Invincible (Elite Doms of Washington Book 6) Read online

  Invincible

  Elizabeth SaFleur

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright ©2019 by Elizabeth SaFleur. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Elizabeth SaFleur LLC

  PO Box 6395

  Charlottesville, VA 22906

  [email protected]

  www.ElizabethSaFleur.com

  Edited by Patricia A. Knight

  Cover design by Shanoff Designs

  ISBN: 978-1-949076-10-3

  Contents

  Prologue

  Untitled

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Epilogue

  Also by Elizabeth SaFleur

  About the Author

  Prologue

  June 8, 1981

  Alice Wynter took two steps forward and spat, “No.” Her eyes, a cold, muddy brown, blazed with fiery hatred directed entirely at him. The two guards who’d thrown him off the Wynter estate flanked either side of her, their faces as still and cold as the marble statues that stood in the gardens behind the closed iron gate.

  Alexander curled his fists around the bars. “I just want to see him. One last time. Then, I’ll go.” He wasn’t a man who begged, but for a chance to talk to Charles one last time he’d get on his knees and crawl over broken glass. Charles had hours, perhaps minutes, left to live.

  Her eyes narrowed slightly. “And allow you to corrupt my son further? Never.”

  He should have known she would not reconsider. The woman lacked any semblance of human compassion. He wondered if she felt any emotion at all. “I just want to say good-bye.” His forehead fell to one of the railings and his voice cracked, but at least he could say the words. His hands slipped on the rails, leaving a blood trail from palms that’d been scraped raw by the pavement when the guard threw him outside. The serrated skin burned, but he couldn’t give a fuck. “Please,” he said again.

  “I forbid it.”

  He lifted his head to receive more visual daggers from the woman who called herself Charles’ mother. Mother. What woman would do this to her son? “We don’t have much time. He’s dying.” For God’s sake, just a hundred feet behind her in his childhood bedroom, Charles lay alone. She’d left him with medical personnel who cared about paychecks and IVs not getting infected. Couldn’t she see? Charles needed someone who loved him there.

  She strode forward so only ten feet separated them. Her lips thinned to a sharp line, and her eyes glowed with revulsion. “And why does my son have no time, Alexander Rockingham? Because of you.” She raised her arm and pointed a finger at him. “You’re worse than the devil. You’re an abomination, an affront to God almighty. Get out of my sight and never come back, or I’ll ensure your life is a living hell.”

  Her hatred didn’t matter to him. He’d apologize. Hell, he’d agree with her. He’d say anything to get back inside to see Charles, but his throat clogged and he couldn’t breathe. He had to keep trying. “At least let me talk to Rebecca.”

  “She doesn’t want to see you. She told you to leave. Now do it.”

  For long minutes, the drone of katydids in the trees swaying in the warm early summer air was the only sound between them. He wrestled with what he could say, what he could do to just get her to unlock this gate and allow him inside. Fuck, he needed to be with Charles. He’d promised he wouldn’t let him die like this.

  His eyes caught movement just behind the guards. “Rebecca,” he called out. “Please, I need to talk to you.” Her eyes frantically darted back and forth between him, Alice and the guards. She shook her head violently and then grimaced, rolling her lips between her teeth as if choking back words or tears. He would never know which as she stepped backward, turned, and fled up the front steps to disappear inside. How could Rebecca have told him to leave? How could she have simply watched through the window as those guards had wrestled him down the stone steps of the entrance, manhandled him down the drive and thrown him onto the road. The gate had locked with a loud clank as he’d picked himself up from the asphalt.

  How could this be happening?

  He leveled his gaze once more on Charles’ mother—though the woman didn’t deserve the title—and leaned closer to the gate, his face between two rails. He couldn’t allow a love that had consumed his life to end like this. He dug deep into his soul and reached for the last shred of self-preservation he could muster. “One day, Alice Peyton Wynter … ”

  Hearing him speak her full name, she lifted her chin sharply. No one dared address her that way, did they? She’d left him no choice. He was not surrendering to the likes of her.

  “One day,” he repeated. “I will walk through these gates as owner of this place.” He glanced up at the two W’s engraved in oval plates at the gate top. “And, I’ll do it with a sledgehammer in my hands to erase anything or anyone bearing the name of Wynter.”

  “Over my dead body.” Alice made a show of folding her arms over her chest. The guards widened their legs as if readying themselves for an altercation. “If he tries to step one foot on this estate, shoot him,” she said without even glancing their way. “And aim for the heart.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” One of the guards pulled a Glock out of the back of his pants and let it dangle along his leg.

  They didn’t need to shoot him. He was already half dead. If he couldn’t get inside to comfort Charles in his last moments of life, if he’d been tossed aside by Rebecca, he’d lost every reason to live.

  He peered up the drive, his eyes finding the window on the second floor on the far right hand corner of the mansion. “Charles,” he whispered. “I’ll be back, no matter how long it takes. I promise.” His gut roiled with the truth. Charles likely had hours left—and he would not be there. Charles would slip from this earth without him, something he’d promised him months ago he wouldn’t let happen.

  He gazed at Alice Wynter, who’d turned and headed back to the house. The two guards still faced him. “I promise, I will be back,” he called to her back. “Even if I have to walk over your grave to
do it.”

  People say a broken heart can kill, but it’s really the secrets that take you down.

  ~Alexander Rockingham, II

  1

  Club Accendos, Washington, D.C. ~ Present day

  Alexander got three steps down the hallway when his nephew barreled around the corner, breathless and agitated.

  “Ryan?”

  “She’s dead.”

  His spine snapped ramrod straight. “Say that again. Slower.”

  “Alice Wynter passed away last night.”

  He drank in every word, every syllable of that statement and let it knock around inside his chest. Jubilant relief should have followed. Instead, familiar anger, like a snaking trail of lava, moved inside as if erupting anew.

  He jerked his head toward the end of the hall. “Let’s go to my office.”

  Ryan kept up with his long strides as his feet went on autopilot. They had to move fast. “The shell company set up?”

  “Years ago, and before you ask, I just checked in with the legal team twenty minutes ago to make sure it’s ready to go.”

  “Good. Let’s move on it.” He nodded his head at a couple stepping out of the elevator. Once inside, he turned to Ryan. “I want the purchase of the estate done by day’s end.”

  “The family’s putting up a fight over the grounds. They’re willing to convey all the paintings, antiques, collectibles, but they want to keep three acres. Apparently, there is a family gravesite—”

  “Nonnegotiable. I’ll pay whatever they want, but I will have the entire estate.”

  “They say money isn’t the object.”

  He blew through his nostrils. “With the Wynters, money is always the object. The last surviving heir can’t afford another bankruptcy, and he doesn’t know how to live without money—a lot of it.”

  They rose the short distance in silence, and when the elevator doors opened, he barreled forward and cracked open the door to his office. Clarisse straightened from bending over a pile of papers on his desk. She nodded but didn’t speak and scooted out through the adjoining door to her office.

  “How much are you willing to spend?” Ryan settled into one of the chairs arranged in front of his desk.

  “Start at $25 million. Go up to $100 million if you have to. I don’t care. Before midnight tonight, Ryan, signed papers—” he aimed his finger down to the blotter on his desk. “—right here.”

  Ryan scratched his chin. “Alexander, I have to ask. What are you doing?”

  The man had done well in helping him make today happen—one of the greatest days of his life in the last few decades. He deserved to know the truth.

  Alexander sank into his chair and leaned back. “Keeping a promise.”

  He always kept his promises, and this one was long overdue—forty fucking years overdue.

  2

  Alexander’s legs complained from standing on the asphalt, but the crumbling house behind the iron gate demanded a five-minute study. The once-grand drive was cracked and littered with dead leaves. “You haven’t aged well, old girl.” As if in answer to his mild insult, a loose shutter banged in the chilly air of the Connecticut fall.

  He stepped back and gazed at the two large W’s embedded in each of the gate’s swing frames. To think he’d once been shut out by this rusted gate. The woman who lived behind it had stood on the other side, not ten feet away, and obliterated his life. He regripped the handle of the sledgehammer hanging heavy along his side. Time to even the score.

  “Set it up, Tony.”

  The metallic screech of the ladder snapping into place startled a few birds from a nearby oak. Alexander climbed to the top, his coat flapping in the incessant gusts. Let the wind try to push him off. He was doing this. Two precise hits on the W and the metal oval hung sideways. One stubborn screw refused to let go, just like the witch who’d lived behind it for the last seventy years. One more dead center hit and the inlaid plate shot to the ground. The other W met the asphalt without a fight. Disappointing, really. The sledgehammer fit his palm so beautifully. After all the devastation she’d wrought, her family’s emblem should have put up a better fight.

  As he descended, he shrugged off Tony’s outstretched hand. Today was a day for doing things himself, and his muscles vibrated from the challenge of dismantling this cruel place, with his own hands if needed, brick by brick.

  After freeing the inelegant padlock and unwinding the chains, the gate swung open with a groan. The flimsy plate made a satisfying scrape under his shoe as he strode through the two stone pillars and onto the former Wynter estate.

  Tony cleared his throat. “Sir?”

  “Follow me in the car. I’m walking in.” Promises made, promises kept was his motto. He’d told Alice Wynter the day he took possession of her property he’d walk right up to the front door, sledgehammer in hand. Her replying smirk and her words—“Over my dead body”—echoed in some far-off corner of his mind. He hadn’t wished her real harm, not then and not now, but he had no qualms about treading the ground that now covered her corpse.

  He took his time advancing on the house as his mother hen assistant crept behind him in the Mercedes, the engine purring like a sated lion. He tuned into every bird chirp in the trees lining the drive, every leaf crunch under his shoe, every crack he stepped on as he fulfilled the first of three promises he’d made the last time he was here.

  The first, that one day as the new owner of Wynter Estate, he’d stride in by the power of his own legs.

  The second, he’d stand before Charles once more and say all that needed to be said.

  The third? Well, that last one was hard as hell to even think about. He’d deal with his thoughts about Rebecca, later.

  He took the front steps two at a time and paused at the white double doors with their ostentatious lion knockers that had once barred his entrance. He lifted the sledgehammer, and a hand fell on his bicep. Tony had ghosted up behind him and now stood with a set of keys dangling from his index finger.

  “That’s a first,” Alexander said. In eighteen years, Tony had never intervened in his actions.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Alexander exchanged the hammer for the keys with a slight scowl the man didn’t deserve, but today he was incapable of pretension.

  The door creaked open. A swath of light cut into the large entry hall, and a breeze blew dry leaves in over his feet to skitter across the marble. Two strides and his feet landed on the round inlay in the center of the circular portico. His skin prickled at the lack of life. He drew in a long breath, held it for three seconds, and pushed out the air in his lungs. So much was off. Stillness surrounded him, not the ticking of the grandfather clock and ice clinking against crystal tumblers. The smell of paint thinner and mold filled the air, not the expected lemon furniture polish. So much was right, too, like no Alice Wynter with her pinched, disapproving face.

  He stepped up to the bottom stair of the split staircase, the red carpet fraying on the edges. A box with paint cans and an abandoned brush, stiffened with dried yellow paint peeking from out the top, stood on the first step. Someone had the presence of mind to touch up the place before it was sold. How quaint given he was going to gut the house.

  At the top of the landing, the family portrait still clung to the wall. He glared at the likenesses of Alice Wynter, her husband, and one son. “Unwanted and abandoned.” The last time he’d stood in this spot, four people smiled out of that painting. She must have had a new one commissioned, leaving out the son Alexander had the audacity to love and the reason he’d been banished from this place.

  “Typical,” he muttered under his breath. The Wynter family once had everything material, but nothing truly important. What he wouldn’t give right now to have brought a blow torch along with his sledgehammer. Oil paint caught fire quickly.

  He parked that old anger which arose whenever his mind dwelled on the hateful family matriarch and turned away, otherwise, he’d never get through this day. He turned to his assistant. “Tony,
go see if there’s any wood outside? I feel like having a fire.”

  Where to start? He had choices. Assess each room, one at a time? Go straight to Charles’ room? Or had the old woman dismantled that small bedroom as she’d promised? To his left, a thin strip of sunlight cut through a crack in a set of double doors.

  The pocket doors slid open easily, and sunlight hit him square in the chest. Abandoned furniture, some cloaked in sheets and tarps, and others left exposed to collect dust, piled like Lincoln logs against the far wall. He strode to the middle window framed in powder blue velvet curtains. Through wavy cylinder glass, Alexander’s gaze swept over the priceless view that would make a realtor orgasm on sight. Tall oak and maple trees, now a tangle of bare branches, hugged the edges of a thick grass carpet that rolled away from the house for several, undulating acres, the Connecticut River a sliver of sparkling reflections in the distance. That wasn’t what interested him. Rather, his full attention landed on a brick walkway lined by boxwoods that led straight to a walled square, the family gravesites. That’s where he lies. In there.