Page 38 of Vengeful Lies

Didn't want to find out that maybe he cared about her when he was gone, and she might never get him back. Didn't want his house or custody of his daughter. She wanted to share those things with him as a family, but she didn't want them because she’d lost Cade in the process.

“I just want him back.” She wept softly. “I want him to be home, to be safe, I hate that he’s in danger because of me, but it makes me love him so much more that he would willingly put his life on the line to save his daughter.”

“And you,” Becca added.

“Sign, honey,” Cooper told her. “Sign the papers and make official what Cade wanted. None of us are giving up on him. He has a plan, and we have a lead that they don’t know about. Don’t give up hope just yet.”

With a shaking hand she reached out and picked up the pen.

Her tears dotted the papers as she signed the documents, transferring the house’s title into her name and giving her custody of Cade’s daughter.

Come home, Cade. Please. We need you.

Chapter

Ten

September 6th

6:18 A.M.

“Wakey, wakey.”

The words had Cade lifting his head. He’d already been awake when the door to the basement was opened, but he hadn't bothered looking to see who was coming.

After delivering a fairly easy beating yesterday, they’d chained him back up and left, returning what he estimated to be a couple of hours later with some food. Since he wasn't just a prisoner but one they had reason to keep alive, they couldn’t just lock him up and leave him. They had to make sure they fed and watered to keep him in good enough shape to keep interrogating him until he told them what they wanted to know.

The thing was, he didn't really have a whole lot of valuable intel.

He knew there had been four men who raped his mother and that Tarek Mahmoud, a world-renowned Egyptologist, had been one of them. Other than that, he knew nothing even close to being able to name the men and bring them down.

But he intended to find out.

Holding out and enduring these beatings for long enough was his best bet at getting whoever had hired these men to come after his family to pay him a visit.

The only piece of intel he had was the link to the stationary company, and that might not pan out to be anything at all. Still, it was something and he knew Prey would look into it and find out if it was anything that would lead them to one of the three remaining men they were looking for.

Now, as he watched two men clamber down the stairs with an urgency he hadn't seen in them before he wondered what was going on. Were they planning on moving him somewhere else? Had something happened?

With him switching places with Essie and Gabriella, his brothers were going to pretend to be holding off on their search for answers for a while. They needed these men to believe his family was going to honor the deal they’d made even if they had no intention of doing so. Quietly looking into the stationary company, hopefully wouldn't raise any heads, and as long as they thought his family had backed off because they didn't want to endanger him the longer it would keep him alive.

“You wanted to meet our boss, well, you got lucky,” one of the men said as he reached down to unlock the chains binding him to the ground.

That perked him up.

Not what he’d been expecting to hear.

He’d only been their prisoner for less than forty-eight hours, he would have thought it would be days at least before the boss would make an appearance.

“He was in the area and wanted to find out for himself what you know. I suggest you decide to be more cooperative,” the other man told him like that suggestion was going to bear any weight.

Even if he had the names of the other three men involved in his mom’s rape and subsequent arrest for treason and fake suicide, nothing these men could do to him would make him cough up that intel.

Nothing.

He’d been trained to withstand torture, and while these men knew how to deliver pain, they knew nothing about the real art of inflicting the kind of agony needed to get a man to start talking.

Once he was unchained from the floor, his wrists still bound and his ankles still bound, he was shoved into a chair and secured to it.

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