Obsidian Faith

by Bev Elle

  In his senior year, Trevor began to leave little markers that he knew would eventually get him caught. He was tired of being a pawn. He figured he’d rather be the fed’s prisoner than continue stealing for a cruel man who’d never been a father to him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was four months before his graduation when Shanice bummed a ride to USF with some girls who used fake IDs to get into frat parties. When she and her friends arrived at his frat house, the party had been in full swing. He’d been playing a game of beer pong with a few of his brothers, and they were scouring the floor for some girls to dance with.

  “Hey, Trevor. Look at the hotties that just walked in the door,” Bryce said. “Four of them. Four of us. Problem solved.”

  Bryce went over and pulled the exotic beauty Trevor had his eye on to the dance floor. Her coloring was similar to Shanice’s, but she had a bod that couldn’t possibly be attached to Shanice.

  The last time he’d seen her it had been over Christmas break when he was a sophomore, and she’d still been as thin as a reed, with arms and legs too long to belong to such a tiny person. She’d been pissed at him, as usual, because he kept telling her it wasn’t safe for her to come to his uncle’s house, but she’d kept seeking him out, even though he’d told her they weren’t brother and sister any more.

  Then she giggled over something Bryce said, and he knew it was her. She was all grown up now. He walked out to the dance floor, where Bryce was grinding on her like a dog in heat, and grabbed her arm.

  “Shanice?”

  A crooked, sexy grin lit up her face, and she abandoned her dance partner. “Trevor!”

  He scooped her up and she held onto him so tightly, Trevor hated himself for having disappointed her over and over again. When he finally eased her out of the embrace, he leaned over to talk into her ear over the music.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you,” she said. Then her beautiful face got serious. “You didn’t come home for Christmas. What was that all about? I mean, I get you don’t want to be my surrogate brother any more, but Isaiah, Brenda, and the twins, they still love you, too.”

  “Let’s not do this here,” he said. “Come on.”

  He led her through the throng of partiers and took the back stairs off the kitchen up to his room. Couples in various stages of making out occupied every spare corner in the house, a sight which usually didn’t embarrass him, but it made him very uncomfortable with Shanice there. Of course, she was a different Shanice from the one he’d last seen, who could now put any of the college girls to shame.

  He tried, unsuccessfully, not to look at her perfectly shaped ass as she walked ahead of him, or the tiny waistline just above it, or... . Finally, they got to his room and he let her in ahead of him.

  The noise from the party was dulled but not totally gone. He grabbed a couple of water bottles out of his mini fridge, opened one, and handed it to her. Then he downed a huge swallow of his own. It was time to clear his head a bit for this conversation.

  He gestured toward a chair, but she chose the bed, so he went to the chair.

  “Do Isaiah and Brenda know you’re here?”

  “What do you think?” she said. “You leave me no choice but to sneak off to see you when I can, because you never come see us anymore. Why is that?”

  It broke his heart to say the words, but he gave her the same bullshit answer he’d given her the year after Dave and Elena died. “I’ve grown up. We’ve grown apart. There’s no blood connecting us, Shanice. You need to live your life and forget about me.”

  Her eyes filled and tears spilled down her face.

  “What happened to us being the two musketeers? One for each other and each other for one?” They’d put their own spin on the musketeer phrase when they’d first moved to Orlando and lived on the same street. With their adoptive families so wound together and going to the same church, they’d believed they would be together forever.

  “That changed when Philip Kyle got custody of me. Now you need to go back home, before you get into trouble here.”

  “I won’t get into any trouble with you looking out for me. Besides, we just got here, and my friends aren’t ready to go.” She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. “It’s okay if you don’t want to see me. I’ll just go downstairs and dance with some of your hot college friends until my friends are ready to go. We can act like perfect strangers if that’s what you want, but I’m not leaving right now.”

  With that, she stood and stalked over to his door. He rushed over and barred her from leaving.

  “Just stay in here and hang with me,” he said. The only alternative he had was to unleash her among his horny frat brothers.

  She smiled knowingly. He wasn’t fooling her. “Sure,” she said, like that had been her plan all along.

  They played video games together like old times and talked until they were practically hoarse before she got a text from one of her friends asking where she was. They were going to take a cab to the hotel. She texted back and told them she’d meet up with them the next morning.

  Trevor didn’t think anything of it when he gave her a new pair of his pajamas to sleep in, and they tucked in for the night in his bed.

  Morning was another thing. When he awoke with a stiffy crammed against her derrière, he was mortified and was certain she’d be traumatized by his body’s involuntary reaction. He jerked away from her, almost falling off the bed. She turned to look at him, unfazed.

  “Have a tic-tac, Trevor.” She pushed one between his lips as he looked at her slack-jawed. Apparently, she’d been awake before him.

  Trevor cowered underneath the comforter, bending his knees so she wouldn’t see it tented by something else. He rolled the tic-tac around in his mouth before he spoke.

  “Good morning. Sorry about that.”

  “I’m going to nursing school when I graduate. I’ve already taken college-level anatomy. I know all about natural bodily functions,” she said with a smile that could only be characterized as naughty.

  Trevor stood, careful to keep his back to her as he adjusted himself, conjuring up images to help him hurriedly deflate. When he turned to face her, Shanice covered her face with the pillow and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Trevor wasn’t sure if he should laugh with her, and therefore at himself.

  She moved the pillow. “Whatever you just did, didn’t help.”

  He looked down, and sure enough, he was at half-mast. She collapsed into a fit of giggles. Again. That did help. There is nothing like being laughed at by a girl to calm an overactive libido.

  Trevor picked up his pillow ostensibly to cover himself, then thought better of it and threw it at her. Shanice tried to dodge it and fell off the bed. The force of her landing knocked the wind out of her mid-laugh. Concerned, Trevor ran around to the other side of the bed and helped her up off the floor.

  “Are you okay?” His voice came out husky, when he realized his body was flush with hers. She looked both adorable and sexy grinning up at him. Despite his desire to continue to think of her only as his surrogate sister, Trevor felt an undeniable attraction.

  Shanice threw her arms around his neck and went onto her tiptoes. He bent his head to lessen their height differential, meeting her soft, rosy lips for the first time. Just as her tongue tentatively touched his, he pulled away, swallowing his tic tac in the process.

  “Trevor... ” She moved back into his arms, wrapping hers around his waist. “We’re not really sister and brother, you know.”

  “I know that.” He peeled her arms from around him, and stepped back, because his dick was getting confused, and that wasn’t a good look on him. Not in front of Shanice. Besides he’d promised Isaiah he wouldn’t return his daughter’s affections while she was still under the age of eighteen. “But we shouldn’t be doing any of this.”

  He put some distance between them. “Let’s get dressed so I can take you to breakfast.”

  Shanice
sat back down on his bed, pouting visibly. He didn’t like that he’d had to reject her, but it was the best thing all around, considering how he was still under Phil’s thumb and if his uncle or Frick and Frack got wind of her being there, her family could still be in danger.

  He went into his bathroom and hopped into the shower. After he’d cleaned himself thoroughly, he turned the water to cold, hoping it would help keep him from reacting to Shanice, the girl he’d always loved like a sister, who was now very much a woman.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Want my bacon?” Trevor remembered how much Shanice loved bacon for as far back as those early days in the group home when she’d bartered with him for his bacon.

  Her amber eyes were sullen. “No thanks.”

  Trevor sighed. “’Nice, you know Isaiah would throttle us both if we let anything happen between us right now.”

  Something in his words must have given her hope because she smiled. “I know, right?”

  “What’s your Dad got, thirty pounds on me? I’m not trying to fight Papa Bailey right now.”

  “He’d definitely kick your ass,” she said, taking a slice of the bacon he’d offered earlier. “But I’d like to think that I’m worth a good ass-kicking.” She bit down on the crisp bacon and chewed.

  Trevor tried not to become mesmerized by her lips. He took a drink of coffee. “You’re worth a dozen or more good ass-kickings, but I want to finish college and you need to get into college, then maybe we can go out on a date, or something.”

  “Really?”

  He smiled. “Really. But you have a few more rites of passage to experience and I’ve got to take the IT industry by storm and build something so I can provide for a woman like you.”

  Shanice grew serious. “I’ve always loved you, Trevor, but I’ve been in love with you since that time you were about to kick Owen Nettles’ ass for spreading rumors about me.”

  “You don’t know that, yet, Shanice. We’ve never had that kind of relationship, and it was never possible for me before now. That would’ve made me a serious pervert.”

  “Do you know that in the old days, girls got married at thirteen?”

  “Yeah, I think I paid enough attention in grade school to remember something like that.”

  “And Amy March was about the age I am when she fell in love with Laurie.”

  “So, you think I’m your Laurie?” Trevor said with a smirk.

  “I know you’re my Laurie.”

  That was the last time Trevor saw Shanice before he was arrested on the eve of his graduation.

  Trevor decided that getting arrested was the most surreal experience ever, especially if you are a college student so close to graduation you can taste it.

  When he began baiting the feds with his hacks, he assumed they would act slowly, like most people, including his uncle, said they did things. He’d hacked into the FBI’s database and he knew they were on to him, so he decided to run the program the week of graduation, thinking they’d probably not pick him up until sometime after he had his diploma in hand.

  The funneling would proceed slowly for seventy-two hours, then it would ramp up and take the balance of what he’d targeted from each state at once and hide it in the various overseas accounts he’d selected. Then he’d conveniently get arrested before he could divide it with his partners. This was his grand plan. He wanted the FBI to arrest him so Phil and the mob couldn’t touch the money, and couldn’t touch the Baileys, otherwise they’d never get the money. Then he’d have to win the trust of the feds to get them all out of the mess he’d gotten them into.

  Trevor was sleeping off a bender when federal agents swarmed his frat house. He woke up from the gentle nuzzling of an assault rifle against the back of his head.

  Two agents in assault gear yanked him up off the bed by and he stood before them in his boxers, hands behind his head just as they’d posed him while they read him his rights. He didn’t know what possessed him, but he decided to goad them a little.

  “Geez, how many feds does it take to arrest an unarmed college student the day before his graduation?” Trevor said to the only suit in the room, who happened to be a tall African American man who looked uncannily like Will Smith in the Mohammed Ali film.

  The movie star look-alike answered him without missing a beat. “Every fucking one of us.” Then punched Trevor’s lights out.

  When Trevor recovered, he was in what he could only describe as an interrogation room. His head lay on a table with drool running out the side of his mouth. When he sat up and wiped his mouth with the back of his left hand, he saw that the table was bolted to the floor, and there were two hard plastic chairs, one in which he was seated. His right hand was cuffed to one of the table legs.

  The Will Smith wannabe entered the room carrying two coffees.

  “I’m Special Agent Hemphill. You look like you could use one of these.” He set one of the coffee cups in front of Trevor and kept the other one for himself, then moved to sit down on the other side of the table. The folder he carried in nestled under the crook of his arm was now splayed in front of him.

  “You’ve been a bad boy, Trevor Landon Kyle.” The dude even talked like Will Smith from Bad Boys.

  “In what manner, Special Agent Hemphill?” Trevor said, playing dumb.

  “Listen, cut the shit. I know and you know what you’ve been up to. You’ve been funneling money from the coffers of state unclaimed property funds to overseas banks.”

  Trevor looked affronted. “Who, me?”

  Hemphill hit the table and Trevor flinched in spite of himself. This is what he had wanted, just not the day before he was to graduate, and now that he was in the hands of the feds and wasn’t going anywhere before they got his story, he decided he might as well cooperate.

  “Okay, okay. You’ve got me. I’ve been a bad boy and now it’s time for the U.S. Government to punish me. I confess. I, Trevor Landon Kyle, am guilty of funneling millions of dollars from state unclaimed property funds, and I’m not certain I know how to retrieve it.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not certain? It’s a simple matter of reversing your program right?”

  “Well, not really. I’d have to have access to a computer to write a program to override my original one, which I might add, took me years to perfect.”

  “You’re shitting me, Kyle.”

  “I shit you not, Agent Hemphill. It’s going to take years to back out of the code and find the fifty random passwords to reverse the program and restore the funds to the fifty states they came from.”

  “I’ll arrange to get you computer time wherever you land, but in the meantime, we’re going to turn you over to the U.S. Attorney’s office so they can try your ass.”

  Oddly, Trevor breathed a sigh of relief when he heard these words. They processed him into the federal holding center to await trial. Two weeks into his stay, Trevor got a visit from Isaiah Bailey who, through his network of prison ministers, called in a favor to visit him.

  The guy was in tears when they ushered Trevor into the private visiting room. Isaiah grabbed him and gave him the biggest bear hug ever, sobbing so hard, Trevor couldn’t stop a few tears from falling from his own eyes as well. When Isaiah pulled himself together, they sat across from one another at a table much like the one that had been in the interrogation room at the holding center.

  “Trev, man. Tell me you didn’t do this.”

  Isaiah’s pain was so palpable, Trevor wanted to break down and tell him the truth, but if he did, Isaiah would confront Philip and the connections Phil had with the mob would put Isaiah and his family in jeopardy. Trevor couldn’t have that. Shanice was part of that family and he would protect them with his life, even if it meant losing his freedom for a while.

  “I can’t say that, Isaiah. I did this. No one else was involved.”

  Isaiah’s brow furrowed. “I know Phil gambled a lot. Are you sure he didn’t put you up to this?”

  Trevor swallowed and lied again to Isaiah’s
face. “No, Philip was too busy gambling to monitor my activities. After David died, I continued to hone my hacking skills and I rummaged through some of Philips work papers and found out about the unclaimed property funds each state held. Then I figured out how to cover my tracks, but I guess I didn’t cover them well enough. The feds have been monitoring my activities for a couple of years. Then finally before the day of my graduation, they had enough to arrest me.”

  “Trevor, you’re going to go to prison for this. You can’t steal that much money, which you’ve refused to restore, and expect them to give you probation. Can’t you do your hacking magic and restore the money?”

  “No. It’s going to take several years to do that.”

  “You know this has devastated Shanice. Nothing Brenda or I have said or done has consoled her. You’ve got to give her some closure. Since you seem so hell-bent on throwing your life away, don’t let her throw away hers. She was in line for valedictory honors, but your mess has her grades slipping, and she’s moping around the house.”

  “I’m locked up, Isaiah. What do you want me to do?”

  “Release her from the hope that there will ever be anything between you.”

  Isaiah’s words shredded his heart, but Trevor held his face impassive as he responded to the pastor’s request. “Okay.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Trevor! Oh my God, Trevor, tell me this is some case of mistaken identity. You didn’t really take that money. Did you?”

  Trevor was elated to hear Shanice’s voice over the phone, even though she was clearly in some distress over what he’d done, but he couldn’t reassure her otherwise. He also could not go easy on her. Isaiah wanted a clean break so she could have a chance at a normal life—without Trevor in it.