Delusive

by Courtney Lane

  Instead, he gave me a nod of approval, signaling he would keep his distance while I did what I had to.

  As I removed my wedding set and put it in the pocket of my skirt, I walked through the store, ignoring Claudia as she questioned why I was back so early from my break.

  Through the storage room, I took a sharp left and exited through the emergency door. I walked at a steady pace until I found Skylar standing in the narrow alley of the delivery access area.

  She began to cry when she saw me and threw her arms around me.

  I immediately shoved her away.

  “I can explain everything, Hanley,” she sniveled. “I promise. I never meant to hurt you.” Her eyes widened and darted around in paranoia. “Did anyone follow you? We can’t be seen together.”

  “No one followed me,” I replied coldly. “I thought you would’ve skipped town by now.”

  “I did—I came back. It doesn’t matter.” She quickly changed gears. “I’m so sorry for what I did.”

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “I don’t accept your apology.”

  She sobbed. “You were the only real friend I had in this town. Most don’t want to hang around with me because they think I’m the town whore who will sleep with anything besides a dog or a kid.”

  “There are a lot of things I would call you,” I snarled, “but I don’t think whore would be one of them. The word gets thrown around a little too much anyhow. You…double-crossed me, Skylar. You had to know I had nothing to do with what happened that night at the club. Besides, with the way you were, I thought you…I don’t know what I thought you were. What I knew was that what happened between us was consensual.”

  She nodded, disclosing to me that she agreed. “I’m sorry about your father. I know how much he meant to you. I wanted to call you so many times after I heard about what happened, but I was dealing with my own shit.” Tears streamed down her cheeks as she sobbed. “My mother is dead, Hanley.”

  “What?” I asked, genuinely shocked.

  “I don’t know if it was her grieving over that piece of shit Milton or if all the stuff that happened to her way back when finally got to her. She was in the trailer, stinking it up, for a few days since I left and came back. The stuff on the table in front of her…I think she shot herself up with black tar and couldn’t handle it or something.” She cried harder. “I have no one left.”

  “I’m…sorry about your mother.” I rocked on my heels, pushing down the need to physically comfort her.

  “Thanks.” She cleared up her tears with her fingertips and began to collect herself. “I…missed you.”

  “The woman you accused of giving you a date-rape drug and forcing you to eat her pussy?” I asked with condescension. “You missed her?”

  “Can you please just listen?”

  I shook my head, looking up at the sky. “I don’t know why I bothered to chase you down. I’m also wondering why you showed up to La Dentelle, knowing I still worked here, and ran away from me.”

  “Penelope called me and told me I had a chance to get my job back. I called to check if you were working, Claudia said you weren’t. Both of those bitches lied to me.”

  “Hard to believe,” I replied. “Whatever is between us, I am sorry about your mother.” I started to walk away.

  “Natanael scares the shit out of me. He makes me do things for him. He has that way, you know. He makes people do things for him, even when they don’t want to.”

  I turned on my heels, glaring at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Roth,” she threw out his name and waited for a reaction. I didn’t give her one. “You knew him, right? You wouldn’t be in this town if he didn’t try to burn up…whatever that was, would you? That’s how you found out Natanael had another son, right?”

  I blinked a few times, trying my hardest not to let on that her information threw me.

  She fiddled with her hands. “The club. What happened at the house. It was all Natanael. He wanted to brand you with the crazy bitch-whore label and turn Elias away from you. That night at the house, they were just supposed to scare you, not touch you.”

  “You were naïve.”

  “I know,” she admitted solemnly. “I didn’t expect what did happen to happen. When Elias and his bodyguards came into the house, he made me watch while they—” Her eyes watered as she roughly rubbed them, smearing her eye makeup underneath her eyes. “I still have nightmares over it.”

  “You were never my friend.” I stepped forward, pointing at her.

  “You don’t understand.” Her eyes pleaded with me as her voice trembled. “Natanael is a monster. You’ve seen my mother when she was still alive. She looked a hot mess. Would you believe she was a star-student in high school, going places once? You know who got her hooked on drugs? He did. My mother had sense enough to turn him down when he propositioned her twenty-something years ago. Instead of letting it go, he drugged her, raped her…until he got tired of her. Until he got her pregnant.

  “He’s the reason she is the way she is now. He’s a bastard, and I’m so scared he’s going to do the same thing to me. The drug thing, not the rape thing. Between him and Elias, I had to keep my head down and do what they asked me to do.” She swept her tears from her cheeks. “Please, tell me you believe me. I never wanted to hurt you. I never meant to hurt you. But they threatened my mother. I couldn’t let Natanael or Elias hurt her. She’d been through enough. I still think, sometimes, that they had something to do with her death.”

  I didn’t know what to believe about what she said. She had lied to me enough times in the past to brand her as a pathological liar. Sighing, I ran my hands up to smooth my bun. “What happened in Cabo, Skylar? It’s time you told me.”

  “Please, don’t make me.” She sniffled and squeaked. “Elias would kill me if I told you everything. It’s bigger than me doing something stupid or someone making me think I did.”

  I looked around the alley, making sure Jaco remained hidden. “You need to tell me. It’s way past time.”

  She ran her hand through her hair manically, dismantling the victory roll in the front of her head. It flopped down on her forehead, forming an S-shaped curl.

  “Four of us—Elias, some Brazilian bimbo, Carter, and I—went to Cabo. Carter used to be what Jaco is right now…Elias’s best friend and number one bodyguard. All of us used to be friends way back when, if you could believe it. Carter took way too many drugs I didn’t even know the name of, and drank way too much one night. He spilled the tea on a lot of Elias’s secrets. I didn’t know if they were true, I thought he was just being an ass. I found out later, on my own, that he wasn’t full of shit.

  “Woke up the next morning, and Carter was dead. I was covered in blood, and I was holding a knife. I don’t remember hurting him. But there he was, next to me in bed, dead. There was so much fucking blood it soaked through the mattress.

  “I freaked out and went to Elias’s room. He was so calm and cool about it. He didn’t seem mad at me or anything. He took care of everything. He promised me I’d never see the inside of a prison cell. I didn’t know that meant I would have to be his bitch for a while. He asked me to do random things to spy on Natanael. I don’t know what he needed the information for, but I…needed leverage, too.”

  “Leverage for what?”

  “Natanael has a lot of kids, right?” She teetered on her heels with her shoulders slinking forward. “Well…I’m one of them. My mom got pregnant with me after one of the times he raped her. Natanael doesn’t know I’m his daughter.”

  Her information brought up my most poignant memory. I covered my mouth in shock…and then disgust. “But you…that night. Elias is your…half-brother?”

  “Before you throw up in your mouth, let me finish.” She pressed her palms out in the air in an attempt to calm me. “The son Natanael thinks wasn’t his, really is, and the one he thinks is, isn’t. Carter told me that the night he died. Hell, Keith lets it be known he hates Natanael’s guts.” She shrug
ged. “I don’t blame him for switching up DNA results with Elias, if that’s what he did.”

  “It’s almost hard to believe,” I said, my voice becoming lost in a sudden gust of wind.

  “It’s crazy, right?” she asked, breezily. “His favorite son, the one he loves above all his crazy number of kids, isn’t his biological.”

  “Elias…” Thoughts of Portugal and the man I saw Elias with swirled around my mind. Needing to make sense of the palpable closeness between Silvio and Elias, and Elias mentioning Silvio wanted to help take over Cari Enterprises, I swung for the fences. “Have you heard of a man named Silvio? Do you know if he is Elias’s real father?”

  “How did you know that?” she gasped, her mouth falling open.

  “Lucky guess,” I replied through clenched teeth.

  “Well guess who gets all of Natanael’s fortune? Once Natanael dies, Elias gets it all.”

  “So…Elias stole Keith’s results and made them his own? And to keep Keith happy he buys him and his wife whatever it is they want?” I questioned, the wheels of my slightly rusty deduction skills working overtime to find the answers and make sense of what she’d told me.

  She nodded yes. “Keith doesn’t care about the money, but Elias still takes care of him,” she explained.

  “Does Elias or Keith know that you’re one of Natanael’s kids?”

  “No one but me and my mother know—or knew. I guess it’s just me now.” Her eyes widened as she took a large step toward me. When I receded from her, she wrung her hands nervously. “Please, don’t tell anyone what I told you. I need this to stay quiet. If the Caris find out what I know—well, I don’t need to tell you how they deal with what they want gone.”

  “I won’t tell anyone.” I lied to her, because I wasn’t sure if all that she said could be believed. She had a horrible track record, being that I knew she’d told me a few white lies when we met. Not because I found out the truth, but because some of the things she told me turned out to be implausible. “I promise.”

  “You look sexy. You’re really working that La Dentelle corset.” She tried to joke with me while wearing an uneasy smile.

  My glower made her look down at her hands and stop her slow accession into joviality.

  She acknowledged my silent contempt, conceding her joke was misplaced by nodding. “I-I know things because of Natanael. Things that could help you like they helped Elias.”

  “Like?”

  “If you want to know what the Caris sell”—she paused to use air quotes—“go check out one of their construction sites. The ones where the buildings never seem to be completed. Go there, find what I’m talking about, and call a cop who isn’t in this town.”

  I turned to leave.

  “I don’t regret what happened that night,” she bellowed, slowing my exit. “D-do you?”

  I peered over my shoulder at her. “Why did you react the way you did?”

  “I was…confused,” she answered, appearing uncomfortable. “I still am. I’ve never been with a woman before. I didn’t know what to do about how I felt. Even with all the shit between us, I miss the hell out of our friendship. Even if we never go there again, with the sex stuff, I hope we can be friends again. If…Elias will even let us and won’t try to kill me. Have no clue why he hasn’t. But, there is that thing about my mom. I mean, black tar heroin? Ironic, right?”

  “I wonder about all of that, too,” I said under my breath and walked over to her. “If you want our friendship back, I need to know if I can trust you.”

  “Hell yeah.”

  I slipped the sugar packet from the pocket of my skirt and handed it to her. “I’m sure you know a few dealers. I need someone who works as the intermediary between the lab and the dealer.”

  “Why do you need that?”

  “Because I need to know what this is, and I need a drug lab that isn’t exactly in someone’s kitchen. They usually have supplies for mixing chemicals and testing the potency in the professional labs. Can you do it?”

  She stared sheepishly at the packet and ho-hummed for a while.

  “Skylar!” I said, growing impatient.

  She snatched the packet from my hands and nodded. “I know a friend of a friend who doubles as a lab geek in the daytime and a drug lab geek at night. I sucked him off once, and I know he’ll do anything for me to get another. I’ll see what he can find out.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  I WENT TO THE library across from the elementary school to do some research. Construction plans had to be filed with the city and posted for public record. It was easy to obtain a few copies of the blueprint records for every property owned under the Cari name. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Housing communities. Retail spaces. Many corporate buildings without basements. I recorded the sites that took the longest to complete. Upon deciding on the one that went on the longest as a place to visit, I took the bus instead of the Camaro there.

  I COULDN’T FIND anything strange about the site. It was just a building in the midst of construction with slats and no siding. The dirt was fresh and piled up to the ground floor on an even level. I pulled back the sheeting and the moment one foot stepped on the ground floor I knew what was wrong. Buildings without basements employed slab on grade, this one did not. I stepped back looking around for a shovel or something to prove my assumptions correct. The walls weren’t concrete, and they were above ground. I checked my phone to make sure I recalled things correctly. The blueprints were a lie, and the building inspector who signed off on the blueprints was likely paid off by Cari Properties. I took pictures of everything to use them as evidence, if needed.

  After taking enough pictures to incriminate Natanael, I returned to the car and set the navigation system for Cari Properties Headquarters.

  THE GRAND LOBBY swam with people in suits milling about. I looked at the board in the elevator lobby to search for a familiar name. I didn’t find Natanael’s name, but I did find Kirsten’s.

  On the way to the elevator, my phone buzzed with a timely call from Skylar.

  “Hey, my friend of a friend found out what that stuff you gave me was. Why the hell are you carting around poison in sugar packages?”

  “I know it’s poison. I need to find out what kind it is.” I added a lie, “I bought a stack of them and I need to make sure of what they are.”

  “My friend says it’s hemlock. Lethal stuff that in the right dose can kill someone in less than ten minutes. I think I remember him saying something about respiratory failure. So…what do you need it for?”

  I hung up on her, turned off my phone, and took the elevator up to the twentieth floor. I knew Skylar’s mind would go wild with the possibilities. If she was predictable, she would’ve thought what I needed her to—that the poison was for Elias. Her assumption would put me closer to uncovering the veracity of everything she’d ever told me.

  She would never need to know the real reason I entrusted her with finding out the information.

  A few different businesses were on the floor, with the largest space given to Cari Properties. The moment I stepped beyond the smoky double glass doors, I was faced with a narrow hall. Offices encased in smoky glass walls lined either side of the corridor. A large espresso-stained desk stood at the end, set up in front of an office that extended the entire space of the east wall.

  “May I help you?” asked the graying receptionist who sat at the desk.

  “Yes, I’m Mrs. Cari’s daughter-in-law,” I informed her with a pleasant smile. “I wanted to take her to lunch.”

  Her mouth twisted up as she regarded me from head-to-toe. “Mrs. Cari doesn’t have a daughter-in-law. Who are you again?”

  The door to the main office swung ajar. Kirsten stood in the doorway wearing a royal blue pantsuit with her hair up in a tight bun. “Hanley, is there something I can do for you?” she asked, smiling wryly as she plodded toward me. “I’m very busy at the moment.”

  I maintained my simper, keeping my posture broad. “I really need to s
peak with you and it might take a while.”

  “You can make an appointment with Mrs. Cunningham.” She nodded to her receptionist, directing me to do what she’d advised.

  “It’s about Elias,” I said with urgency.

  Successfully garnering her attention, she turned on a dime and headed back inside her office. With her hand up in the air, she gesticulated over her shoulder, directing me to follow her inside.

  Upon walking inside her office, I closed the door behind me.

  She ambled to the far side of her office and stared out at the downtown L.A. landscape through her floor to ceiling windows. Sighing, she turned around to regard me with arms folded. “You’re very different for Elias, but you’ve become the equivalent of a much-needed wrecking ball.”

  I sat in the chair opposite the desk and clasped my hands together on my lap. “From what Elias has said about you, you don’t really interact with him much.”

  “True. It doesn’t mean I don’t research the women he dates. It’s a necessity that I know who he allows in his life. That includes you, Hanley.”

  “It was made known I’m not his typical type.”

  She laughed. “You are most certainly different for him in a lot of ways. You remind me a bit of myself when I was your age. Ambitious. Ruthless. Strong. Alluring enough to distract a man from his duty. My son doesn’t know left from right since he met you. His work has suffered. His views have changed. You were everything I needed you to be for him.” She pulled out the chair from her desk and slipped into it. Crossing her legs, she folded her hands over her lap. “I won’t be keen on calling you my daughter-in-law until you two have a proper wedding in a church in front of family and friends.”

  That was unexpected. She made me believe there was a chance we could actually have a relationship. It made me rethink her position in everything. Maybe she truly was on her son’s side. Maybe she realized she had abandoned him and wanted to right her wrongs.