by Aly Martinez
“And…and…and then your brothers just so happened to show up in the middle of the night and attacked him? I saw Dante shoot him in the leg before chasing him into my apartment. But what the hell happened after that? They didn’t just all tuck in for the night and go to sleep. Even if it was pure coincidence that the fire started at that exact moment, why did none of them see it? Why did none of them try to get out?” I was panting by the time I finished.
“Maybe the fire wasn’t a coincidence, then. Maybe one of them started the fire.”
“Right!” I yelled, sans the whisper. “Okay, but which one of your dumbass brothers would have the first clue on how to rig an electrical fire? I’ll tell you who could though… Penn. He rewired at least three apartments while he was there. But see, when the cops found their bodies…” My stomach rolled at the memory. “Penn was tied to chair.”
“Shiiit,” she breathed.
“Yet, again, I’m expected to believe that he just so happened to get everything that meant anything to me out of that building that night, then left me the exact amount of money I needed for me and all the girls to escape, and then the building caught fire, burning to the ground, taking the two men who kept me trapped for over half my life with it? It just doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s definitely suspect. But I’m not sure I’d be complaining. He basically solved all of your problems.”
“But he died doing it.” A rush of tears I should have long since run out of snuck up on me. “I want to know what happened to him. I loved him, Cat. I loved him so much. And I feel like he was another man who sacrificed everything for me. I don’t know how to process that.” I rested my forehead against the wall as two vending machines hummed behind me.
“You don’t have to process it, Cora. Not right now, anyway. Grieve. Be sad. Cry. Fine. But you don’t have to figure it out. What are the cops saying?”
I took a few seconds to collect myself before answering. “Nothing really. I think they were just happy to finally be rid of Marcos and Dante. You know the cops haven’t been their biggest fans since Manuel went down.”
“They aren’t the only ones,” she muttered to herself. “Good. At least they aren’t looking at you for any of this. And what about Penn’s brother? Have you talked to him about this?”
Another room door opened, and I peeked into the hall and saw Drew heading my way as if his ears had been burning. I got busy straightening out dollar bills on the side of the pop machine and whispered, “I don’t know. I think he’s still in shock. He keeps saying stupid crap, like maybe Penn was trying to take off with all that money. But Penn clearly left everything for me to find.”
I’d only fed one bill into the machine before Drew rounded the corner.
“Shit. There you are. How long does it take to get a drink? I was starting to worry.”
I swiped under my eyes and offered him a halfhearted smile. “Sorry. I just needed a minute alone.” I pointed at the phone. “It’s Brittany. I was talking to her about getting the girls together so I can give them some money.”
His eyebrows gathered. “Right. Of course.”
“I’ll be back in a minute. Okay?” I lifted the dollar in his direction. “You want anything?”
“Nah. I’m good.” Skeptically, he stared at me for another beat. Then he shook his head and reluctantly backed away.
I leaned through the doorway and watched until he was out of earshot. “Listen, I need a way to get in touch with you. Things are different now. We don’t have to sneak around anymore.”
“Well, maybe not from my brothers, but my father and Thomas are still very much alive.”
“I just need a number, Cat. I’ll keep it private.”
“Okay. Okay. I’ll text it over.”
“Thank you,” I whispered. “Now, I’ve got to go. I’m going to see what info I can get out of Drew. I’ll keep you updated if anything comes up. Oh, and stay away from the storage unit. That’s where I ditched the cash.”
“Jesus. A million dollars. Seriously?”
My stomach pitched as I added, “And ninety-nine cents.”
She sighed. “Okay. I love you. One in. One out. Remember?”
“Always,” I breathed before hanging up.
I finished up at the machine, getting River a Mountain Dew that I hoped would serve as some sort of treat/peace offering. As I walked back to the room, I called Brittany and asked her to get up to the hotel as soon as possible.
If I wanted to keep Drew in the dark, I was going to have to be a little more convincing.
Penn
My hands ached at my sides as I watched him exit the courthouse.
He was smiling, carefree and oblivious, while chatting it up with the herd of well-dressed men hanging on his every word. From his tailored, navy-pinstriped suit down to his perfectly styled dark-brown hair, the man looked every bit the successful prosecutor the city knew him to be.
But I knew he was so much more than that.
Thomas Lyons was a soulless bastard who I would make damn sure followed his old friends Marcos and Dante into an early grave.
The hot summer wind wrapped around me, fanning the fire in my soul. There wasn’t much I could do right then. Not in such a public place. And not without the time or the space to make him properly suffer. A quick and painless death was not at all what I had planned for him.
Twenty-nine minutes had destroyed me.
Twenty-nine minutes of her screams of agony.
Twenty-nine minutes he had arranged.
No. Thomas Lyons would pay tenfold for each and every one of those minutes.
But waiting for the right moment to make a move wasn’t proving to be easy, either.
His every breath taunted me, knowing that his heart was still pumping blood through his worthless veins while hers was rotting on a stained piece of carpet in a garbage pile somewhere.
She was dead.
And he was smiling.
My vision flashed red as he stopped at the bottom of the concrete steps to talk to a younger woman. She too was in a suit, though hers was punctuated with a pair of heels and a black leather briefcase at her side. A colleague perhaps.
But all I saw was Lisa.
She’d been fearless the day I’d met her. Knowing that crazy woman, she’d probably marched right up to Thomas, her Louboutins I’d worked my ass off to provide for her clicking the sidewalk, and dropped the bomb about all the dirt she’d dug up on him. She would have wanted to witness firsthand the shock contorting his face. She’d have reveled in the glint of fear appearing in his eyes.
Lisa was a good person with a wicked addiction to justice. There was no standing in her way. God knew, I’d tried, but I’d never been able to argue her out of anything. She hadn’t cared what it cost or how much she had to go through to make it happen.
Her heart had been set on making the world a better place.
Even as it beat for the very last time.
Pain from the graze of Dante’s bullet at my calf made me wince as I moved to stay out of Thomas’s line of sight. Not that he would have recognized me. Our worlds had collided, but he and I had never crossed paths.
At least not yet.
I casually propped my back against the brick wall outside the local coffee shop, my stomach churning as he grinned down at the woman and his hand cradled her at the elbow as he bent to touch his lips to her cheek. It was chaste enough to be friendly, but the way she swayed into him was anything but.
This fucking piece of shit. Murder aside, he had a wife who was so terrified of him that she’d taken their daughter and run. And he was making moves—or, at the very least, eyes—at a woman who had to be twenty years his junior.
My hands began to ache all over again.
“Is that him?” Savannah whispered in my ear.
“Shit!” I growled, wheeling around and nearly knocking the cup of coffee out of her hand.
“Shit,” she parroted, teetering to the side.
I snaked a hand o
ut, catching her before she toppled over. “Jesus, kid.”
“Don’t Jesus me. You were the one who randomly turned into the bumbling Hulk. Here.” She extended a paper cup of coffee my way, keeping the iced-fru fru-chocolate-whatever for herself.
I turned back around in time to see Thomas and the woman walking away together.
“He’s not attractive,” Savannah announced around the straw of her drink.
Curling my lip, I shot her a glare over my shoulder. “Are you kidding me right now?”
Her red, penciled eyebrows shot up. “What? I was just making an observation.”
Starting toward the car, I gave her my back. “Well, keep your observations to yourself. That man is a piece of shit masquerading as salt of the Earth. I don’t give the first damn what he looks like. All I care about is how fast I can take him down.”
“Jeez. Forget I said anything.” She scoffed, following after me.
She’d been with me for two days.
Two excruciating days.
She wasn’t a bad kid. Truth be told, she was a really fucking good kid, with a good heart and a troubled soul her parents had never taken the time to heal. However, when I looked at her, all I saw was Cora. Not in her features or her mannerisms, but rather in my memories. And considering that it had only been a little over a week, those memories were still so fresh and so potent that they wrecked me every time.
I missed Cora something fierce. And with her out there, hurting, it was a wonder I could function at all.
But I’d done all I could for her.
I’d cashed out a substantial portion of my retirement account to leave her that million and change, but where I was going, money in the bank didn’t matter. Though, if I was being honest, it had never truly mattered.
It hadn’t saved Lisa.
It hadn’t kept me from falling into the darkness after she’d died.
But I hoped like hell it could save Cora.
There was a good chance Drew was never going to speak to me again. Giving her the cash was always supposed to be the backup plan if anything truly happened to me. But when I’d gotten to the building that night, I’d peered up at the railing on the third floor, imagining her smile as she stared down at me the way she so often did when I got home from a run.
Leaving her was going to destroy me in ways from which I’d never recover.
But I couldn’t walk away without knowing she had everything I could possibly give her.
However, that meant taking some things from her as well.
That building. That fucking building. It had been her home for over a decade.
But it had to go.
I couldn’t risk that they would ever try to take her back there. Manuel had at least another five years on his sentence, but his empire would not still be standing when he walked out of the chain link gates.
The biggest part of that legacy was his family name.
So, one after the other, I choked the life out of his sons as well.
In the previous four years, I’d done a lot of things in the name of avenging Lisa’s death.
But that.
Killing Dante and Marcos.
That was for Cora.
And I would never feel the first regret over it.
So yeah, while I hated knowing that Cora was hurting, I was able to climb out of bed, put one foot in front of the other, and breathe through the pain of losing her all because I knew she was free.
Drew was going to stay with her until she got settled somewhere new.
I’d like to think he was doing it as a favor to me.
I knew Drew though. He liked to play the hard-ass, but he was a good guy who cared about Cora more than he’d ever admit. He’d make sure she was taken care of.
Even if I couldn’t.
Savannah and I climbed into my car, my door slamming while hers softly clicked.
“Are we gonna follow him?” she asked.
I ground my teeth, hating like hell that she was involved in this clusterfuck. But the moment I’d let her climb into my car that night, I’d made her a part of this. I shouldn’t have picked her up. I should have called Drew, told him where she was, and let him handle it.
But I’d promised Cora I’d get her back. Hell, I’d driven seven hours to Cleveland using the little details I’d gathered about Savannah over my two months with Cora to track her down.
And seeing her standing on that corner, with bruises on her arms, clearly up to no good, I couldn’t wait.
She needed help.
And I was there.
Well…Shane Pennington was there. I didn’t know who the fuck I was anymore.
When she’d asked questions about Cora, I’d been forced to tell her the truth.
Or at least part of it.
I’d glossed over Lisa. Then told her that Marcos and Dante were dead, but I didn’t explain the how, i.e. me being responsible. This led us to the fire at the building, then the money I left behind, and finally the body Drew had purposely identified as my own.
For being sixteen, she’d taken all of it surprisingly well. Her first question had been a shrieked, “Holy shit. You left her a million dollars?” Followed by, “Holy shit. Where’d you get a million dollars?” Followed by, “Holy shit. Can I have a million dollars?” But after she’d calmed down, her face had paled as she’d whispered, “The whole building is gone?” Followed by, “Were any of the girls hurt?” Followed by, “Cora thinks you’re dead?”
Her heartbreaking concern was nothing compared to the hurricane swirling inside me, but I had only one answer. “Yeah. And no matter what happens, you can’t tell her I’m alive. She’ll become a target, Savannah. I left so she could finally have a life of her own, not get bogged down in someone else’s shit. After everything she’s done, I think we can both agree she deserves that much.”
She nodded, I nodded, and then we rode the first three hours back to Chicago in silence, both of us lost in our own thoughts.
The fourth hour was spent not in silence after she had what I could only explain as a vocal seizure when I snatched her phone mid-text and threw it out the window south of Ann Arbor. I told her I’d replace it. She glanced around the car, no doubt remembering the money I’d left Cora, and then demanded the latest and greatest iPhone. I laughed and told her she was funny.
She’d fumed for a solid hour, but then she’d fallen asleep and slept for the last two.
Those were my favorite of the trip because, for those two hours, it had been easy to forget how bad everything had gotten.
Cora and River were safe with Drew.
Savannah was safe with me.
And for one more night, as the headlights illuminated that seemingly endless highway, I pretended I was still drowning and not already at the bottom of the ocean.
Now, watching Savannah out of the corner of my eye as she slurped her coffee, I felt that same sense of contentment slithering through me. If only Cora had been there too.
Cora.
Cora.
Cora.
My mind’s favorite distraction.
And torture.
I sucked in a deep breath, holding it until my lungs ached. On an exhale, I answered, “No. We’re not following him.”
“Why not? He’s so close.”
I turned into traffic the opposite direction than Thomas had wandered off. “Because you’re with me. I don’t want you involved in this. I shouldn’t have brought you down here to get coffee today. Speaking of…” I snapped my finger and put my hand out palm up. “Change. I gave you a fifty.”
“Oh, come on! It’s, like, thirty bucks. What if I need something? I don’t even have money to catch a cab back to your apartment.”
“A cab?” I flashed her a glare. “I’m not sure if you realize this, but the thing you’re sitting in right now, it’s more than just a beautiful piece of German machinery. It’s actually a car too.”
My gaze was aimed at the road, but I didn’t have to see her to know she was rolling
her eyes.
“I mean, if we’re not together, Penn. You still haven’t replaced my phone.” She pouted her bottom lip and batted her painted-black lashes at me. “I’d be all alone out there with no way to get back to you, Papa.”
“You call me Papa again and I’m gonna ground you for the rest of your life.”
She laughed, throwing her head back against the seat. “Daddy? Is that any better?”
“God. No.”
“Okay, cool. You’re right. We’ll keep it simple and stick with dad.”
I slowed at a stoplight and angled to look at her. Her wild, red hair was up in one of those messy piles on the top of her head that River so often sported. But do not be mistaken; it had taken her at least twenty minutes in front of the mirror to get that thing messy without being too messy.
I’d forgotten what it was like to live with a woman. Cora was as low maintenance as it got. If her blond curls weren’t cascading down her back, they were pulled back in a rubber band she permanently wore around her wrist. This styling action was usually performed while she was walking, talking, or, on occasion, riding my…
Shit. I had to stop thinking about her.
Savannah. That’s what I needed to focus on.
The day after we’d gotten home from Cleveland, I’d taken her shopping. What this really meant is I’d taken her to the mall where we’d argued over clothes, she’d ended up storming out, and I’d ultimately thrown a pile of what I’d deemed to be age-appropriate attire—even though she’d deemed it all “hideous”—beside the cash register along with my credit card. She’d only started speaking to me again when I’d handed her my card and agreed to stand outside as she hit Victoria’s Secret. I didn’t give a fuck what she wore under her clothes as long as they weren’t visible.
“How about we stick with you calling me Penn, and then you actually give me back my change? We agreed no money, no phone, no nothing until we get you into some kind of drug program.”