Page 19 of Sweetest Revenge

Back then, she had been pliant, just like her father raised her to be. A good little girl who would listen to her father and later her husband.

Not anymore. Now, she held firm. Brattier than ever before. She wanted me to know that while I might own her for a month, she was going to make it hard on me.

While I wanted more than anything to make her beg, I knew it’d take a lot of work for that to happen. It should have annoyed me, but the prospect of a challenge excited me even more instead.

I’ve always enjoyed the chase anyway.

“Mercer’s daughter keeping you up?” Ares teased, coming through the door right after Maxwell. Of course he knew already. It was hard to hide something so newsworthy, especially from someone like Ares, who prided himself on knowing everything.

Nice of him to finally show up.

His presence was hard to miss. But his annoyingly playful attitude wasn’t.

I accepted the coffee from Maxwell and took a sip. I leaned back in my chair to enjoy a moment of peace before?—

“It’s leaked that you bought her,” Ares said, his tone getting on my nerves. “The Rogue Enquirer published this.”

Ares handed me an iPad, and on it was a headline in big, bold letters.

“ALEC MERCER’S DAUGHTER PURCHASED BY ENEMY IN SEX AUCTION.”

I let out an annoyed huff.

“Get Tristian on it and?—”

“Get it taken down and sue the publication?” Ares finished. “Already done. You should have learned to trust me by now.”

I let out a grateful hum as I took another sip of the coffee. Ares was a nepo baby to his core, and if I was being honest, I had no idea what he did with his money. I thought it went into stocks and other investments, but I didn’t want to open up the conversation floodgates more than they already were by asking.

He was interested in the auction and approached me after I’d been a consultant on his father’s company. It was then that I realized his talents were being underutilized. Ares was carefully risk-prone with a smidge of unhinged that didn’t belong in a regular company. He needed more. And I could give him that. Now I paid him a salary, and he helped clean up some of the uglier messes.

If there was one thing I knew too well, it was that rumors had the power to destroy even the strongest company, and he, along with the other people I hired, would put out the fires before they started.

“Let’s remember to send Tristian a nice bonus this year,” I said to Maxwell, who nodded. Tristan was our lawyer and saving grace. Money could do a lot of things, and whatever it couldn’t, a nice trip to the courthouse would.

“So…” Ares trailed and attempted to take a seat on the edge of my desk before I glared at him, forcing him to quickly correct his course to remain standing. “Addison Mercer?”

I nodded. “Blame Maxwell and Dante. They apparently thought it would be funny to invite her to the auction.”

“One, she came to us,” Maxwell replied and lifted a finger up to stop Ares from commenting something that would probably have made me angry. “Second, not funny. But we knew you’d buy her. Maybe this was me and Dante giving you an early Christmas present.”

I scoffed and shook my head. Addi’s file was on my desk, open, and displaying the picture she’d submitted. It was a poor-quality cell phone camera shot, but her face was unmistakable.

I tried not to look into her current situation any more than I had in the past few years. After last night, though, curiosity was eating me up, and I was finally down to satiate the curious beast inside me.

“I need information,” I said. “Her mother’s in the hospital. Get me everything on the current situation. Why does her house have a lien on it? I want her work schedule and names and details of every single worker there. The names of her mother’s nurses and doctors while you’re at it. Everything. “

Ares nodded. “You got it, boss.”

I had already found out a few easy things.

I knew where she lived, in the last Mercer property—the one that currently had a lien on it. Her main place of work seemed to be a bakery around the corner from her house. She also worked as a dishwasher at a steakhouse.

Something a girl like her never would have had to do if her father was still alive. It must have been hard for her to cope. I couldn’t imagine the girl I knew back then getting her hands dirty, even in a situation like this.

I opened my mouth to give yet another command, but the devil herself was slowly opening the door to my office. She froze when she saw me and tried to back out, but both Maxwell and Ares turned to look at her.

“Oh? Someone’s here to see you, boss.”

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