Feel (Sovereign Book 3) (6 page)

“Nine one one, what’s your emergency?” a female voice asked. I opened my mouth to speak, but stopped when Gavin’s threat rang loudly in my head.
No cops. No FBI.

I quickly hung up and moved to my suitcase, throwing on a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved top then sliding on the first pair of sandals I found. I grabbed my phone and stuffed it in my purse along with my room key and raced out the door, not caring whether it closed properly behind me. 

I ran to the elevator, my finger desperately pressing the call button as if my life depended on it.
Not my life, Barrett’s.

It hit me that I knew why Barrett never turned up at the police precinct to meet Marlee. She would know what to do, but I couldn’t call her.
No cops. No FBI.

The moment the elevator arrived, I pushed my way through the barely open doors, unaware of my surroundings or the fact there were four other people in the car with me.

“Miss, are you alright?” an elderly man asked behind me, gently touching my shoulder.

I flinched and whirled around to face him, my eyes wide with terror. “I . . .” I swallowed hard and concentrated on controlling my breathing. “I’m sorry. I’m . . . just in a hurry.” I gave the man and his wife a fake smile to hide the terror I was really feeling and turned back to face the doors.

When we reached the ground floor, I pushed out the elevator doors and ran across the lobby to the sidewalk outside. I saw a cab with its back door open and a couple of young guys moving toward the car. Without thinking, I jumped in front of them and sat down in the back seat, slamming the door closed behind me.

“Hey, you can’t—”

“Sorry, but this is an emergency. I need to get to my mother’s house ASAP,” I told the driver. His eyes went wide before he quickly faced the road and pulled out of the driveway and into traffic.

“Is everything okay? Do we need to call an ambulance?” he asked, his eyes meeting mine in the rear-view mirror.

“I just need to get there fast,” I replied, wringing my hands in my lap and silently praying that Gavin hadn’t hurt Barrett. Then I remembered that my mother was returning this afternoon.

Without another thought, I pressed redial on Marlee’s number and she answered within two rings. “Alyssa? Did you get hold of him?”

“Marlee . . . Detective . . .” I cleared my throat and willed myself to keep my emotions in check. “Do you know when my mother was due back?”

“I have it somewhere. Just give me a moment and I’ll be able to find it on my desk.” The line went quiet, bar the distant sound of shuffling papers. “Here it is; her flight was landing at three p.m. at McCarron. Is something wrong?”

“I . . . I can’t tell you but you need to stop her from going home.”

“What do you mean? If something’s wrong, I can help.”

“He said no cops and no FBI,” I whisper. “Shit. Forget it. Forget I said anything. I’ve got to go,” I said quickly before hanging up and turning my phone off.

I could only hope that I got there before anything happened to Barrett.

Twenty minutes later, the cab pulled into my mother’s street to be met by a police car blocking the road.

“No, no, no!” I cried as I slammed my hands against the safety glass, scaring the driver. He turned to look at me then got out of his door and stood beside the car with his hands pointing in the air.

“She just told me to drive here. I know nothing!” he shouted at the two police officers approaching him.

I jumped out of the cab and ran to one of the officers. “I have to get to my mother’s house. It’s an emergency!”

“Ms. Jacobs?”

“Yes. I know Detective Manning sent you, but you need to leave.” I looked around the street, the sidewalk, and then down the road where my mother’s house was. “I don’t even know if he’s there, but I have to check. I have to try!” My voice cracked and I wrapped my arms around my waist as I stood in the middle of the street in front of the two police officers and the cab driver, all of whom looked at me with wide eyes.

“Let me make a call. We’re just first responders to an urgent request for assistance. My only instruction was to block access to the street and wait for back-up.” He gave me a curt nod and walked back to the police car and sat in the driver’s seat, lifting the radio to his mouth.

With no other option, I pulled out my phone and turned it on, quickly dialing Marlee’s number again.

“Alyssa, I need you to stay where you are. We’ve tracked Gavin Barnes’s phone and we’ve tracked him down.”

“He said no cops! No FBI! He has Barrett!” I was hysterical now, desperately racking my brain to find a way to get to Barrett and keep the police away.

“You need to tell me exactly what he said to you, Alyssa. I need to know what units we’re going to need.”

“He has a gun, he has Barrett, and unless I come alone, he’s going to shoot him,” I sobbed as I paced back and forth on the sidewalk. “Marlee, I need to go to him. He told me to go.”

“And you can’t help Barrett if you go in there and get shot. I need you to take a deep breath and think about anything else you can tell me.”

“I don’t know anything else!”

“If you don’t think you can stay there, I’m going to get an officer to bring you in. Just until we know it’s safe,” she replied.

“No! I can’t leave. I need to get to Barrett.” My heart raced, and my hands were clammy, the phone slipping in my hand.

“I’m five minutes away and S.W.A.T. is ten minutes after me. You just need to hang tight for a little longer, Alyssa.” Her words were reassuring. Help was on its way, whether I wanted it or not. I told myself I just had to wait five minutes for Marlee to arrive, and she would help.

Or else I had five minutes to make a run for it and hope like hell I didn’t get shot in the process.

I chose the latter.

I kicked my shoes off, threw my purse on the ground, and ran down the sidewalk as fast as I could, until I reached Gavin and Mom’s long driveway. I kept running until I was at the front door, stopping for a second to catch my breath, but when I saw Barrett tied to a chair in the living area, I turned the door handle and stepped inside.

“You took your time. I was starting to think you didn’t care about Boy Wonder here,” Gavin said, poking Barrett’s slack head with the muzzle of the silver hand gun in his hand. Barrett didn’t move, his arms were limp, and his wrists were bound to the wooden arms of a dining room chair. His legs were splayed wide and his feet pointed outwards at an unnatural angle from each other, and I wondered what Gavin had done to him to get him here.

“Let him go!”

Gavin’s eyes were full of rage. His hair was haphazardly skewed as if he’d been running his hands through it. His loose grip on the gun put me on edge but there was no sign of a struggle, and nothing appeared out of place.

“You think you know it all, don’t you? You think your precious FBI agent here told you everything?” he said, before letting out a maniacal laugh. “You know nothing!”

I took a deep, calming breath and decided I needed to put him at ease. I slowly moved toward Gavin with my hands in the air. “I just want to take a seat. Is that okay?”

His answer came in a swift jerk of the gun toward the day bed in the corner window of the room. With a small nod, I walked over and sat down, making sure to keep one of my hands visible while the other gripped my phone tightly.

“Why are you doing this to me Gavin? I’ve done nothing to you.”

“It was never about you, Alyssa. You were collateral damage. Then you put ideas in your mother’s head. Everything was going according to plan, and then you made her question our marriage. In one phone call, you planted doubts in her mind. She endured our honeymoon then left me because she needed
space
.” His agitation increased with every word he spoke, and I knew I had to placate him to buy myself—and Barrett—more time.

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to be there for the wedding.”

“Sure you did. You’re a spoiled brat, like your father wanted you to be.” My head jerked back at the vicious tone in his voice when he mentioned my father.

“You knew my father?” I asked, without thought.

Gavin walked over to the front window of the house, looking up one way and then back down the street. His body stilled, and I stopped breathing, fearing he’d seen the police lights and would hurt us.

He turned back to face me. “Your father stole the business from me. He stole everything from me.”

“What?” I whispered incredulously, unable to mask the disbelief in my voice.

“I see you don’t believe me,” he said, a wolfish smile slowly growing on his face as he looked straight ahead. “And Special Agent Lucas has decided to join the party. Did you have a good sleep,
Barrett
?”

“Huh?” Barrett replied with a slurred voice, and my heart squeezed tight. Without thinking, I rushed to his side, swiping away the hair stuck to his forehead and frantically checked him over with my hands and eyes for any visible injuries.

“You okay?” I whispered, cupping his jaw in my hands. His eyes grew wide and he struggled against his bonds, shaking his arms and hands, trying to move them. “Don’t. We just need to buy ourselves some time,” I murmured against his lips, leaning in for a kiss as understanding registered in his eyes.

“Get away from him. I don’t trust him not to try anything,” Gavin shouted.

“Okay,” I said, as I stepped back and mouthed
I love you
to Barrett.

Keep him talking
Barrett mouthed back. I nodded and turned around to face Gavin. 

“You knew my father?”

“We were at college together. I had an idea for a small business, something to earn us some money while we studied. We started a community newsletter—just small at first—and ran it out of my dorm room. When it started to take off, your father cut me out of it. All of it. Then he had the audacity to ask your mother out on a date,
knowing
I had been wanting to date her ever since our freshman year.”

“You knew Mom at college?” I asked stupidly, not thinking.

“I just said that, didn’t I?” he angrily retorted. “She didn’t know me, though. Or if she did, she didn’t remember me when I introduced myself to her at a function last year.”

“You targeted her, didn’t you? What was the wedding then? A ruse?”

“I’ve wanted Rosalie for a long time, Alyssa. She just happened to be the means to an end in this regard. By becoming my wife, her assets became mine. It meant I could take the company from you.”

“All of this is for the company?” I continued, focusing on keeping his attention on me and not on Barrett or whatever might’ve been happening outside the house. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed since I’d run through the police cordon, but I knew it must’ve been long enough for Marlee and the S.W.A.T. team to arrive. I just hoped they were getting ready to do something.

“It was to take back what should’ve been rightfully mine,” Gavin said, his voice low and deadly serious. “My company . . .” He took a step toward me and his right hand straightened, lifting up and directing the barrel of the gun directly at my forehead. “The woman who should’ve been my wife from the start . . .” My breathing stuttered. I’d never been face to face with a gun—or a man hell-bent on revenge—before, and I had no idea how to act. “And then I find out I’m being investigated by the FBI and this guy . . .” he said, tilting the gun to my side where I knew Barrett sat behind me, “. . . is actually an undercover agent sent in to bring me down.”

I was paralyzed by fear and opened my mouth to plead with him to rethink everything, but no words would come out. “It was actually your little fuck buddy who told me. Quite an enlightening conversation we had. That man has a lot of anger toward your fuck-toy here,” Gavin continued, narrowing his gaze and glaring at Barrett.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” Barrett ground out behind me as it sunk in that Aiden blew Barrett’s cover, out of spite? Jealousy?

Time stood still as silence filled the room.

They said your senses could be heightened in extreme circumstances. You took more in, and everything you heard and felt was magnified by a thousand. In that moment, faced with my own mortality and the knowledge that one squeeze of Gavin’s finger could send a bullet careening through my body, I could hear even the faintest of sounds around me.

I heard the faint ticking of what I guessed to be my mother’s grandfather clock she’d had since I was a child and a soft drop from a leaking tap, possibly in the kitchen, which was two rooms away from where we were being held. I heard quiet footsteps to the side of the house, and I hoped that meant help was coming.

Before I could notice anything else, there was a loud click of the front door and Gavin quickly rushed me, wrapping an arm around my throat and digging the muzzle of the gun hard into my temple. Using my body as a shield in front of him, he faced the doorway and tensed when Aiden walked through the door with his hands in the air, a dark blue vest with S.W.A.T across the front covering his chest.

“I’m Detective Aiden Lawrence. I rang you this morning,” he said to Gavin. “I thought you’d prefer to talk to me than the hostage negotiator that LVPD has outside.”