!” Sophia shouted straight in my face. “Don’t you fucking say that to me! He’s my baby’s father, not yours!”

I shook my head, helpless. I couldn’t take it back. I couldn’t deny the truth.

She had to know. If she had ever thought it was anyone else, she was kidding herself.

Fresh tears pool under her eyes. “Fine. Then he has to die too.”

Even through the tears, the fury in Sophia’s gaze struck me down to my bones. I had no doubt she would shoot and kill me. She hated me that much.

Lifting the gun, Sophia aimed it straight for my chest.