He should have been doing so many things.
Hell, at this point, maybe his dad would even have met a new woman if he were still alive. Found someone else. Fallen in love again.
Ryan scoffed as he drove to the office, wondering how such a ridiculous notion had appeared in his head out of nowhere. Because love was a fucking lie.
* * *
He slapped the contract on his brother’s desk. “Boom. Done. Another deal for us,” he said, parking himself in the black leather chair in Michael’s office. Guitar-heavy rock music pulsed from the laptop. His brother used to play the electric guitar and had dabbled in rock bands in high school and college. A workaholic with little time to play now, he still assaulted his eardrums with his favorite tunes.
Michael arched an eyebrow. “You don’t say. Maybe I should keep you around.”
Ryan rolled his eyes. “Hey, fifty-fifty, I could say the same of you,” he said, meaning their joint ownership of Sloan Protection Resources.
“Yeah, I know. Just giving you a hard time.” Michael cast a cursory glance at the pages on his desk. He tapped his index finger against them. “Looks good. I see White Box is getting a full suite of security services. This is the company you met with in San Francisco a few weeks ago, right?”
Ryan nodded. He’d been slated to visit his mom in prison with Shannon at the time, but their mom had gotten the dates wrong, and Shannon wound up going solo. Ryan had been in San Francisco instead, meeting with the head of White Box, a guy named Charlie Stravinsky, and his right-hand man, Curtis. Charlie owned some restaurants, including a once-popular Chinese eatery, but had now converted them to private clubs, the kind that catered to gentleman with big wallets and hearty appetites for both women and bets. That kind of business needed security, and since White Box was expanding from San Francisco to Vegas, the firm had reached out to Ryan and Michael.
“And you said his VP of biz dev is coming in to sign the papers?”
“One p.m. today. Guy named Curtis,” Ryan said, tapping his watch. “He’s local here in Vegas. It’s on you for the final signatures. I worked on that deal all day Saturday and Sunday.”
“Aww, poor baby,” Michael said, breaking out an imaginary violin and running the bow across the strings.
“Whatever,” Ryan said, waving a hand dismissively. “Point being, I’m out of here the rest of the day.”
“You going to see 347-921?”
Michael didn’t even use their mom’s name, just her inmate number. At first it had rankled Ryan, and he’d told his brother as much. Use her name at least, he’d said. Michael never did, and Ryan had learned to let it go. Now, he was used to the way Dora Prince had been reduced to digits.
“I am.”
His brother made a scornful sound as he shook his head. “Why do you waste your time with that?”
“Why? You’re seriously asking why?”
Michael nodded as a guitar riff played through the speakers. Ryan rose, planted his palms on Michael’s desk, and stared at him, wondering if he was crazy. How did his brother not get it? “Because I want to know why the fuck the case is open. Don’t you?”
“She won’t tell you shit.”
Ryan stabbed his index finger against his sternum. “But I’m the only one she might tell something. That’s why I’m going. Because I’m the one who sees her, besides Shan. So if there is something to say, or someone else involved, I’m the one she’s going to talk to.”
Michael softened his tone but still held his ground. “Look, man. I get it. I understand she did some kind of number on you and convinced you she might not be guilty—but she’s so fucking guilty, Ryan. Day is day, and night is night, and our mother had our father killed. Maybe there was someone else involved, maybe Detective Winston is sniffing around for a middleman, or something between her and Stefano, but I guarantee that you’re not going to exonerate inmate number 347-921.”
Ryan gritted his teeth as frustration seared his nervous system, running a wild course through his body. “Here’s the bottom line. Someone knows something about our family that we don’t,” he said through tight lips. “I want to know what that something is, and I’m not going to stop until I find out.”
Michael stood up and clapped Ryan on the shoulder. “You’re a determined bastard. But you’re my determined bastard. So don’t speed like Sanders. We need you squeaky clean here at the company. No tickets, no record, nothing.”
“Don’t worry your pretty little head. I’m never dirty,” he said with a wink.
Michael tugged him in for a quick hug. “Love you, bro.”
“Love you, too,” Ryan grumbled.
This. His brothers and sister. His grandmother. His dog. That was real love to him—the only kind he trusted.
Chapter Eighteen
An elderly woman with curly gray hair opened the faded red door of the ranch-style home and waved goodbye to the man inside. “See you at the recital.”
“You’re going to be great. Your ‘Für Elise’ is fantastic.”
The voice blasted Ryan back in time, like a slingshot to the end of junior high. Luke Carlton, older, grayer, and paunchier, turned to Ryan as the woman ambled down the steps on the way to her car.
“Ryan Sloan,” Luke said and extended a hand. He wasn’t surprised to see Ryan, nor should he be.
Ryan had made an appointment for a piano lesson. He hadn’t used the name he’d had growing up—Ryan Paige-Prince—but Luke clearly knew who he was. He suspected that was a result of the reopened investigation.
Even so, Ryan’s legs felt wobbly and his stomach plummeted. It was as if he was having an out-of-body experience and someone else was grasping the palm of this brown-eyed man in khaki slacks and a sky blue Tommy Bahama shirt.
His mother’s ex-lover.
“Come in,” Luke said, letting go and gesturing to the home he’d lived in for the last five years. Before this meeting, Ryan had run a security check on Luke Carlton. He was only a few years older than Dora Prince, and he’d bought this home with his wife. Ryan didn't know how long Luke had been married, though.
“My kids are at camp,” Luke said as they walked through the living room. Okay, he’d been with her long enough to procreate. “Wife’s out grocery shopping. I take it you’re not really interested in a piano lesson?”
Ryan shrugged a shoulder. “Sometimes I think about taking it up.”
“Lots of adults do. Half my business these days is from adults who decide they’ve always wanted to learn how to play.” He guided Ryan through the kitchen. The sink was stacked with plates. Eggs had been served for breakfast. A loaf of rye bread was on the counter, a twist tie keeping it closed. An odd sense of the surreal descended on him. Everything about Luke’s home was so…normal. From the blinds that hung on the living room windows, to the beige couch with an indentation on it in front of a large TV screen, to scattered pictures of his kids and his wife, many of them on a beach, playing in the sand and surf.
Luke led him to an office area, with a baby grand piano, a couch, a chair, and a writing table.
“We might as well chat here,” Luke said and claimed a spot on the piano bench. He gestured to a wooden chair.
Ryan hardly wanted to sit. He didn’t want to stand. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. He stuffed them into the pockets of his pants. He was used to talking to clients, to pitching the need for security services, to giving orders to troops in Europe during his days in the army.
But talking to his mother’s former lover from eighteen years ago gave uncomfortable new meaning. His throat was parched, and his tongue barely worked. But somehow, he found the ability to speak. “My dad’s case was reopened. The detective asked me about you and your relationship with my mom.” Ryan jumped right in, hitting the key points without mincing words.
Luke nodded. “I am aware of that. I met him, too. Winston. Seems sharp.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, simply to say something. “What does he know? Did you tell him how you knew my mom?�
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“I told him we were in love, yes. And that it had been a mistake, since she was married,” Luke said, clasping his hands together. “I still ask God every day for forgiveness for having fallen in love with a married woman.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Ryan said, because he wasn’t here to talk about contrition for cheating. “I’m talking about her drug problem. The cocaine. That she got it from Stefano. Do they know?”
This was the first time he’d said those words aloud in nearly twenty years—drugs. Cocaine. That Stefano was her dealer. When he was in seventh grade, a year before the shooting, Ryan came home early from school on a half-day that his mom had forgotten about. He found her cutting lines at her sewing table. With a rolled-up dollar bill, she’d leaned in and inhaled a line of white powder off her Singer machine.
He stood in the door, his jaw hanging open. “Mom?”
She raised her chin. Her green eyes were glassy, but the stunned look in them said she hadn’t expected him home.
“Please don’t tell anyone,” she said and started crying. She stood up and clasped her arms around him. “Please, this is my last time. I’m trying to stop. I swear I’m going to stop. I promise.”
At that age, you believed your parents. You believed your mom even if she had powder up her nose. What else was he supposed to think? He was barely thirteen then, and all he knew was that his parents had been fighting, they barely had any money, and they lived in a shitty neighborhood.
She’d clutched him as if her life depended on it and begged him to never breathe a word.
In the months that had followed, she’d seemed determined to prove herself to him. She’d told him she was getting help, that she was going to Narcotics Anonymous, and that she had a sponsor for counseling and guidance. “Please, Ry. I’m trying so hard, baby. I’m trying so hard to fight these demons,” she’d say to him at night as he got under the gray cover in his twin bed. “Don’t tell your daddy please. He’d just worry. And don’t tell your brothers and sister. I’m so ashamed, and I want to get well again. I’ve got a sponsor and I’m going to meetings, and I swear I’m going to kick this habit. I owe some money to the guy I used to buy from, and I’m working extra for the local gymnastics team to earn enough to pay him back. Once I do, I swear I’ll be free of this.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” Ryan had said, battening down the hatches, locking up his brain, some sort of self-preservation kicking in. It was all he’d been able to do. Zip it up, keep it quiet, and never speak of what he saw.
He never said a word.
Even when she met Luke at those meetings. Even when she fell for another recovered addict. Even when she was first questioned by police, and it all came to light that she’d not only been having an affair with that former addict at the time of the murder, but that she’d made a string of phone calls for two months to a man named Jerry Stefano. Why was she talking to him so much, the cops wanted to know?
She’d begged Ryan again to stay quiet. She’d shut the door to his room, planted her hands on his shoulders, and given him instructions. “They haven’t found the person who shot your daddy. And they’re asking me all kinds of questions, and I’m petrified they’re going to try to frame me for his murder. You know what we talked about?”
Ryan had nodded as fear rippled through him.
“If the police know I used drugs, if they know I bought them from Jerry Stefano, it will look so much worse for me. They know I’ve been on the phone with Jerry for months. I’m going to have to tell a lie about all those phone calls. He’s been calling to collect money, and if they know I was buying from him, they’ll paint me as a druggie, murderer wife.”
“But wouldn’t they see you’re innocent if you tell them about the drugs? Won’t it be better to have them know you bought drugs than to have them think you planned a murder?” he’d asked, trying desperately to understand why she didn’t confess her secret.
She shook her head. Vehemently. “No. Never. Trust me. It will look worse, and I have to beat this rap. So I have no choice but to lie about Jerry. Luke is the only other one who knows the truth about those phone calls.”
Luke and Ryan.
That was all.
Now, years later as an adult, Ryan was asking the only other person who knew if he’d broken their silence. “Did you tell the detective that Stefano was her dealer?”
Luke shook his head, rose, and turned up the air conditioning in his piano room. The sound of the whirring grew louder, as if Luke was using it as a buffer to cover up this conversation. Ryan bristled inside, because he so often did the same thing. He’d cranked up tunes in his car when he’d told Shannon details of the case.
Luke held up his palm, as if he were swearing in court. “I did not say a word. Her last wish before she went away was for me to keep that secret,” he said, his voice trembling. “She was terrified of Stefano. You never met him, Ryan, and I pray you never do. You bump into a guy like Stefano on the street and you run the other way.” There was rabid fear in his eyes as he offered this strange piece of advice.
Ryan crossed his arms. He didn’t want advice from his mom’s lover. Besides, he wasn’t afraid. Not of Stefano and not of men like the scumbag who’d killed his father. “I’m not scared of men who deal drugs to fucking mothers and children,” he said, practically spitting out the words.
Luke’s gray eyes widened, and he grabbed Ryan’s arm. “She was petrified of what would happen if people knew she was connected to him,” he pleaded.
“But their plan didn’t work. Their cover-up failed,” Ryan said, reminding him that the lies his mom had told didn’t save her from jail. The truth would have tethered her more closely to the Royal Sinners, so she’d fashioned a fable. She’d said all those phone calls to Stefano were for tree trimming, and he’d said the same. That was Stefano’s day job—a laborer at a tree-trimming company, so when she was asked about the string of calls, she’d claimed she’d hired him “under the table” to clean up some overgrown branches. It was the kind of work she couldn’t have her teenage sons do since it required specialty saws and tools. That was all true and completely plausible.
And the tale seemed to work at first for both Stefano and Ryan’s mom. For a brief while, their story did the trick. Botched robbery—that was how the murder looked to authorities, and Stefano seemed clean.
Until the detectives found Stefano’s fingerprints on the gun he’d disposed of, and the man started singing about how he’d been hired for much more than tree-trimming.
Stefano served it all up, and the lie unraveled.
He told the cops he’d been contracted to kill. He said the calls to Dora weren’t to cut overgrown branches—they were to plan the murder and to make it look like a robbery gone wrong. He alleged he’d been promised ten percent of Thomas Paige’s life insurance policy if he pulled it off.
The life insurance company went next, supplying more evidence. They confirmed that Dora had called a few months before the death to make a “routine check” on the beneficiary information on behalf of her husband, then six days after the murder to try to liquidate the funds.
In her defense, Dora maintained her husband had asked her to check on the policy and that was why she’d phoned the company months before his death. For him, she’d said. He was busy working, and asked her to check up on various pieces of paperwork. As for accessing the payout, she pointed out that if she’d killed him for money wouldn’t she have called hours later for the cash? No, she’d waited a week.
A week. She hung her hope on time.
The jury didn’t buy it.
She could have admitted to the drugs then, but it was too late for her. The case was so far beyond drugs. The state had Stefano and his testimony, they had the life insurance proof, and they had circumstantial evidence—she was having an affair at the time of the murder.
They had her, beyond a reasonable doubt, the jury said.
Admitting to drug using and buying, to money owed to dealers, wouldn�
��t have done a damn thing to change the fate of either Stefano or Ryan’s mom.
“Don’t mention the drugs,” she’d begged Ryan before she left for Stella McLaren. “It won’t make a difference now. I will keep fighting to be free, and it will look worse for me if this gets out. I’ll try to find a way to get the guys who really did it. I have to take the fall now, but please know I will be appealing. I will do everything I can to be with my children again.”
But why was Luke still covering up?
Ryan shrugged off Luke’s grip. “The lies didn’t work. So why are you protecting Stefano?”
“I’m not protecting Jerry,” Luke said insistently, pointing to the door, waving wildly beyond. “I’m protecting my family—my wife and kids—from Stefano’s friends on the outside. His friends protected him, Ryan. That’s what a Royal Sinner does. The goddamn ink on their arms says that. Protect Our Own. He has friends who have been looking out for his interests, and I am not about to serve up any more details on him and have those friends come after my family now.” Luke rubbed a hand across his jaw, glanced away, then turned his gaze back to Ryan. His eyes were softer now. “Look, I made some mistakes when I was a younger man. I made some terrible mistakes. I left town to start fresh after Dora was gone. Moved to San Diego and met my wife there. We returned to Vegas five years ago. My job now is to protect my family, and Jerry Stefano is not a man to be messed with, so I never talked then and I don’t intend to now. He told us to never say a word, so I didn’t. He made it clear the people we loved would get hurt. That’s why your mother kept it quiet, and that’s why I did, too. I love too many people to take that chance.”
Ryan sighed heavily, a long, deep, frustrated sound filled with years of regret, years of anger, years of locking up all these awful secrets.
There wasn’t much else to say, so Ryan thanked him and headed to the front door. On the way, he spotted a framed wedding photo of Luke and his wife. The man didn’t look much younger than he did today. “How long have you been married?”
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