Near Control: A Street Fighter Romance Series, #3

By Lexy Timms

You were never in control anyways…

We have a chance to shoot for the big leagues—and a chance to bring down Maya's family for good.

 

Maya has been thrown into flux by her father's bold announcement, but neither of us are willing to give up on exposing the truth behind his shady business yet.

 

When an offer comes in from an unexpected source to take me to the top of the fighting game, I can see it as the chance it is to take our message worldwide.

 

But her family isn't willing to give up that easily—and Maya is still in danger from her crazy brother and her scheming father.

I'll do anything to keep her safe. But how far will we have to go to find peace?

 

A Street Fighter Romance Series

• Next Battle
• Never Forfeit
• Near Control

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dark Shadow Publishing
• Release date: Jun 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223435471

Lexy Timms

"Love should be something that lasts forever, not is lost forever."  Visit USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR, LEXY TIMMS https://www.facebook.com/SavingForever *Please feel free to connect with me and share your comments. I love connecting with my readers.* Sign up for news and updates and freebies - I like spoiling my readers! http://eepurl.com/9i0vD website: www.lexytimms.com Dealing in Antique Jewelry and hanging out with her awesome hubby and three kids, Lexy Timms loves writing in her free time.  MANAGING THE BOSSES is a bestselling 10-part series dipping into the lives of Alex Reid and Jamie Connors. Can a secretary really fall for her billionaire boss?

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A Street Fighter Romance Series

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Next Battle

Never Forfeit

Near Control

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Near Control Blurb

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YOU WERE NEVER IN CONTROL anyways...

We have a chance to shoot for the big leagues—and a chance to bring down Maya’s family for good.

Maya has been thrown into flux by her father’s bold announcement, but neither of us are willing to give up on exposing the truth behind his shady business yet.

When an offer comes in from an unexpected source to take me to the top of the fighting game, I can see it as the chance it is to take our message worldwide.

But her family isn’t willing to give up that easily—and Maya is still in danger from her crazy brother and her scheming father.

I’ll do anything to keep her safe. But how far will we have to go to find peace?

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Contents

A Street Fighter Romance Series

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Near Control Blurb

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

A Street Fighter Romance Series

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Chapter One

Maya

I SAT THERE, ON THE edge of the bed, a million miles from home and everything I had known—staring at the TV. At a face that was all too familiar to me, a face I wished I could have forgotten by now.

But he wasn’t going to let me. With this announcement, he had just pretty much sealed himself into the history books, making sure nobody would ever be able to even think about discussing the history of mankind without involving him in the conversation.

My father’s announcement had been playing over and over again, on every channel I switched to. His smiling face was almost enough to pass for sincerity if you didn’t know any better, though I did by now. He was telling everyone they had the cure for cancer, and that the disease as we knew it would never be the same. Everywhere was reporting it, every station covering him. It was like I couldn’t get away from him. Commentators were already dissecting the press conference he’d done, detailing everything he’d said and breaking it down for viewers who might not know what he was talking about.

This is going to be a game-changer, one of them told the camera excitedly as I flicked on to another channel. Everything we know about disease will be-

I clicked off before he could continue. Maybe it would have been easier if I had just been able to celebrate with the rest of the world, if I had been able to join in on this joyful realization, this belief that everything was going to change. Yes, the cure wasn’t going to be cheap, but at least there would be one. Wasn’t that all that really mattered? Nobody would have to face down the impossibility of this disease alone again, without any confirmation if the cures and treatments they were going to use would work. They would know there was something out there, something that really delivered.

If they could afford it, of course.

It was that part which pissed me off, that part I had been doing everything to try to avoid when I had taken the cure from my family. I knew producing the cure wouldn’t actually cost that much, but they had managed to convince the world that  it was more expensive than it ever could have been. They had lied. Made it harder for anyone to access, basically ensured only the richest people in the world could pay for their health, for their lives.

It was fucking sick. I had never expected them to pull something like this, even though I had uncovered dark depths to my family I had never even imagined before. I supposed some part of me had wanted to believe there was some decency left in them, even if they had shown me a million times over by now that they were monsters. They didn’t care about the common good, about the rest of the world. They cared about lining their pockets, even though they had enough to live on for the rest of their lives if they wanted to, if they stopped right now.

But they’d seen a chance to rake in cash beyond their wildest dreams, and they’d taken it, and there was nothing I could do to change it now. I felt so defeated, as though everything I had been working toward had been ripped right out underneath me.

I had turned my entire life upside down, I had put myself in the firing line of a family more powerful than any other in the world right now, and for what? For the same outcome to happen anyway. This was always what they’d planned, to release the cure and make it seem as though there were serious shortages so they could charge crazy amounts of money for it. I had thought I could stop it, but the only thing I had managed to do was actually speed it up.

At least the cure was out there. I was trying to think about it in the most optimistic way I could, but it seemed impossible, impossible to do anything but sit there and take in the news and try to keep breathing steady. We had run so far, we had done so much, and nothing had changed. Nothing had been any different. I couldn’t believe it.

I had flipped Zak’s life upside down, too—it wasn’t just me who had been involved with this; he had decided to help me in any way he could, and it still hadn’t been enough. I could hear him talking on the phone outside the door, his tone terse, but I couldn’t make out anything he was saying. My ears were ringing so loudly, like they were trying to drown out the shock of what I was seeing on the screen in front of me. I couldn’t handle this. I couldn’t take it.

I put my head in my hands and realized they were shaking hard. I felt like I was watching myself from above, from another body, taking all of this in any way I could. I didn’t know what to fucking do. Everything had changed, with just one announcement.

I could almost see it in my father’s eyes, the glint that told me he had won and he knew it—he had pulled it off, and there was nothing I could do to change it. The reality of it was just starting to set in, and I couldn’t believe it. He had put me through hell for what I had done, told me he was going to rip my life apart, and for what? For him to just do what he was going to do anyway? How was any of this fair? I didn’t get it.

But it made sense. He knew I wouldn’t wait forever in releasing the information I had managed to take from him, and this was his way of trying to make sure I didn’t win. He would have done anything, even if it went against his plan, to make sure everything I had done was futile.

It was sadistic, and I was his daughter. I was family, even though it felt like I had been cast out right now, struggling to keep my head above water. I didn’t even want to think what he would have done to the people he didn’t like. It scared me. The monstrousness that had always inhabited my father, my family, and I had never seen it. How deep did the depths go? How far down did this spiral, and how bleak did it become?

I turned off the TV, the sudden silence in the room almost worse than hearing my father’s voice make the announcement for the dozenth time. I was sure anywhere I went right now, I was going to be met by his face, by his smile. By the look in his eyes that told me he had won, and everything I had done had been for nothing.

I could have been part of the family when they did this. I could have been standing, beaming, proud, by my father’s side, believing we were doing our bit to change the world for the better. I wouldn’t have known the lies he was spinning, about the cost of production. I just would have seen a chance to make a difference, and I would have taken it.

Maybe my life would have been better if I had done that. It would have been easier, for sure. It was hard to imagine myself back there, back in the life I had lived before all of this had started—back in the world I had put aside to follow my beliefs. But I could have stayed. Even if I’d had my doubts, I could have kept my mouth shut, and I could have reaped the rewards of doing exactly what my father wanted of me. It would have been okay, wouldn’t it? The cure would still have been out there...

No. I was trying to tell myself something I could never have believed. If I’d even had the slightest inkling that there was anything wrong with this cure, that there was any way it could have been produced for less money, I would have had to live with the nagging knowledge of it at the back of my mind, and I wasn’t sure I could have lived with it. I would have done anything it took to make sure it got out to the people who needed it, even if it cost me...

Even if it cost me everything.

I could feel the tears starting to snag at my eyes, the lump in my throat as the sheer panic and horror of everything that had happened began to set in. This was real. This was really happening. And if my family had already gone this far to destroy and discredit me, to make my life hell and all my actions pointless, I didn’t even want to know where else they were going to take this.

What else they were going to do to us.

I shivered at the thought. We had made it out of the country okay, but did they know where we were? Where we had escaped to? I glanced around the room in a panic, wondering if we were being watched. What if someone had tipped them off to our flight out of the country? I’d thought we would be safe here, at least a little safer than we had been before, but I wasn’t sure if it was true. Not anymore.

There was no more leverage I held over the family right now, nothing I could use to try and convince them to play by my rules. Now they’d put the cure out there, they’d snatched away whatever control I had left, and that scared the shit out of me. I felt helpless, as though I had been tossed out to sea without a life preserver, paddling in the water as I tried to keep my head above the surface.

What were they going to do to us now? It was a question I couldn’t even imagine the answer to, didn’t even want to, not really. I had to keep pushing forward, do what I could to keep going, but I didn’t know how. Even with Zak at my side, it felt impossible. I had been running on fumes as it was, but more than anything, I had been running on the belief that what we were doing really mattered.

And now, I knew it didn’t. My family had no use for me anymore, no reason to keep me alive, and they would dispose of me any way they saw fit. And take Zak down with me, too, along with anyone else they could find who they thought had helped me. I would leave a trail of destruction in my wake, and I hadn’t even known it until now.

I turned the TV back on, staring listlessly at the screen, my chest rising and falling quickly as I took it in. I didn’t know what would happen next, but I knew it was going to be tough. Whatever they were going to throw at me, at us, it was going to be scarier and bigger than everything else that had happened so far.

I thought it had been bad before. But that had only been the start. Now? Now, we were looking down the barrel of a real fucking problem. And I wasn’t sure how we were going to be able to dodge these bullets.

Chapter Two

Zak

NO, LISTEN TO ME, I ordered the woman on the other end of the phone. The reporting you’re doing isn’t accurate. I know what he said at the press conference, but it’s not the full story-

You’ll need to submit a tip through our tipline, the woman replied, sounding bored. But I doubt it’s going to go anywhere. This is the biggest news story on the planet right now, and you’re going to need some strong evidence to back up what you’re claiming.

Before I could get out another word, she hung up, and I let out an annoyed grunt and slammed a hand into the wall next to me. I knew it wasn’t going to help anything, but I didn’t care. I was just so fucking mad right now, and I needed to get it out of my system somehow.

Her father had gotten the drop on us. Made us look like fucking idiots for doing what we had done. I couldn’t believe he had actually gone out there and done something so bold, so ballsy. I almost would have respected it, if I hadn’t known the damage this was going to do to the world at large.

Specifically, my grandmother. She was the one I couldn’t help but think of right now. She would never be able to afford the cure they were putting forward, she didn’t have that kind of money to her name, and where did that leave her? To just...to just fucking die? It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair. And I knew we couldn’t let him get away with it so easily.

I had been calling around every news outlet I could think of since I had seen the story break, trying to get one of them to listen to me about the truth – he was selling this cure for a jacked-up price because he knew he could, because he knew he could make all the money in the world from it. He didn’t need to be charging the amount he was, but he could get away with it unless someone stepped up to put themselves in his way.

Nobody had listened to me. Nobody had wanted to. Of course, all anyone in the world wanted right now was to believe this was actually the cure they had been waiting for, and that the person releasing it was doing the right thing in the way they were distributing it. They couldn’t handle the truth of it, the truth of realizing they were being conned by a man who already had more money than he would ever be able to spend in one lifetime.

It was evil. Downright fucking evil. I had met plenty of bad guys in my time, but never any like this, never any who were willing to do this much damage on this big a scale. I wondered how much money he had already made from it, how many people had invested in stocks for his company and made him another million. The thought of it was infuriating to me, knowing he was probably already raking in the cash, making millions from just the announcement.

I needed to do something to stop it, to cast a