Rogue Wave (The Water Keepers, Book 2) (40 page)

I shook my head. “Nothing…the building is just so big. I guess I’m wondering how we’re supposed to find them.”

“We’ll find your mom,” he assured me. “Just follow my lead.”

I followed hesitantly behind as Rayne made his way across the room toward the front desk. Just before we were within hearing distance, he pulled out his wallet and folded a large bill discreetly in his hand. “Unfortunately,” he said in a hushed tone, “you can pretty much get anything you want if you’ve got the money to pay for it.”

It looked like he planned to bribe his way to finding my mother, which wasn’t the type of thing I was interested in making a habit of, but in this case, it certainly felt justified. I gave him a nod, signaling that I understood, and approached the desk with Rayne by my side.

A slight, middle-aged man greeted us politely. “Hello. How can I help you? Are you checking in?”

“Actually, no,” Rayne said. “We’re looking for someone. Perhaps you can help us find him.” Rayne slid his hand inconspicuously across the desk, allowing the corner of the bill to show in his hand.

The man froze a moment to study Rayne’s face. Then he smiled awkwardly, and shifted his eyes down to something hidden behind the desk. “Yes, of course,” he finally said, sounding a little too suspicious. The man looked across the room, making eye contact with a guy in a dark suit on the couch who nodded back from behind a newspaper.

Rayne grabbed my hand and pulled me back from the desk, realizing something wasn’t right, but it was too late. As soon as we turned around, another man, with arms as thick as truck tires, stood in our way. “Mr. Hastings would like to see you,” he said, blocking our exit, making it very clear that this wasn’t an invitation; it was an order. I looked up at Rayne with concern, hoping for some glimpse that he had a plan.

“It’s fine,” Rayne said, gesturing for me to comply with the man’s demand. “Just do what he says.”

I eyed the man cautiously as he herded us across the room. The other man, in the suit, left his newspaper on the couch and fell into step next to me as we approached the elevators.  The same man slid a card through a scanner and pressed the highest button with the letters PH written across the surface in place of a number. Of course…the penthouse. For some reason, it seemed like we should have been able to figure that one out on our own.

The only sound breaking the silence was the ding that the elevator made after passing each floor of the building. Just as the ding chimed again, signaling the fourteenth floor, Rayne quietly pulled a pen out of his pocket and let it fall to the floor near my feet. The man standing next to me was distracted by the noise and glanced down just long enough for Rayne to jab him in the face, followed by a knee to the gut. The man crumpled to the ground.

The other guy, the one so muscular he could have been the Incredible Hulk’s son, started to grab Rayne from behind, but Rayne was quick to respond. Rayne turned his body, twisting the man’s monstrous arm in just the right angle to cause the man to buckle forward under Rayne’s command.

Just then, the guy in the suit pulled himself up off the floor, and before I knew it, a gun was pointed at my head. The click of the gun cocking caught everyone’s attention, causing Rayne to freeze in place. Rayne quickly released the muscular man’s arm and held out his hands, showing his willingness to comply.

The final ding sounded and the elevator doors opened. The larger man pushed Rayne forward, forcing him to stumble out through the opening. The guy with the gun motioned to me to follow them into the hallway.

There was a cleaning lady with her cart standing just to the left of the elevator doors, who looked down without saying a word, waiting carefully for the elevator to empty so she could make her quiet escape. She didn’t even look surprised when she saw the gun. It made me wonder if every employee in this hotel was working for Ash Hastings, or at least being paid off for their silence. Or maybe she just recognized a bad situation and was smart enough to keep herself out of it.

The man next to Rayne took a phone out of his pocket, mumbled a few words I couldn’t quite make out, and snapped the phone shut again. By the time we reached the end of the short hallway, the door to the penthouse was already open, and Ash Hastings was waiting inside. His face was so irritatingly smug I almost wanted to slap him.

“Rayne, I’m so glad you came to join the party,” Ash said. “I was wondering what was taking you so long.” Ash used the knife in his hand, which looked more like a hunting knife than anything you would find in the kitchen, to cut a slice away from his apple. “You too, Sadie. I was hoping you would come.” He held the slice in my direction. “Apple?” he offered. I didn’t answer. Ash shrugged and went on. “You’ve looked better though, I have to say. What’s wrong? Not drinking enough
water
these days?”

Rayne lunged forward at Ash in anger, but the large man grabbed him and held him back. “Sadie doesn’t have much time,” Rayne said as he tried to yank his arms free. “Don’t you understand that? Don’t you have a single decent bone left in your body?”

Ash scowled, getting up in Rayne’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean? Who are
you
to judge
me
? You self-righteous, son of a—”

“I only call it like I see it,” Rayne said, holding his ground. Rayne shook his head, his voice easing back. “What happened to you, Ash? What are we even doing here? I’m not your enemy, remember? And neither is Sadie.”

“You were always such a boy scout,” Ash shot back, ignoring Rayne’s comments. “Rayne Stevens is too perfect to make a single mistake, right? Maybe you should have thought about that before you kicked my father off a cliff.”

“Ash, how long are you going to torture yourself with denial? I already told you that I’m sorry for how things happened, but when are you going to face the fact that your father wasn’t a victim? He was a cold…hard…criminal. Wake up, Ash. I had no choice. Your father brought his fate upon himself.”

“Did my mother bring her fate upon
her
self, Rayne? Was
she
a hardened criminal?”

Rayne looked baffled. “What? No, of course not. What are you talking about?”

“No one understands what I’ve been through,” Ash said, his jaw trembling. “Nobody in Banya knows what it’s like to lose somebody like I did. Nobody there understands loss at all. Their parents and grandparents and children live for hundreds of years. It’s practically a celebration when the time finally comes for someone to go. My mother was young and beautiful. She still had so much left to give, so much life still in her. Of
course
my father lost it when she died. Of
course
he did. He knew he had nothing left in his future but years and years of lonely torture. What kind of a life is that? What’s the point of even bothering to try?”

Rayne reached out and placed his hand on Ash’s shoulder. “I understand that you’re hurting. I want to be there for you—”

“Don’t touch me,” Ash said, pushing Rayne away. “Just stay away from me. You need to get this through your thick skull. I don’t want to be your friend. You make me sick. You’re nothing but a glorified babysitter, and yet the Council wants to give you a fricking medal of valor for taking down my father. That’s like our whole lives in a nutshell, isn’t it. You do something stupid, and then they give you a reward. I can’t stand it. Even the sight of you makes me want to rip my own eyes out.”

Rayne gritted his teeth. “Fine. There’s no point; I’m done trying with you. But I’m not going to stand by and let you take your issues with
me
out on Sadie. She has nothing to do with this.”

“Maybe,” Ash said. “But’s that’s not my call.”

“Are you going to tell me what’s really going on here?” Rayne pushed.

I was getting just as frustrated with Ash as Rayne was. I took a step toward him. “Where’s my mom?” I demanded, unable to hold back any longer. “Did you hurt her?”

“She’s here, and she’s fine,” Ash said dryly. “So, you can stop your crying. She’s just bait. You’re all just a bunch of bait.”

“Bait for what?” Rayne said.

“I want to see her,” I cut in. “Where is she?” I had the sudden desire to drive my knee right into Ash’s groin so I could push past him to find her, but it didn’t seem like the best idea with a gun pointed at my head.

“Bait for what?” Rayne demanded again.

Ash rolled his eyes as if Rayne was the biggest idiot he’d ever met in his life. “To lure Hamlin out of his safe little shell,” Ash said. “Thanks to you, I’m sure he’ll be here any minute.”

“What makes you so sure?” Rayne said. But I knew just as well as Rayne did that my father was probably on his way here right now—a thought that brought me a certain degree of comfort, and yet terrified me at the same time.

Ash laughed under his breath. “Oh please, we both know I’ve heard every single word the two of you have said for months now. Believe me, it was completely nauseating, but it made it so easy to manipulate you into doing what I wanted. Actually, most of the time you both did exactly what I wanted without me even having to try. So I should thank you both for being so sadly predictable.”

“But you could have set up an appointment to meet with Hamlin at any time back in Banya,” Rayne protested. “All you had to do was come back. He would have been the first person to want to meet with you.”

“Oh, I know,” Ash replied coolly. “I could have gone back to meet with him, if I actually cared about any of that anymore, but this meeting isn’t for
me
.”

Just then, a dark voice echoed from inside the room. “Ash…” the voice called. “Stop dawdling in the doorway like a buffoon and bring them both inside.” A shiver crept up my spine. It was the voice from my nightmares, a voice I could never forget no matter how hard I tried. I swallowed and looked over at Rayne. His face turned white, and I knew that my worst fears were about to come true.

Ash’s temporary composure faltered as his eyes shifted toward the direction of the voice with a look of agitation. He closed his eyes for only a second, regaining his focus.

As soon his eyes opened, Ash tossed the apple he’d been clenching in his fist straight into the air and hurled his knife across the hall. It whizzed past our heads, piercing straight through the center of the apple and pinning it perfectly to the wall. My mouth dropped open. I always believed Ash Hastings was a force to be reckoned with, but now I knew for sure.

“Well, at least I know I can still do
one
thing right,” Ash mumbled under his breath.

Ash slid his hand behind his back and pulled out a gun from his waistband. “You two…” he said to the two men working for him. “Watch the door.” Ash looked directly at me and with a mocking tone said, “Ladies first.” As soon as I was through the doorway, Ash grabbed Rayne by the collar, pushed the gun into his neck, and shoved him inside the room behind me.

The feel of the penthouse compared to the hallway was like going from day to night. The hallway had been brightly lit with almost white walls, and cheery beach-themed décor. The penthouse was something else entirely.

It was sort of spectacular, but in a dark, ominous way. There wasn’t an ounce of white anywhere to be seen, aside from the tiny round lights specking the slate gray ceiling almost like stars in the night sky. The floor was cold and hard, covered in large grayish brown tile from corner to corner.

As Ash forced us into the front room, I stared up at a mesmerizing ceiling made of glass and undulating waves of glowing blue water, which hovered over a stiff, charcoal gray couch, casting strange swirls and flickers of blue light around the room.

I held my breath as we entered, dreading what I was about to find, but the large room was completely empty. It was obvious the place was surrounded by floor to ceiling windows, but the shades were drawn all around, making me feel dark and closed off…and claustrophobic.

I felt myself gaping as we moved past a sleek, ceiling-high fireplace casting a fiery glow at the center of the space. On the other side of us was a curving spiral staircase made of glass and steel, with what looked like an elevator door right behind it. They had an actual elevator right inside the hotel room. Actually, the place didn’t feel like a hotel room at all, and I wondered if the Hastings family actually owned this place or maybe the entire hotel.

Ash smirked when he saw my face staring at the elevator. “Oh, that goes up to the pool on the roof,” he said, expecting me to be impressed. “Our
private
pool.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the glass, water-covered ceiling in the front room, as if explaining that it wasn’t a ceiling at all, just an ingenious way to show off their luxurious rooftop pool.

The eerie ambiance in the room fueled my anxiety. Voss was close; I could feel it. But as we passed the spiral staircase into another shady room with a foreboding vaulted ceiling, my heart stopped all together.

“Mom!” I called, lunging forward. But my feet froze only a step later when the chill of Voss’s black eye’s pierced through my limbs.

Voss stood from a black satin sofa with a devilish grin, his handsome suit and well-groomed appearance a poor disguise for the ugliness I knew they were concealing. “Long time no see,” he said, toying with me. “Did you miss me?”

I swallowed the lump of air in my throat like a rock, looking away from his callous face to see the streaks of tears down my mother’s cheeks as she huddled on the hard floor, her hands bound behind her back like a prisoner.

My mother tried to scramble to her feet. “No,” she cried. “Sadie, what are you doing here? You have to get out of here. You can’t—” Before she could finish, Voss grabbed her neck and pushed her back to the floor.

“Stop,” I pled. “You’ll hurt her.”

Rayne stepped forward automatically, his protective instincts kicking in, but Ash yanked him back, thrusting the gun deeper into Rayne’s neck.

I looked at Ash, hoping there was still a shred of humanity left in him. “Why are you doing this?” I said to him, my eyes starting to burn. “What did we ever do to you?”

Ash stared back at me as if there were nothing left, just emptiness. But I didn’t look away; I kept staring and staring, wishing I could shoot flames at him with my mind, until something in Ash faltered. His eyes shifted away, almost as if he was ashamed, and I felt the tiniest hint of hope. Maybe there was still a chance he would change his mind and realize the severity of his mistakes. Maybe there was a chance. He had helped me once before.