Read Online Kane (BBW Billionaire Romance) by Christa Wick - Free Book Online Page B

intention of dignifying her question with a response.
    “Answer me or I’m leaving.”
    His lips drew inward. She could see that he gnawed at the inside for a few seconds, his gaze darting angrily around her face as he studied the minutia of her expression.
    “Just what is it that’s worth risking Christine’s safety?” he countered, his tone turning cold and calculating. “Your pride? Your integrity?”
    Her face crumbled at his question. He wouldn’t answer. And she realized she wouldn’t leave—at least not immediately.
    “I need to check on Christine,” she said, weakly gesturing at him to move aside. “And you need to pack a bag.”
    He let Daniella pass, her head filled with answers to his ruthless question. Staying meant she was losing her heart, her optimism, her faith. But he was right about one thing. None of her feelings, none of her hurt, was worth endangering the child who had been placed in her care.
    Christine was everything to her, and, somehow, Daniella would have to figure out how to live the next eighteen years without that dedication becoming a visible burden as it had been with the Marquardts.
    At least, she thought, coming to a stop in front of the crib, any sacrifice would be made out of love.
    Managing a faint smile, she stroked the baby’s cheek.
    Made out of love and repaid with love.

Chapter Nine
    B ag packed for show , Kane waited for Reed to arrive. When the elevator doors opened, he let his subordinate step off, then he stepped on, not a word exchanged between them.
    Everything the man needed to know, Kane had conveyed by text.
    When the elevator doors closed, he pressed the button for the lobby and held it until the security panel reset. Finished punching in a sixteen-digit code, he felt the cage begin its long descent.
    The upscale residential building nestled in Raleigh’s business district had been built the year after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Buried three levels below ground, the developer had put in a communal bunker. The attorneys, bankers, and dentists who once rented its office suites, had bought into the promise of safety at work, even if the Soviets launched their nukes.
    Then came Nixon and detente followed by Carter and an economic slump. The professionals moved out and the building remained empty until Clinton’s presidency, when it was turned into an oasis for yuppies working in Raleigh’s tech corridor.
    Now, the entire bunker level was his, it interior renovated with labyrinthine turns and dead ends.
    If the decor upstairs seemed severe, downstairs was a shadowy mausoleum lit mostly by the small power lights on the electronics that permeated the bunker.
    Entering the tactical area, he switched on a bank of monitors. The penthouse appeared across the many screens. Reed was in the kitchen with Dani, the two of them sitting on opposite sides of the island. Kane turned up the volume then walked over to the espresso machine.
    The conversation sounded like Dani was once again leaning toward striking out on her own. Reed was trying to talk her down. As Kane had discovered after the scene in his office, Dani’s elderly neighbor had been severely beaten after the arsonists spotted his outdoor security cameras. The old man had given up his outdoor feed to their brutal interrogation techniques, but the long-retired veteran hadn’t revealed his separate indoor security feed.
    When the cops showed up to ask about the cameras they had also spotted, they found him near death. He was in a coma now, but he had been conscious long enough to tell them about the second feed and how to access it.
    Tears streamed down Dani’s face as she listened to Reed fill her in on the details.
    “We’ve identified the men,” he told her. “They have rap sheets thicker than a bible. Sex and drug trafficking, extortion, battery, kidnapping—”
    A sharp gasp from Dani cut Reed off before he could add the final polish to the men’s list of misdeeds.
    Murder.
    Not once or twice but