Page 119 of My Rose

Shit.

Oh well. He was done soon, anyway. “Us—as in you, me, and Beck. You didn’t think it was just you that she left, did you?”

The jealousy I also inherited burned in his eyes. “She didn’t give a damn about either of you. She was ready to throw it all away and look, she ended up walking out without you. She never cared about you or Beck.”

“And you did?”

His nostrils flared. “I did what needed to be done. You were soft. Too soft to run my fucking company. Your brother was the stronger of you both, and you know it.”

“Yes, in an ideal world, I’d be the one buried six feet under, and you’d have the twisted protégé you always wanted.”

He laughed. “Yes. But that seems to have changed. Turns out, all you needed was a broken heart.” He topped off his drink, and I watched with bated breath as his fingers trembled around the glass. “Which reminds me—was she still a virgin?”

He wiped his lip with his thumb, unable to hide another set of tremors. I smiled, but not from his question. “Yes. Although you tried to ruin that, didn’t you? Ruin her?” I scoffed. “As if that would have deterred me from chasing after her.”

His hazy green eyes locked on mine. “I knew s-she was your o-obsession. Your j-journals and all the f-fucking tattoos. J-Jesus, Briggs. You w-were disgust…disgustingly i-in love. L-love do… doesn’t exist”

I nodded, glancing down the hallway behind him. He was too far gone to notice. “You’re right. About one of those things, at least. She was my obsession and still is.” I stood and moved to sit beside him as he leaned his head on the back of the couch. “And no, you can’t fucking have her.” I yanked him closer to me by his hair as my mother, and Dean stepped into view. I guided his drooping head, granting him the angle he needed to see them through his slitted eyes.

My father blinked slowly at his business partner, then rolled his eyes to my mother. “S-should’ve fuckin’ know…known it’d be y-you.”

“Save your breath while you’re still conscious,” Dean replied. “Victoria told us about what you did with the women atourclub. It’s me who should’ve done something before it got as far as it did.”

“F-feminist idiot,” my father got out before my mother walked up to him and slapped him across the face.

Dean slammed a packet of papers down on my father’s lap, then squeezed my father’s reddened cheeks together to get his vacant expression to meet Dean’s wary eyes. “Sign, Ben.” I believe confusion struck Ben, but he was too high to function properly. That’s whathappens when you take a drink without knowing what’s in it. What a damn shame. “Time to give it up.”

I took the pen from Dean and wrapped my father’s fingers around it, guiding his hand to the one line that would give me the company and leave my father with nothing. But that wasn’t enough for me.

The hoard of officers that came in a few minutes later while my father was fast asleep were the ones that would end it all. I proudly stripped my wire from beneath my shirt and handed it over while my mother leaned back against the outer wall of my home, watching her ex-husband get taken away.

All I’d needed was a confession, along with my mother’s witness accounts and documents she still had, of what he’d done with the women at VanLuxe—the now very closed gentlemen’s club that was never truly just that—and he was never going to see the light of day again. With VanAndrews now headed by me, Ben would have no money for a lawyer and no family or friends to support him on the outside. He’d have no hope of ever getting out.

Dean’s hand squeezed my shoulder as we watched the lights fade from view.

“The original plan—you were ready to do it, weren’t you?”

I mulled over his words. “He wouldn’t have stopped unless I did.” Our original plan would have potentially driven Rose from me, but it was a risk I was willing to take to save her.

“I would have pulled the trigger for you. If we hadn’t made a deal with them, I would have shot him the minute he entered your house.”

And that’s why I’d be loyal to him for the rest of my life. One of the many reasons

I jerked my chin toward the last car—the one driven by the blonde agent, Tracey, that Jim had tracked down. When I called the agent, I readily offered to provide her with whatever she needed before I even knew if my mother had anything concrete on him. It wasn't because of the faith I didn't have in my mother. No, it was my faith in my father's desire to hide whatever he'd been up to. He killed for it, lost his wife over it, and was losing his business partner and friend slowly by keeping the secret. Agent Tracey had been trying to take him down for years, attempting to gather any evidence she could. She thought we were using the house I signed over to Rose as a meeting place to sell women. The woman they’d been after—I’d been completely wrong about.

“Guess you were right—they were after Jasmine.”

Dean coughed into his fist, the thought probably just as vulgar in his mind as it was in mine. “Yeah. Suppose I was.”

“Did you know?”

His brows furrowed. “That Stan came for her?” His face twisted. “Fuck no. I just had the same thoughts as you—save my girl. You know, all that.”

Dean wouldn’t lie about that. He may have hidden his suspicions, but I believed him. “You’ve been watching for a tail for a while now, haven’t you?”

“Yep. Knew something was bad with that place for a long time, just didn’t know how to go about doing anything.” He drew in a deep breath, then exhaled, forming steam against the cold air.

“And you took Jasmine out before she could get wind,” I concluded.

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