Under His Domain (3 page)

“It ends when people stop being oblivious
to the consequences of their own actions.”

“I know I added to the suffering when I
thoughtlessly told my friend Blake about everything,” Kennedy told Nicole.
 
“I thought I could trust him, but I
hardly knew him.
 
And he turned
around and gave my life away to the papers to suit his own agenda.”

“And what was his agenda?”

“He wanted to make Easton hate me.”

Nicole’s eyes narrowed.
 
“This friend of yours gave your story to
the tabloids to make Easton hate you?
 
I’m afraid I don’t understand.
 
Easton had nothing to do with any of it.”

Kennedy sighed.
 
“This…friend…he had feelings for me, and
I told him that I had some feelings for Easton.
 
My friend didn’t approve of my
relationship with Easton, and I think he believed that by hurting my
credibility with Easton and the agency, it might somehow allow me to see the
truth or at least his version of it…I don’t know.
 
He thought he was protecting me in some
bizarre way.”

“That’s very odd,” Nicole said, shaking
her head.
 

“As it turns out, my taste in friends is
almost as misguided as my taste in men,” Kennedy said, but then she realized
what she’d said and felt bad.
 
Easton might be in real trouble because of her, and here she was being
cynical.

“You know that Red and I were not in
favor of Easton pursuing a relationship with you.
 
Even though we found each other through work,
it didn’t seem like a very good idea to encourage such a thing.”

“I know.
 
It’s just another way I’ve failed you,”
Kennedy said.

“But clearly there’s something between
you two,” Nicole told her.
 
“I can
admit that.
 
We were wrong to try
and keep you two apart.”

“Well, now it seems we’re going to be
kept apart anyway,” Kennedy said.
 
And she felt the tears coming back.
 

If something had happened to him, she
didn’t know if she could even live with
herself
.

Soon, she was crying again and Nicole had
slid her chair around and was hugging her tightly, telling her it was all going
to be all right.

In the middle of her crying jag, the men
came back downstairs together.
 
They
seemed to be arguing about something.

“I won’t do it,” Kane was saying, as they
descended the stairs, Red ahead of him.

Red stepped off the stairs and turned
around to face the older man.
 
“You
will do it,” he replied.

Kane stopped and glared at Red, Kane’s
cheeks turning crimson.
 
“I don’t
recall ever being employed by you.
 
As I remember it, I’m the one who took over your company.
 
So if anyone’s going to give orders
around here, it’s not going to be you.”

Red continued to meet his gaze.
 
“It’s not an order, it’s just the right
thing to do and you know it.”

“I don’t know any such thing.”

“We need to do the exchange.
 
It’s the only way.”

“That’s not how I see it,” Kane replied.

Kennedy was baffled.
 
“Exchange?” she said, but nobody paid
her any attention.

Red shook his head and grinned
angrily.
 
“I should’ve known you’d
pull this crap.
 
You’re goddamn
ego…”

“My ego?” Kane guffawed, coming the rest
of the way down the stairs and brushing past Red.
 
Her turned his attention to Nicole.
 
“You really need to talk some sense to him,”
Kane implored her.

“What’s going on?” Nicole said, standing
up.

“What’s going on,” Red said, “is we were
able to make contact with the people holding Easton.
 
And they want something from us,
something we have the power to give them.
 
And now our reliable old buddy over here doesn’t want to give it to
them.”

Kane spun on him.
 
“Because we all agreed that we wouldn’t
ever release that particular…package…into the world ever again.
 
It’s on ice, forever.
 
And that’s how it’s going to stay.”

“I’m confused right now,” Kennedy
said.
 
“Is Easton all right?
 
Is he hurt?”

Red glanced at her, irritated.
 
“He’s alive.”

Having heard that, Kennedy felt her
entire body go limp, relaxing,
a
gigantic weight being
lifted from her shoulders.
 
He was
still alive, that was all that mattered.

Nicole walked over to Red and put her
hands on his hands and looked into his eyes.
 
“What’s the package they want?”

Red’s expression was one of intense
discomfort.
 
“You remember that very
unfortunate person who crashed the party at our home a while back?
 
The one that we sent away on a permanent
vacation?”

Nicole’s face suddenly drained of
color.
 
“Oh my God,” she gasped,
backing away from him.

Kennedy had no idea what they were
talking about.
 
It was upsetting
enough to know that Easton was being held, but now nobody was explaining
anything to her.
 
She only knew they
weren’t doing anything to get Easton back.

“Can you all please tell me what this
means?” Kennedy said, her voice breaking under the strain.
 
“I deserve to be included.
 
Easton’s in this position because of
information I told him.
 
If anything
happens to him, then I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life.”

The three of them stared at her.
 
At first, she thought no one was going
to respond.
 
But finally, Red spoke.

“There was a man who tried to hurt us in
the past.
 
A very
dangerous man.
 
We were
forced to take matters into our own hands.”
 
Red glanced at Nicole.

“Some associates of Kane’s helped to deal
with the situation,” Nicole continued, choosing her words carefully.

Kennedy suddenly understood what they
were telling her.
 
She felt her eyes
grow wider.
 
“Jimmy DeLuca wants to
do a prisoner exchange,” she whispered.
 
“Is that it?”

Kane smiled a little.
 
“She’s very smart, isn’t she?”

Red raised his eyebrows.
 
“Some might say too smart for her own
good, even.”

“Certainly she’s got a lot more going on
upstairs than you do, Jameson.”
 
Kane shot him another frustrated look.

“We’re doing the exchange,” Red told
him.
 
“I’m not letting Easton pay
the price for someone else’s mistakes.”

“If we do this transfer, then we’ll pay
the price.
 
Do you really want this
man to be set free?” Kane said.
 
“Do
you remember what he did to us last time?
 
And now he’ll have plenty of new reasons to extract revenge after where
he’s been since we sent him away.”

Red fell into an uneasy silence, and both
he and Nicole seemed deeply uncomfortable and…afraid.

Kennedy realized that they were
terrified, and it wasn’t because of what had happened to Easton.

It had something to do with the
mysterious prisoner that they had been holding onto because of the danger he
posed to them.
 
It was shocking to
her that Nicole and Red harbored such a secret, but then again, she shouldn’t
have been surprised.

People harbored all sorts of skeletons in
their closets—she knew that better than
most
.

“Well, now Kennedy has yet another story
for her friends at TMZ,” Red said, his voice filled with biting sarcasm.

“She’s not going to tell anybody,” Nicole
said.
 

“She’s told everything and everyone about
all her other so-called secrets,” Red replied.
 
“Do you really want her knowing anything
else she can use against us?”

“I believe that she made a mistake,
telling her friend some things that he went out and spread around,” Nicole
said.
 
“I believe my sister.”

Red fell silent once more and Nicole was
profoundly moved at her sister’s display of fierce loyalty.

“The point is,”
Kane
said, “we cannot do this.
 
We cannot
allow Trevor to be set free.
 
He
wouldn’t stop until he’d hurt or killed or tortured some or all of us.
 
The man is completely insane and
unredeemable.”

Red began pacing the floor.
 
“If we make DeLuca and his crew promise
to keep Trevor in line—“

Kane barked laughter at this
suggestion.
 
“You’re going to cut a
deal with the mob and expect them to honor it?
 
Have you lost your mind?”

“He’s right,” Nicole said.
 

Kennedy turned and stared at her.
 
“You’re not going to do the
exchange?
 
You’re going to let
Easton stay in captivity?”

“I don’t think this is the way to get him
back,” Nicole said softly.
 
“The man
they want to use as an exchange is someone who would be a threat to all of
us—including Riley.”

Her words pierced Kennedy’s soul.
 
She felt suddenly empty, deflated.

I
thought you said that they’d make everything right
, Kennedy thought with some
bitterness.
 
You said Kane and Red would know what to do.
 
But you lied.
 
You don’t really care about Easton.

“We’ll come up with something else,” Red
announced, trying to sound convincing, but his
eyes
told a different story.

Kane tried to agree with him.
 
“Yes, there’s always more money.
 
Money can get this done, we just need to
make them see that we’re willing and able to accommodate them.”

“Did you offer money already?” Kennedy
asked, knowing the answer before they even responded.

Kane’s gaze went down.
 
“They were blustering…it’s…it’s a
negotiation.”

Red glanced at Nicole and shook his
head.
 
“We offered them a lot and
they showed no interest.
 
They want
Trevor or nothing.”

The room grew quiet again.

“There will be repercussions,” Kane
said.
 
“We’ll hunt them down like
dogs if they hurt your man.”

Red nodded, but he was clearly
crestfallen.
 
“I wish there was more
we could do.”

Kennedy was hollow and broken.
 
They were going to give up on
Easton.
 
They were truly going to
give up on him, and she knew there was nothing she could do to convince them
otherwise.

There was no way they would put Easton’s
life and safety above that of their family, their child.

She pictured Easton’s eyes, the way he
looked when he smiled, the way he felt against her.

She could feel him, and she could feel
him being stolen from her.

Her heart broke and she thought she would
never be the same.
 
She would go
back to Boston, back to MIT, and she would lead a quiet life of math and
numbers and forget about the painful world of real human beings.

She would never get over the loss of
Easton.
 
Never.

Nicole came over and put a hand on her
shoulder.
 
“We’re going to keep
trying, and I promise you we’ll find a way…”

Suddenly Kennedy had a thought.
 
She looked at Kane Wright, knowing he
was the cold-hearted one, the man who would understand her way of looking at
this.

“Maybe,” Kennedy said, “you can do the
exchange without truly giving them what they want.”

Kane Wright met her eyes, and she saw
that his cold and calculating gaze was now interested in what she had to
say.
 
“Go on,” he replied softly.

“Maybe you just send this
package—this prisoner you’re holding—back to them, but you don’t
send him back whole.”

Red shook his head.
 
“We can’t do an exchange by handing them
a corpse if that’s what you’re suggesting.
 
We agreed never to do that—never to kill Trevor.
 
He’s to be kept alive but out of the
picture, for good.”