AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He was a scholar, a librarian, a man who knew that knowledge meant power and wanted to ensure his family always had it.
This was the start of it. The start of everything the Barkers have built their empire on—fear. Knowing anything and everything they can to blackmail and threaten, then when people don’t comply, they either ruin their lives or take them.
And this man was the one who set that ball rolling.
I drag my eyes away from the page and back over to the case. Volume after volume of diaries and ledgers, likely filled with stories and detailed accountings that will create the true picture of the Barker family.
All right at my fingertips.
Why wouldn’t Weston keep these locked up or move them so I can’t access them?
Maybe deep down he wants me to know, wants me to understand him, no matter how aggressively he might push me away. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
With Weston Barker, it seems there isn’t any easy way to discover the truth.
WESTON
The towering pine looms over me, broad, wiry branches spread out across the forest canopy, swaying gently in the wind. Beautiful and strong, yet as big a hazard as there is out here.
Precariously close to the workshop and the clearing where I do most of my work, the next major winter storm could bring it toppling down on the building that holds all my supplies. Things necessary to play my role as The Beast.
I can’t afford the time it will take to rebuild and replace anything I might lose in a mess like that, especially during winter. Which leaves me here today, doing what I should have taken care of years ago—eliminate the threat.
Just like a lot of things out here, beauty often means danger.
This tree may be what I’m looking at now, but Callista is a prime example of that primitive truth.
One so ingrained in nature that it’s a wonder anyone still succumbs to it.
Yet, that’s precisely what I did.
I knew that staggeringly beautiful woman would be my undoing the moment she looked up at me with those wide doe eyes. Nothing that lovely and perfect can exist without being dangerous, and without knowing it, she’s created an even more precarious situation than this tree threatening to crush me and my workshop.
She couldn’t have known what sliding onto my lap today would initiate. That it would expose us both to the type of scrutiny we don’t need when we already live in a damn fishbowl. She couldn’t have known that I’m not the only one watching the camera feeds. And her naivety will be the means to her downfall—and mine.
We may have been safe in the library, where nothing gets recorded to protect the very necessary privacy of what I do there and the information contained within those walls, but once she descends those stairs, every movement is tracked, every step analyzed.
There is no other reprieve from the prying eyes in that house.
And apparently, we looked rather “cozy” in a way that drew far too much unwanted attention.
It’s forced my hand and made it impossible for me to pretend to be unaffected by her. And that knowledge has made me vulnerable and her a greater target.
I wish I could undo it, find a way to remove the menace in the same fashion I’m about to this tree. Swinging an axe has always come naturally, and burying it in the neck of anyone stupid enough to threaten someone I care about despite my best attempts not to.
If only…
This world is never that easy. Things aren’t that simple. Nothing with Callista will ever be, either. Not with her father under the Barker thumb, not when she entered my life in this fashion, certainly not when I’ve just pushed her away and shot her down, embarrassing her and making her feel as though she isn’t enough.
When in reality…she’s everything.
Spinning the axe in my hand, I walk around the pine again, assessing the thick trunk, determining the best angle to cut to ensure it falls well away from the workshop and doesn’t get hung up in the other trees.
Tree felling is a science.
One that must be learned from a skilled lumberjack in order to do successfully. After so many years, the process has become well-rooted in my brain, so I barely have to think about it before knowing exactly what to do and how.
Still, Father’s voice pops into my head, explaining various angles, how to make the face cut, demonstrating the felling wedge on a tree just like this before he toppled it. But the memory that might have been warm, a perfect father-son teaching moment, quickly morphs into most of my interactions with the man.
