“Mom—”
“No, let me finish. I always took it for granted. And not just my looks, but people. You, your father. And now Nico.”
My hackles rose. Why did she have to mention that jerk? I couldn’t tell her that we thought he might’ve tried to have her killed to collect insurance money. But maybe I could find out why she had taken out the policy in the first place.
“Mom, speaking of Nico, tell me about this insurance policy you took out.”
“You mean the life insurance policy?”
“Yeah. If you were going to take out a life insurance policy, wouldn’t it make more sense for you to designate your next of kin as beneficiary?”
“You mean you think you should have been the beneficiary?”
Crap. I hadn’t meant for that to sound the way it sounded. “No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, yeah, it’s what I mean, but I’m not after any money from you. But why would you name a boyfriend? He wasn’t even your fiancé.”
“I figured we’d be married eventually.”
“I didn’t know you were planning to marry again.”
She sighed. “For a long time I never thought I would. After that idiot Neal Harmon stole all my money, and then when your father refused to take me back after that. But Nico was different.”
“Really? How was he different?”
“He wasn’t after my money. After all, I didn’t have any. At least not much, anyway.”
“Dad was never after money.”
“Oh, I know that. But he didn’t want me.”
“That was ten years ago. What made you decide that Nico might be worth marrying?”
“He was very good to me. He bought me presents, flowers. He made me feel like I was important to him.”
“So you decided to take out an insurance policy and named him as beneficiary because he gave you flowers?” I shook my head.
“Actually, the policy was his idea.”
Why was I not surprised? “Why would that be his idea? Is there something you’re not telling me? Is your health bad?”
“Of course not, silly. If my health were bad, I wouldn’t have been able to get the policy in the first place.”
She had me there. Frankly, there was only one reason why Nico would’ve wanted to take out the insurance policy on my mother—so that he could eventually benefit from it. How could I get her to see that? And in her fragile state, did I even want to?
“Why do you think he made that suggestion? I mean, to take out the policy and make him the beneficiary.”
“Well, it was his idea to take out the policy because I’m not getting any younger, so it was a good idea to get life insurance now while there were no issues.”
“Okay, that actually makes sense. But no one is depending on you, Mom. Dad and I are self-supporting. When there’s no one depending on you, there’s no reason to take out insurance on your life.”
“Well, it made sense to me. I could get the policy now, and it’s amazing how cheap term life is from some companies.”
“So you decided to get the policy, and he wanted you to make him the beneficiary?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no, that was my idea.”
I arched my eyebrows. Her idea? “Yes. He suggested you, Jade. Or your father.”
“Then why didn’t you choose one of us?”
“I did. I chose you. But then I started thinking that the one rock in my life for the last several months had been Nico.”
“The last several months? You named a man your beneficiary when you’d only known him a few months? Not even a year?”
“Well, yes. After I chose you, Nico and I talked about the future. He told me he loved me and that he planned for us to live our lives together, and that maybe, since we were going to be married anyway, it might make more sense to make him the beneficiary. Then we wouldn’t have to change it later.”
“A-ha. So it was his idea after all.”
“Oh, no. It was my decision.”
And once again, my mother had been played by a man. It wasn’t bad enough that her second husband had sucked her dry of all of her life savings. Now this lying jerk had come to suck the life out of her, literally. But I couldn’t press it right now. She was clearly getting tired.
“All right. I understand.” I didn’t, but what good would it do to let her know that? “I think we’ve talked enough. You need some rest.”
She closed her eyes and sighed. “I’m so sorry, Jade. For everything. When Nico comes back, he’ll explain it all to you.”
When Nico comes back. My poor mother. Still as naïve as the day she was born.
“I’m sure he will. Don’t worry about it, Mom. Right now, all you have to worry about is getting rest so you can heal properly.”
When she had drifted off to sleep, I went back out to the waiting area and told my father about our conversation.
“He’s a slippery fellow, that Nico, huh?” my father said.
“He seems to be. I wish she could see him for what he is.”
“When he doesn’t come back, she’ll have no choice but to see it.”
“I just don’t understand.”
“Well, your mother has two faults. The first one is that she is as vain as they come.”
I let out a laugh. “Really? Hadn’t noticed that.”
“Second one is that she has a hard time seeing people for who they really are. It happened with that second husband of hers, and now it’s clearly happening with this Nico. You see, they both showered her with affection, compliments, gifts, and she falls for it every time. That’s why she and I never worked.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s no doubt Brooke is beautiful. She was a knockout when I met her, Jade. Amazing. But I saw beneath her looks. I knew she wasn’t perfect, and I loved her anyway. I never made her flaws any secret. But she didn’t want to be a real person in my eyes. She wanted to be a princess, a beautiful woman who had no flaws—she wanted to be Brooke Bailey, supermodel—and that’s how she wanted me to feel about her.”
“But you loved her.”
“I did. I loved her. Flaws and all. But she couldn’t accept that I saw her flaws.”
“Still, I feel bad that you couldn’t be with the woman you loved, especially when she wanted you back.”
“We’ve been over that before, sweetie. You were my priority then. You’re still my priority now. See? Your mother had her priorities all screwed up. Clearly, she still does.”
“She did tell me she wanted to try again with me. And she admitted she had taken a lot of things for granted in her life.”
My father nodded. “It’s all a step in the right direction, that’s for sure. A brush with death has a way of making people see what they’ve previously been blind to.”
“If only she could see Nico for who he really is.”
“She will, sweetie. Eventually. But she has to figure that out for herself. Neither you nor I will be able to convince her of it.”
I sighed. As usual, my father was right. The man had common sense to a fault.
“You know, I wish you could’ve known your mother when she was younger. She was so full of life. She wanted the world on a platter, and she thought she had it for a while. But fame and fortune are fleeting things, Jade. What’s important is people. The people who love us, who need us, who make us feel emotion. That’s what’s important in life.”
My heart swelled. My father had never been a rich man, but he surely was rich in the area of wisdom. I reached over to pat his hand, but before I could, my cell phone buzzed.
“Excuse me.” I grabbed my phone out of my purse.
Shit. It was Ted Morse again.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Talon
So here I was, again, gripping the arms of the green recliner in Dr. Carmichael’s office.
Since I had to stay in Grand Junction until seven p.m. anyway, to meet Shem back over at the body shop, I figured I might as well do something constructive. Dr. Ca
rmichael had been amenable to meeting me on weekends in the past, so I’d given her a quick call. She agreed to meet me for an impromptu session.
“What do you want to talk about today, Talon?”
I shook my head. “Hell if I know.”
“Have you thought about what we talked about last time? About why you wanted to survive even when you thought you didn’t want to?”
“Not really. I mean, clearly I wanted to survive. I did everything they made me do in order to survive. Even though most of the time I wished I were dead.”
“There’s a big difference between wishing you were dead and actually being dead. I know that doesn’t make sense, but the subconscious understands it.”
I let out a shaky breath. “I’m glad. I mean…I’m glad I didn’t die.”
She smiled. “I know you are. I’m glad you didn’t too. You will get through this. You’ve come so far already. I’m amazed at your progress.”
She paused, and I had no idea what to say to that. Thank you? That seemed trite. I desperately hoped she’d start speaking again.
She did.
“So you said on the phone you think you’ve identified two of your attackers now.”
“Yeah. I can’t be sure, but things sure seem to add up.”
“And both those men have disappeared?”
“Yep. And get this. One of them is my half uncle.”
“What?” She raised her brows.
“Yeah. Jade’s boss, the sleazebag district attorney. Larry Wade. Jade did some investigation, and I was able to confirm it. He and my mother had the same father. It was covered up years ago, and I can’t figure out why.”
“That is odd.”
I shook my head. “I’ve been over and over it in my mind, Doc. The only thing I can come up with is that my father and mother somehow managed to cover up our relationship with Larry because they knew what kind of man he was.”
“It’s possible.”
“But if they knew what kind of man he was, maybe they knew…” I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. Had my mother and father actually known the identity of one of my attackers? And had they let him off the hook? No, that couldn’t have happened.
“Are you suggesting that they knew he was one of the men who kidnapped you?”
“I don’t know. But why else would they want to cover up the relationship to him?”
“We can only speculate, Talon. Both of your parents are dead, so we can’t ask them. And unfortunately, you’re going to have to accept the fact that some of these questions may never be answered.”
“I guess. But damn, it sticks in my craw. How could a relative… I mean, I was his nephew.”
Dr. Carmichael leaned forward. “You can’t trouble yourself with those questions. There will never be an answer to satisfy you. It’s highly likely that this man, this Larry, is innocent. There’s no way to know if he indeed was one of the perpetrators. But if he was? These men were psychopaths. It wouldn’t have mattered if you were his nephew or even his son. He didn’t see you as a human being. These men saw you as a toy, a plaything. So don’t try to make sense out of it. It’s senseless.”
“I just want to understand.”
“My point is that you can’t. The only one who can understand a psychopath is another psychopath. It’s better that you don’t understand. Trust me. But you do need to accept that. A normal person with a normal personality can never understand the horrors committed by the criminally insane. They’re not meant to.”
“But why me?”
Dr. Carmichael shook her head. “That’s another question that may never be answered. You were in the right place at the right time. Or rather the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“If only I hadn’t gone looking for Luke.”
“But you did. And you suffered the consequences. ‘What ifs’ don’t do anyone any good, Talon. All you can do is accept the past and move forward.”
I knew that. God, I’d heard it enough—not just from Dr. Carmichael, but from my brothers.
“You say I’ve come a long way. What makes you say that? I don’t feel particularly different.”
“Are you kidding? You’ve come a very long way. You can now talk about this without losing consciousness or sending yourself into a flashback. That’s huge.”
True. The first time I’d come to see Dr. Carmichael, I’d ended up in the ER after a fainting spell. She was right.
“And you’ve opened up. You’ve told Jade you love her. You’ve told your sister about your experiences.”
“And I’ve been able to say I’m sorry.”
“Did that trouble you before?”
I nodded. “It’s not that I wasn’t sorry. And it’s not that I didn’t know when I should be sorry. It’s just that I had to force the words out.”
“And it’s easier now?”
“Yeah, I don’t know why, but it is.”
“I think I know why that is.”
“Why?”
She looked me straight in the eye. “Because you stopped blaming others. You’ve stopped resenting others because this didn’t happen to them. It happened to you.”
I looked down at my hands clenching the armchair. Had I done that? Had I really? I closed my eyes. “That’s a heavy statement to make, Doctor.”
“Yes, it is. And look at how you’re dealing with it. Your fingers are clenched around that armchair, but you’re not storming out of here. You’re not yelling at me that I’m wrong. That’s got to say something.”
“I never thought…”
“Of course you didn’t. This would’ve been on an entirely subliminal level. Look at your brothers, for example. You love them, and you never thought you blamed them for any of this. But deep inside, you resented that it had to happen to you instead of them.”
“That’s not true. I’m really glad this didn’t happen to either of my brothers. I mean that.”
“I know you do. That’s not what I mean. You wouldn’t wish this on anyone. I absolutely believe that. But in the back of your mind, you were resentful. You were resentful that it was you. Why not someone else? Why not some other kid you didn’t even know? You may be thankful that it wasn’t Ryan or Jonah, but in the back of your mind, you wonder, why not one of them? Why did it have to be you?”
Could she be right? “And you think that explains why I had such a problem saying I was sorry?”
“I think it explains it very well. Don’t you?”
I shook my head, my lips trembling. “God, I never meant to…”
“I know. The subconscious mind is very powerful, though. And the good news is that you’re healing. Now you can tell people you’re sorry. You’re moving forward. You will heal.”
“I hope so. I’ve been carrying this burden for so long. I never thought I would ever be free of it. I don’t know that I ever can be totally free of it.”
“No, you’ll never be completely free of it. It will always be part of your history, part of your psyche, part of what makes you Talon Steel. But what you can do is let it stay in your past, move forward, let yourself love and be loved. You’ve come such a long way already. I know it may not feel like you have, but just the fact that you can say you’re sorry to someone. That’s huge.”
Was she right? And then something dawned on me—like a light bulb moment. I was amazed I hadn’t realized it before now. “Wow,” I said aloud.
“What is it?”
“I can’t remember the last time I went to the kitchen at night to stare at a glass of water.”
* * *
The experts I’d retained before I went to Dr. Carmichael’s met me at Shem’s body shop at seven. We entered around back, and Shem let us in the locked gate.
“The car’s over here,” Shem said.
He led us to a black Bentley. A fucking Bentley. I was no stranger to nice cars, though I preferred my old pickup to my Mercedes-Benz.
“Shem,” I said, “thanks for letting us in. This is Bill Friedman and Clark Tyson. They�
��ve agreed to take a look and see if the airbag was tampered with.”
“Go right ahead,” Shem said.
“Thanks.” I handed Shem some bills. “For your trouble.”
“I’ll just be over here looking the other way.” He ambled back inside the shop.
The two guys looked at the car for about half an hour and then came back to me.
“I wish we had better news for you, Mr. Steel,” Friedman said. “Because the car has been completely rebuilt since the accident and a new airbag put in, there’s just no way to tell if the original was tampered with. Do you think Shem in there has the original airbag? The one that didn’t deploy?”
“I don’t have a clue, but we can ask him.”
I motioned to Shem through the window.
He came out. “Yeah?”
“The guys here can’t find any problem with the airbag. Nothing indicated it had been tampered with.”
“I was afraid of that. I mean, we completed the work. We had no reason to suspect any wrongdoing, so we didn’t look for anything.”
“Do you have the original airbag? The one that didn’t deploy? I assume you put in a new functioning airbag.”
“We sure did. I’ll have to look around and see if we still have the old airbag. It was trash. I don’t know why we would have kept it.”
“Do you remember anything odd about the airbag when you removed it?” Friedman asked.
“Can’t say that I do, but again, I wasn’t looking for anything.”
“Sensor could’ve been bad, or the airbag could’ve been an old airbag with holes in it,” Tyson said. “Anything like that?”
Shem shook his head again. “I wish I could help you fellows. But like I said, we weren’t looking for anything.”
“Likely you’d have noticed if the airbag was bad itself,” Friedman said. “I’m going to have to assume it might’ve been a faulty sensor. And now that the new one’s been installed, we have no way of proving the sensor was faulty in the first place. Even if it was a faulty sensor, that doesn’t mean someone put it there. It’s a machine. Parts go bad on their own sometimes.”
I sighed. “Do normal people off the street know how to put in airbag sensors?”
Possession: Steel Brothers Saga: Book Three Page 15