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The dining room was quiet across the hall. The silverware, laid out at the side of dated plates. Dust sat in each bowl because no one had been here in weeks. A spider weaved around the cutlery, searching for company or a smaller insect he could feast on.
“Catharina!” I rushed around the downstairs area, my gun moving ahead of me to the kitchen and the cages empty of women. More spiders crawled around the space.
“Cat!”
The sound of a struggle pulled me back out into the hallway. Rounding the stairs, I took them three at a time to get to the top quicker. Remembering the way to Rothbart’s room, I pushed the creaky door with the Glock. My eyes closed, my heart raced, terror made me too fucking hot as I fretted over what I’d find inside.
A fake accent entered my ears, coaxing my eyes to open. “There he is! The hubby, the Decoy, the rockstar. I’d be honored if not for what you did to my family.”
The voice belonged to the giant man sitting in front of Cat, who was alive and semi-conscious, supported by a huge fireplace.
“Tell me you’re okay, Cat?”
She wasn’t the one to answer me. “Do you not like her new name? The identity is the first thing we strip, even before the clothes. It’s only in rare circumstances they are allowed to keep them, and only if I have a fondness for their birth name. I never liked hers. I told the boys to start calling her Aribella upon pick-up, and that is her name here.”
“My wife’s name is Catharina Sutter-Cole wherever she is.”
Cat’s head didn’t look my way, acknowledging me as her husband or even as a person in the room. Her gaze, filled with hate, stayed on Rothbart as she blinked through swollen eyes.
“Yeah, I’d keep those fucked up things closed if I were you.” Rothbart sneered, giving her a second glance.
“Don’t listen to him, Cat. He’s not a fan of beauty.”
His eyes moved back to me as I stepped deeper into the room. An eyebrow raised, allowing me to see the bruise developing close by.
She’d done that. I knew it.
“It’s a husband’s job to say that kinda shit. More truth comes from outside the relationship.” His jibe was more vicious than mine as his eyes followed me around the space.
Because our relationship wasn’t built on truth and trust, and that was my fault.
I couldn’t let him see how his words fucked me off because this cunt didn’t deserve any advantages from me.
I kept my back straight and my tone flat, raising an eyebrow, too. “I guess that’s why your wife discovered her worth after I stopped by.”
My words were for Rothbart, my eyes drifting around him at every opportunity.
The blood on Cat’s face glistened by the heat of the blazing fire. My sweatshirt stuck to her body like a second layer of skin.
“Do not talk about my wife after what you did to her.”
“Payback,” the flattest of words came out, my gaze forced to lock on Rothbart. “For what she allowed to happen to mine.”
He smiled with pure mirth, making it obvious he didn’t give a fuck about that woman, like he didn’t about any other.
“Let my wife go.”
“And you’ll make my death quick and painless?” he laughed, mocking me because he knew I’d never let him live. “You know, I know that won’t happen. Alerion told me a lot about you—how music meant so much to you until her. That’s why I waited until this week to frame you. I waited until your show to hang a young victim from the nearest bridge and pin it on you.”
My jaw ticked. My patience was getting thin.
“I wonder how he’d feel about that?”
“He’d be proud of you. I don’t doubt it.”
He laughed again. “Yeah, I think so. Funny how you went from his greatest asset to the bane of his life. I think he tolerated a lot, with the drugs and shit, until the night he called me to come and get Aribella, here, of course. That night you pissed him off more than ever…until three days later when you left the hospital, returning to Cedric’s to look for her and killed him because you couldn’t find her.”
“He killed himself.”
