Page 41 of His Master

We had to wait for the elevator to come, but by another twist of luck, it was empty when it arrived.

“I don’t know what we’ll find in the lobby,” I told Simon. “And I hate to admit it, but I don’t know how deep the shit we’re in is.”

“It seems pretty deep,” Simon said breathlessly as the elevator took us down.

“Yeah.”

That was all I could manage as the swoop of the elevator reflected the sinking feeling in my gut. My hope was that we’d seen the trap Uncle Vincent had set early enough to get away before things got too bad, but there wasn’t any way to tell for certain.

I held my breath as we reached the ground floor and as the elevator doors slid open, and I braced myself for a fight. We stepped out of the elevator immediately and right into a few people who were bored at best and confused at worst.

I almost breathed a sigh of relief. We’d made it down before any of my uncle’s security guards could seal the building. Ihoped that meant there weren’t enough of them to put the entire building on lockdown in order to catch me.

“Mr. Woodbury!”

I turned and stood a bit straighter as Janet, the valet, approached us from the door to the parking garage. Simon and I were already headed that way, so I just picked up my pace to meet her.

“Your keys,” she said, thrusting them into my hand. “They’ve got the entrance to the garage blocked, but I parked your car on the street, like I said.”

“Thank you,” I said, accepting the keys, then immediately heading for the opposite entrance.

I wanted to say more, and I would definitely reward Janet as soon as I had a chance. How she knew in advance what was going on was a mystery I would solve later.

It turned out that Janet’s forward thinking might just have saved my and Simon’s bacon. My SUV was parked half a block down from the building’s main entrance. Simon and I were able to reach it, get inside, and pull away before a pair of my uncle’s guards rushed out of the entrance we’d just left from.

“That was close,” Simon panted, glancing back over his shoulder at the building as I drove away as fast as I could.

“I just wish I knew what it was a narrow escape from,” I said, driving as fast as I dared on city streets in the middle of the day.

Simon shifted to face forward again. “Would your uncle try to physically hurt you or worse?” he asked.

I didn’t want to answer that question out loud. I didn’t want to worry Simon.

But my omega deserved the truth.

“He might,” I said, gripping the steering wheel tighter. “I hope he wouldn’t, but I can’t say that for certain unless I know what his ultimate aim is.”

“I don’t want to worry you,” Simon said, his cautious concern endearing, “but didn’t you say that if one of the three of you who own Victory Holdings were removed from your position within the company, it would cause a cascade effect that would break the company up…unless one of you died?”

I smiled, but there was no humor or happiness in it. “I wasn’t going to mention that, but yeah.”

Simon blew out a heavy breath. “He’s your uncle, your family,” he said.

“He loves power,” I replied. “And I guess there’s the whole thing of him being disappointed in me for wanting to go in a different direction with the company.”

“But to actually try to hurt you?” Simon asked quietly, shaking his head slightly.

I wished I could shield Simon from the kind of people I’d surrounded myself with in my life so far. I wished I’d never been the kind of alpha who actually considered Eddie a friend and who enjoyed himself while treating omegas so horrifically. There were so many things I regretted in my life, and it felt like they were all catching up to me now.

I drove us straight to my Barrington home. Like in Norfolk, I owned the entire beachfront condo where I had my penthouse apartment. The risk of my uncle going after me there existed, but I trusted my building manager and the staff he’d hired to be loyal to me and no one else.

Sure enough, we didn’t run into any trouble when I parked in my usual spot in the garage, then took Simon through the building’s lobby and up to my apartment. Everything felt normal and calm, just an ordinary Tuesday in the ritzy section of Barrington’s beachfront. My apartment was untouched, exactly the way I’d left it when I’d headed out to Norwalk on Friday. The cleaning crew had come, but that was it.

“Is this where you live most of the time?” Simon asked, looking around the apartment as I shut and locked the door behind us, tossing the keys on a small table under a row of hooks where I had some antique hats on display.

“Most of the time, yes,” I said. “Although I only moved into this place a year ago, after I decided to turn over a new leaf. I like being near the ocean. It soothes me.”

“Me too,” Simon said with a smile for me over his shoulder as he walked toward the French doors that led out to a balcony overlooking the beach and the ocean beyond.

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