Chapter 29

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Feenix Blaylock

A fter we hit a few more stores, she pulls me into a nearby high-end cafe. Whatever body shame issues she had while shopping are now gone as she takes generous bites of her burger. She’s already devoured her fries, but I can’t really blame her considering we ate breakfast before the sun rose.

As I observe her, she has a gleeful glint in her eyes. Perhaps it has everything to do with having clothes of her own since I won’t let her step a foot in her apartment’s direction, but I like to think it has everything to do with spending the day with me. Or maybe it’s the fact that she’s being taken care of after almost two weeks of her husband being dead, a subject we haven’t touched on yet. Money has to be tight if she’s living in the apartment building she chose. It’s surprising to me since Nathan was paid well for his services with us. It’s been on the tip of my tongue to ask her about it all day, but it’s none of my business, and the fact of the matter is he clearly left her with absolutely nothing.

Nothing makes me more furious.

He must not have felt for her the way I do, ketchup on her cheek and all.

And dare I say it, it almost feels like my life is . . . normal. That this is what I could eventually have, but that’s a lie I’m telling myself because I’ll never have this. This won’t be a day-to-day thing for me. In fact, it’ll likely be the one and only time I take her out like this.

Not only can we not afford to be seen together, but this – whatever this is between us – will come to an end in one form or another. We’ll catch my boss, she’ll get rewarded, and I’ll go to prison. It’ll end in only one of us getting a happy ending and the other paying for his crimes.

Unless I run. We catch him, I take his money, and I run. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a few hours, but could I leave her behind? No. Would she come with me? Maybe. Am I so far gone that I won’t face the extent of my crimes? Most likely.

“What?” she asks after swallowing a bite.

I hadn’t realized I was staring. I blink once, pick up a french fry, and pop it into my mouth. “Nothing,” I say.

She narrows her gaze. “No lies. Remember? That goes both ways.”

I recline against the back of the chair, cross my arms, and debate what to tell her and how honest I’ll be with it. “That what we are doing here, right now, is all a lie.”

Her scowl matches her tone as she says, “Having lunch?”

I give her a pointed look.

Understanding crosses her face, and she gently sets down what’s left of her burger. “This feels like a date to you. ”

One curt nod is the only answer I can muster because expressing feelings? It’s not my thing. It never has been and never will be.

Thankfully, she doesn’t expect that side of me to suddenly make an appearance because she leans a little into the table and murmurs, “Don’t make the present a piece of your past. Live it while you can, Nix.”

The corners of my mouth tip up. “That’s your advice?”

She shrugs and picks up her burger again. “It’s good advice.”

“Mhmm,” I hum as I grab another fry.

As I’m chewing, she asks, “Tell me about your mom.”

My scowl is immediate, and swallowing the fry feels like shoving a rock down my throat. “No.”

“You said you’d tell me about her eventually. And now that I have you trapped, I should be able to get that story without a problem.”

I look away from her for a moment, out the window and toward the leaves racing across the street. My grunt is the only response I want to give her, but I have to give her something.

She nudges my shoe underneath the table with her own. “Do you two still talk?”

I keep my attention on the leaves, watching them swirl around the ankles of those who walk the sidewalk. “No.”

“When did that change?” she asks softly.

I focus my attention back to her, pulled by the sincerity of her tone. “I walked away from home when Megan went missing.”

She cocks her head to the side. “Why?”

“My mother is a gambler,” I force out. “She spent all her money at the casino.”

“Okay…” she presses on when I seem like I want to sa y anything else. And I don’t. I want this conversation to end here and now, but I know that, once she gets started on a mystery, she doesn’t let it lay to rest on its own.

I sigh and roll my neck to relieve some of the strain of sitting ramrod straight as soon as the topic arose. “I don’t have proof, but I know she was the one who sold my cousin into sex trafficking. Into this business.”

She blinks rapidly for a few seconds, and then she slumps in her seat. “For money? For gambling?”

I flex my jaw, and my face hardens at the memory of confronting my mother about it all those years ago. She had denied it, but magically, she had all this money to place bets. Even though I was young, I wasn’t stupid. I knew, and she knew that I knew, but there was nothing I could do about it because I couldn’t prove anything. I still can’t, and if I know anything about this business, it got buried so deep that it’s the devil’s reading material.

“I didn’t know the business took – I thought they stole their um . . . belongings.”

I shake my head. “Not all the time. Some of their ‘belongings’ come with the promise of greater things. Sometimes people sell their loved ones. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.”

She searches the table as she comes to grips with this. “Every time I think I have some kind of understanding, it’s ripped out from underneath me.”

“It’s bigger than you think it is,” I whisper as I sweep a few crumbs onto the floor.

She returns her gaze to mine. “How did you get so lost in it? How did it all of a sudden become okay to be your mother?”

I run my hands along my jeans, uncomfortable with her question and with myself. “After walking in the darkness for a while, you become nothing but a mirror shadow of it.”

It takes her a few seconds, but eventually, she nods in tentative understanding. “And then I came along.”

“A beacon of light,” I mutter.

She leans forward and puts her chin into her hand. The sorrow is still on her face – for me, for my past, for my present – but she tries hard to hide it. “Am I to assume that you and your mother never got along?”

“No, we never did.”

“Why?”

I try like hell not to sigh. I was hoping we’d be done talking about the woman who birthed me, but she wants to discover more about that bitch. “She spent all her money, which means there was hardly any money to put food on the table.”

“That’s horrible,” she breathes. “What did you do?”

“My aunt made sure I ate.”

Her eyes soften a little. “Do you still talk to your aunt?”

I shake my head. “Breast cancer. Died a year after Megan was taken.”

She curses under her breath. “So you have no one.”

“Except you and Noll.”

The slight blush that she gives off is just as innocent as she is, and she smiles just a little. It’s then I know I said the right thing. I meant it, too, but I just hadn’t expected it to be a big deal to her.

Something catches her attention over my shoulder, and the blush quickly fades to a pale white. “That’s her,” she breathes out so quietly that I almost didn’t hear it over the noise of the cafe.

“What?” I ask when her gaze returns to mine. She’s trying to keep the shock off her face, but she can’t hide it in the set of her eyebrows .

“The woman,” she whispers fervently. She reaches across the table and grasps my fingers resting against the surface. “The Russian woman with the missing stone. Anya.”

Slowly, I turn to look with her. She’s by the door, having just entered and dressed in regular clothes instead of the dress she had worn to the gala. She looks bathed and ready for the day in the city. The exhaustion in her gaze is unmistakable, however. I see it all the time, and I expect to see it tonight, too, when I film her.

Normally, at this point in time, I’d tell myself that this is no place for emotions. But this time? I can’t shove them down. I have to though because, if I don’t, we’re in deep shit.

There are dark circles under Anya’s eyes, and she’s currently biting her nails as she stands closely to a man I do not recognize. I don’t need to know the man to know who he is though. He’s checking out the goods he may or may not buy, getting her food while getting to know her so that he can fantasize about her later as he’s plowing into her corpse.

It’s not uncommon.

I turn back around as my heart hammers in my chest. I may not recognize him, but there’s a good chance he’d know Charlie at first glance. She’s a beauty to remember, and she’s popular enough with the dark inner parts of our world to have her face permanently etched into any of their minds.

“We need to leave,” I hurriedly grunt to her.

I move to pull my hand away and stand up, but she squeezes my finger to keep me where I am. “They’re being seated. Oh! Oh, she’s going to the bathroom.” She lets go of my hand, grabs her clutch from her lap, and pulls out a pen. On top of her napkin, she scribbles numbers, and my eyes go wide.

“Don’t,” I hiss.

She glances up at me and hisses back, “I have to. If I can do anything to help her, I’m going to try.”

“You can’t give her your number. What if someone else finds it, Charlie?” Surely she knows how stupid this is. How easily it could get turned around and she’d be the one who’d need to be saved.

She shrugs a little as she stands. “It’s not mine. It’s my partner’s.”

And before I can stop her, she heads to the bathroom. All I can do is stare at her back, watching as she skates around the table where the man Anya came with is now seated, looking at the menu.

I curse under my breath and pull the collar of my shirt further away from my neck. Slapping cash on the table for our tab, I stand and move toward the door to wait for the woman who has a death wish, and position myself so I can fully watch this man’s eyes. If he lands a look on her longer than a few seconds . . .

There are no bounds to the lengths I will go to protect her. Another murder is nothing to me.