Page 84 of Traitorous Lies
November 14th
6:58 A.M.
When two men with guns ran into the study, Jax lost it.
One of the men must have hit Cassandra because the view from her camera was suddenly coming from the floor.
Monique’s camera remained steady, which meant she was still on her feet, but he’d seen the other man approach her and didn't have to have a vivid imagination to know that she currently had a gun held on her.
“We have to get in there,” he ground out, already heading toward the house.
“We can't, not yet,” Cade said in that infuriatingly calm tone that his oldest stepbrother seemed to be a master at.
How could Cade be so calm?
How could any of them?
Even if they didn't care about Monique—and he knew that they did—their sister wasin there.
“We have to,” he snapped, a thread of panic obvious in his voice. “He’s going to kill them.”
“Not yet,” Cade said, voice still even like this was no big deal.
“He can't kill them here,” Cooper said.
“Not if he doesn’t want to get caught,” Connor added.
“He has to be smart enough to know that even if we let Cassandra and Monique come here alone, we wouldn't let them go without knowing where it was they were going. If they turn up dead, we’re going to be going after him publicly, and he can't risk that. He is going to kill them, but he’s not going to shoot them dead in his study at a property owned by his family, because forensics would prove where they died,” Cole elaborated.
“Look, listen,” Jake said, indicating the tablet he was clutching in his hands.
“What are you doing, Dad?” Monique’s strained voice came through the comms. “Men with guns? Really? One of them just knocked Cassandra unconscious. What do you think you're doing? Are you really going to stand there and watch your own daughters be murdered? Your own flesh and blood?”
“My daughter and her friend are going to tragically pass in a car accident right down the street. So sad, I was going to be visiting with my daughter after her ordeal in Paris,” Samson Kerr said, and from the look on the older man’s face, he would feel no remorse for ordering the death of his own children.
“They know, Dad. They know that you're Cassandra’s father. Do you really think they’ll believe that?” Monique asked. “They’re not stupid. DNA tests will prove Cassandra is your daughter, and this whole lie you’ve been living is going to come crashing down around you.”
“They don’t have any proof,” her father snapped.
“Oh yeah, we do,” Connor said, drawing Jax’s attention away from the tablet.
“It was there?” he asked, somewhat incredulously.
On the flight, they’d all discussed Monique’s mother, and what kind of proof she could have discovered that proved her husband was a rapist. They’d wondered if maybe she’d kept something hidden, or made copies of whatever she had, something that, if stumbled upon, would beenough to alert whoever had found it of her husband’s crimes. Monique had come up with a spot on the grounds of this property that she thought might have held enough significance for her mother to hide evidence there.
The spot from the photo.
The picnic in the woods with the balloons and bubbles that he’d recreated for her yesterday.
Monique couldn’t articulate why that photo had been one she’d clung to over the years, only that, for some reason, it had always been in her room, and she hadn't been able to get rid of it even though she was angry with her mother.
“A folder, inside a box, buried right where the picnic blanket would have been. There’s a letter to Monique in here as well, along with what looks like copies of a calendar, along with a key that explains all his codes. There are a few items of bloodstained clothes, and some other things as well,” Connor explained.
“So we have enough to destroy him?” Jax confirmed, because that was the only thing stopping him from running into that building and saving the woman he was madly in love with.
“I’d say that along with the footage from Cassandra and Monique’s cameras we have more than enough to bury him,” Cooper said.
Still, they all looked to Cade for the final say. With a young daughter to care for, the oldest of them might have asked Cooper to step in and lead Charlie Team, but they all knew that Cade was the head of their family.
