Sin & Salvation

Chapter 14

Glancing around, I see Payton watch Emma sit back down as she smiles and glances in our direction. Payton smiles back and then roughly drags me by the arm to a conference room down the hall.

"Ouch Payton, what the hell?"

Everyone is staring at us as we go in and I do my best to avoid eye contact. She shuts the door making sure no one is around, then pushes me down in a chair sitting across from her. This must be the room she was setting up for the meeting because there's piles of papers and notebooks set up.

"I'm sorry, but Silas Bennett is not someone you want to be seen alone with, Cora. Especially when you're with someone who is as jealous and protective as Brett."

"Payton, you're freaking me out, what the fuck are you talking about? We just had him over for dinner the other night and he was fine with me." Kind of a lie but he wasn't exactly that dangerous so I'm not going to worry her.

"Silas worked for another company near here a few years ago. Him and the CEO, James were very close— apparently buddies from college. James had a wife named Gia and they were like the definition of perfection. High school sweethearts, both from money, really good upbringing, the whole nine yards."

It sounds just like Brett and I except we met in college. I'm imagining the ways this story could end poorly and all of them worry me.

"Just a few months after they got married, James starts noticing Silas and Gia growing closer and talking more privately with each other at get-togethers. They would even sneak off during parties or dinners, but James just cracked it up to be that they were good friends and happened to have a lot in common. I mean, Silas was his closest friend, the best man at his wedding for god's sake."

The memory of Silas and I walking off together during dinner the other night flashes through my mind and nausea roils in my gut. "Right, okay... so what? They spent time together, what's the big deal?"

"The big deal was that one night Gia just decided to up and leave. Took a bag with a bunch of her shit in it and left James a note telling him not to worry, that she'd be home in a few days. James gets home after work to find her note and her stuff gone. He of course is freaking out thinking she was possibly abducted, or worse, because it wasn't like her to just up and leave like that. Well, thankfully, he had GPS tracking on her phone and thought to check it before calling the police. But, guess where he finds her Cora."

An uneasy feeling goes through me and I can sense where this is going. "Don't tell me—"

"Yep, at his best friend Silas'. James rushes over there demanding to see her. Silas insisted she wasn't there but James pushed past him and found her locked up in the spare bedroom. When he got in there, he found that she had brought a lot more than just the clothes— she had wads of cash, a plane ticket, a burner phone, and a fake passport. She wasn't just going to see Silas— she was trying to run away with him."

My mouth drops open in complete shock. Silas was going to run away with his best friend's wife? But that's not the part of the story that gets to me— it's the part about her being locked up in a room.

Was he forcing her to do this? Why else would he have locked her in?

"James immediately starts putting the pieces together: that she had been cheating on him for months with Silas and they were going to run away together to start a new life. Unfortunately for her, she failed to shut her cell phone off before getting there and it blew their little plan up in both their faces."

Holy shit. No wonder Payton was freaking out. She probably thought he was going to try and seduce me or kidnap me just like he did with Gia. Except, he has been trying to seduce me since the moment I met him and the thought starts to make me feel sick. Every time I've been around him, he's managed to get my guard down and I melt right into the palms of his beautiful, strong hands.