A Commitment to Love, Book 3 (51 page)

Boom.

In that moment, I realized someone else stood in that closet right next to me.

I’m not alone.

“Hello, Jasmine.” Benny slammed into me and knocked the gun out of my hand. It fell to the floor.

“Congratulations on your engagement.” He held me against the closet’s wall.

C
HAPTER
31

Jasmine

I
punched at Benny and then tried to bite his hand as it came close to my mouth.

“Really? This is how you treat your father?”

“Get the fuck off of me.” I shoved away from him and fell back into the other side of the closet.

“Try and leave and I’ll hit you.”

I froze, but kept my eyes on him.

A line of dim red light sliced against his face, showing me only one of his eyes and part of his nose. The rest of him remained in darkness like me.

“We need to talk.” He didn’t smile.

I took that as a good sign. “Why?”

Keep him talking. Find the gun.

“I don’t understand everything that’s going on.”

“Maybe you’re going crazy.” I slowly slipped my foot around the floor to figure out where the gun had fell.

“We both know I’m far past that.”

The toe of my shoe tapped the end of a hard object. I hoped it was the gun. “Maybe you should kill yourself.”

“I should murder you for saying that.”

“You took Troy away from me. You think I see you as anyone I could love?”

“What’s going on, Jasmine?”

“Are you joking?”

“Not what I’ve caused. Where’s your mother?”

I quirked my eyebrows. “At home.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t know for sure.”

He muttered something under his breath.

“What?”

“She’s doing something.” He kept rubbing his hands together and never remaining still. Booms continued in the front of the club, but still the men had not gotten through.

Hurry, guys. Before he kills me. Keep him talking. I got to keep him talking.

“How did you know I would be here today?” I asked.

“Your mother told me.”

I should’ve been shocked, but it seemed that nothing could hit me hard anymore. “How the fuck did she know I would be here? Not many people knew.”

“Sherman told her. He said he overheard Vivian and you talking about doing something with a strip club to surprise Chase.”

“What?”

“He walked in on you both in the hotel in London, smoking and talking about surprising Chase with a dance, and that it would be in Miami. It was an off chance that you would actually do it, but I headed straight to Miami and put guys in all of the strip clubs in the city. Days later the call came from Vivian to the Doll House.”

“Now, you and Mom are working together?”

“I don’t know. She gave me all the information to find Chase and you.”

I swallowed all the hope I’d had left. “And now what?”

“I don’t know.” In a sudden moment he hit the top of his head over and over. “Why? Why?”

I edged away from him. “Why what?”

“Why did she tell me?”

Bang.

The men continued to knock at the door outside, and Benny kept hitting his own head.

Bang.

“Ms. Montgomery!” the guards yelled. “If you’re by the door, stand back.”

Shots boomed next.

I should’ve had my mind on escaping, but it left and went to Benny’s statements. Mom told Benny where I would be, with the understanding that he might kill me just like he’d did it to Troy. I looked up at him. “What did Mom say when she talked to you?”

“What?” Benny stopped hitting himself.

“What else did she say? How did the call go?”

“She answered. I told her that I wanted to know where she was. She said that it wasn’t my business. I told her that she didn’t want me to have to spend energy searching for her because if I did, I wouldn’t be nice. Then she sounded real scared for a few seconds. Told me she loved me. Said all these things about us.”

Vomit threatened to come out of my mouth. These were my parents—two sociopaths plotting together and it all made me sick.

“She told me that she would help me kill Chase,” Benny said. “She was mad that he was treating her like a second class citizen.”

“That’s what she said?” I asked.

“Those exact words. And then she gave me the information.”

More shooting sounded far off in the club, but it seemed they still hadn’t opened the door.

“Don’t worry about Chase’s men getting in here,” Benny said. “I bought this club up and had the doors reinforced with ones similar to what you would see in the Pentagon. We have time to talk.”

I’ll have to save myself. I’ll have to kill him. I can do it. I can ….

I gulped in fear. “But you’re wondering why Mom has been so cooperative, when recently she’d been working with Chase out of nowhere?”

“Yes.”

Talk to him. I can talk my way out of it.

The closet closed in on me even more as I stood next to him and tried my best to talk my way out of dying in his hands. He scared the shit out of me, and he’d earned my fear. But, I had to get out of here alive. I would walk out. Benny would leave in a body bag.

“She put Chase and me together,” I said. “Did you know that? She got the garden party invitation from your apartment and brought it up to Vivian. We’re together because of her. How long do you think she has been plotting Chase and me? How far do you think her planning has gone back? I bet she wanted us in the closet right now.”

“She’s a fucking spider and her web goes on and on.” He leaned away from me.

“Let’s leave the closet.”

“No.” He began rubbing those hands over and over again. “What else has she done? What else do you know?”

“You already know that she led Chase to the penthouse and to us in London. And Chase told me about your suspicions on her getting that … pedophile in the house.”

“So what does she want right now?”

I inched away. “You dead.”

He stayed quiet for a minute, and silence filled the whole club. No chatter came from the women. Security had probably given up on the doors. Nothing boomed or banged.

Finally, Benny whispered, “It’s more than that.”

“What is?”

“Killing me is something that Sophia has wanted for a long time, but she would only go that route if she possessed a clear line of power at her hands. The only reason why I’ve been alive for this long is because I can keep her safe.”

Keep him talking. Get the gun off of the floor. Shoot him.

It was still unusual to hear about Mom in this way. “So if you’re dead, then she doesn’t have a big power person to protect her, when she’s doing whatever?”

“Yes.”

“But then found an opportunity for her daughter to mess with the Stone family,” I said. “It was a long shot, but I’ve skimmed some of your journals and it sounds like that not only is she good at hiding who she is, she enjoys playing around in people’s life. She thinks she’s a puppet master.”

Benny’s voice came out in a dead tone. “Chase could give her power. She’d been muscling him since you both first broke up. I found it funny at first, then something about her doing it started to make me uneasy. She stopped asking me for help. Had the large sums of money to get the people she needed to do the things I wouldn’t.”

“Muscling him?”

Benny ignored my question. “Then Chase’s girlfriends came after you.” He clapped hard and I jumped. “Those goddamn dirty girls of his tried to shoot you, and I think that was when things got messy.”

“Maybe we should go out of the closet.”

“That made me go crazy.”

“I feel like you were already a bit—”

“All I could think about is snapping each and every one of those sluts’ necks. You shoot my daughter? Die!”

With my foot, I slid the hard object closer to me and prayed with that it was a gun.

He bobbed his head. “Sophia started plotting then.”

“How?”

“I had blood lust and she would come over and we would make love all night in my—”

“Oh God.” I scrunched my face in disgust.

“She whispered things in my ear, after we made love. Told me that Chase should die. He was in the way. ‘He’s making you look like a fool,’ she would say and then kiss me for a long time. ‘We have to get rid of him.’”

I paused from messing with the object. “She told you to kill Chase?”

“Yes. This started with her.” He hit himself. “And then she turned around and took a large part of my savings and hooked up with the boy wonder. Why?”

“I … I don’t—”

“If I die, then I’m out of her hair. Fine. Chase dies, then what does she get? You’re not his wife. Nothing would go to you.”

And then it dawned on me. “She didn’t consider the fact that Chase would die.”

“She thought he would win?”

“No,” I said with sadness. “It didn’t matter to her. If you went up against him and died, then she’s closer to Chase and getting more power. If you end up killing Chase, then you’re still in her grips and the only one that’s lost is me. And as we know, she couldn’t care less about ruining me.”

“She has no heart.”

“Or soul.”

“You have to get Mom out of your ear.” I moved the gun closer to the wall. “Do the opposite. She wants you to kill Chase. Don’t. She wants you to terrorize us. Stop. You got us to London from all for her plotting, and what happened? Troy is dead. Vivian will never forgive you. I’m terrified of you. So many innocent people have died, and for what? Mom?”

Silence sank into that closet.

Sweat trickled from the side of my face.

I strained to listen for what was going on outside.

Nothing came.

What happened to the girls? Where did the security people go? What’s going on out there?

Then Benny cut through the quiet. “I should kill her.”

And like my mother’s child, I lifted my head and whispered, “You should, Daddy.”

His lips parted when I said the last word.

“You called me Daddy.”

And I forced down the bile in my throat, and nodded. “I called you Daddy because that’s who you are.”

“How should I do it, Jasmine?” He displayed a sad smile. “How should I kill Sophia?”

Being careful, I took my time with each word. “Let’s work together.”

“You would help me?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I’m different than I used to be,” I said.

His gaze saddened. “Death does that to you.”

“Yes, it does.”

“I never meant to hurt Troy.”

A heart-wrenching ache cut through me.

“I never meant to. I never meant to.” He blinked and tears fell from his eyes. “Never. Never. Do you hear me?”

My eyes watered. I was slowly losing it. All that careful soothing to Benny had come undone in my chest as he spoke about my brother. I no longer had the patience. Rage boiled in my veins.

“Never,” he said. “When I pulled the trigger, I died. Every part of me. I wanted to rush to that bullet. And he wouldn’t move. Did he know? Did he want it? He didn’t move. Did he have time? I ruined it all. Never. Never.”

“Shut up!” I screamed and fisted my hands. “Get me out of here. I can’t. I need air. Open the door.”

“Okay. Okay.” Benny patted the air, touched the knob, and turned it. “And then we can plan.”

“Yes,” I growled.

Benny got in front of me.

The door opened.

Scar stood in front with a gun pointed at Benny’s chest. My dad’s friend with the huge gash who’d been in our lives forever. The man that walked with a shadow hovering over him. He never had anything much to say to us, always lingering in the background with dead eyes and no smile on his face.