11. Chapter 11

eleven

Lucas

I did my best to ignore the flash of thigh next to me. I should have specified that there was enough time for her to get dressed, but I appreciated her giving in too much to raise my concerns before she grabbed her essentials and followed me out to the car.

Apart from my urging for her to buckle up, we drove the rest of the way in silence. Only once we pulled up to the driveway did I have an oh shit moment. I didn't want this woman intersecting with my private life, but it would go against my duty to leave her alone in the car. It hadn’t even occurred to me what bringing her with would mean, but I couldn’t leave her by herself, unprotected.

When my mom called, a note of hysteria in her voice, at six in the morning and told me to come over right away I didn’t think, just reacted. If she needed me then I needed to be there; I was the only one left in her life and I couldn’t just ignore her when she sounded like that .

But I still didn’t know for sure whose side Athena was on. She went on a date with a mafia enforcer and could hold her own in a fight. She defended criminals and scumbags for a living. She was defensive and uncooperative most of the time. Her own mother worked for the Morellis before her death.

What if Athena was a danger to my poor, lonely mother?

I let the engine idle for a moment while I debated what would be considered the “right thing” in a messed up situation like this.

My mom made the decision for me, rushing out to the front porch when she saw me pull in, her eyes lighting up when she saw I had company. Shit. I knew what she was thinking.

She rushed forward and opened the passenger door for Athena before I even had my seat belt unbuckled. “Come inside, both of you! Come on!”

Athena gave me a confused look, but unbuckled and took my mom’s offered hand and followed her up to the front door.

I slowly exited my car, pressing the button to lock it behind me, as I made my way up the overgrown walkway my mom used to take so much pride in. I made a mental note to arrange for a gardener to come out soon.

“Lucas didn’t tell me he’d be bringing a guest with him!” I could hear her exclaiming in excitement, much too loud for a quarter after six in the morning. I saw her hesitate as she wrapped an arm around Athena’s waist, pausing at the body armor, but to Mom’s credit she didn’t say anything, just kept guiding Athena forward .

The front door of the house next door slammed open and I prepared my ears. “What the hell is the racket about so goddamned early on a Friday morning?”

“Sorry, Mr. Rosenberg!” I called back at a much more reasonable volume. “We’re heading inside right now.”

“You bet your ass you’re sorry,” he grumbled, stumbling his way back in his house. I could see his poor wife waiting in the entryway, giving a small wave of apology as she closed the door behind her husband.

For my entire childhood I remembered Mr. Rosenberg being quick to anger and not afraid to be loud about it, but Mrs. Rosenberg being such a calming, kind friend to my mom. Too bad Mom couldn’t find it in her to keep up with friendships anymore.

I closed and locked the door behind me, trying to keep a straight face while Mom greeted Athena.

“Can I take your jacket and…bulletproof vest for you, darling?”

“Yes, thank you, Mrs. Blake,” she said, shrugging out of her jacket and loosening the velcro on the vest.

“Oh, it’s Meedes, dear, after my late second husband. But you can call me Margaret.”

“You can call her Mrs. Meedes,” I disagreed. “Mom, this isn’t a friend, it’s an uncooperative person of interest I’m keeping safe. She’s here because you needed me, not for any other reason.”

My mom eyed Athena in her cute, short little pajama shorts and purple top, then pointedly gave me the side eye when she caught me glancing at those lean, sexy legs again .

“Sure thing, honey. I believe you.” She turned back to Athena. “Call me Margaret.”

I rolled my eyes, but Athena giggled. Why did that giggle irritate me so much?

“Margaret,” Athena agreed, giving me a smug little smile. She was enjoying this too much. “Is everything okay with you? Your little Lucas was in such a hurry to come see his mama, after all.”

I glared at the back of Athena’s head as my mom took her arm and led her into the living room.

“Mom, maybe Athena could make herself a cup of coffee in the kitchen while you and I talk?” Athena didn’t need to be involved in this conversation. She didn’t need to be involved in any of this.

“Oh, I don’t need any coffee. I’m wide awake,” Athena asserted with glee.

“She’s fine, Lukie, come. Let’s have a sit and I can tell you what I heard and why I called.”

There was no getting around it. The woman I despised most in the world was about to hear a lot of personal information and I either had to deal with it or risk my mother’s wrath by being rude to a guest.

After a millisecond of thought I quietly sat down. I chose the armchair across from my mom’s favorite spot on the love seat and took out my little notebook and pen in preparation while she led Athena to sit down next to her on the couch. It didn’t escape my notice that they still had their arms linked together, like they were old friends .

Athena looked like the kid who won herself a chocolate factory, eyes eager as she waited for juicy gossip to use against me, but there was no going back now.

“What’s going on, Mom? What did you hear and from whom?”

“I woke up at five, as usual, to get the paper from out front.” I nodded. Mom had an irrational fear of someone stealing her newspaper and an even worse fear of getting her news in digital form from her phone, so she always got up early enough to look out the front window and see the rolled up newspaper land on her lawn.

“Okay. Was it something the paper-guy said or did that attracted your attention?”

She shook her head. I glanced at Athena, waiting for the moment she’d figure it out and use this information against me. She was running her hands up and down those damn legs. I reached for the afghan hanging on the back of the chair behind me, handing it off to her. If she was cold, it would hit two birds with one stone: keeping her warm and covering up those distracting legs at the same time.

“No, it was in the paper. There was an interview with a man who was married for eleven years.”

I tried to keep the pity out of my eyes. “Eleven years, huh? How long was the engagement?”

“That’s just it: there was no engagement. They eloped the same night they met.”

I could see the confusion on Athena’s face. She was probably wondering what the emergency was, and why my mom needed to tell me this mundane information so urgently.

“Eloped. Okay.” I wrote the word down in my notebook. “What was the wife’s name?”

“That’s the important part: he called her Ella Louise.”

There it was.

“Mom, we’ve talked about this before.”

She shook her head in denial. “I know we have, but this is different! The name is so close, and the timeline adds up! This is my baby, your sister! We can finally bring her home, Lukie, this is her! I feel it in my gut!” The tears were welling up in her eyes, but Mom was trying to hold it back in front of a guest, refusing to let them spill down her cheeks.

“I’ll check it out. Where’s the article?”

She picked it up from the coffee table, already cut out of the newspaper and laminated. Mom was nothing if not prepared, and the relief she felt when I accepted the offering was physical, the tension leaving her shoulders in a heavy breath, a single tear escaping down her cheek.

“I think I’d like that coffee after all,” Athena cut in, standing up. “Is the kitchen over there?”

I nodded, grateful that she had enough decency to give us privacy, even if the worst of it was over. When she rounded the corner I leaned forward, talking my mother’s hands in my own.

“I want you to prepare yourself for this to go nowhere,” I told Mom, just as I did every time she thought she found a lead.

Danielle went missing eleven years ago, so a real lead at this point would be a miracle without inside resources. I wouldn’t be likely to find anything of use until I had access to the FBI records on the goings on happening a decade ago within the actual Crimes Against Children and Human Trafficking Unit. Finding answers, even if we never found her, all rode on my transfer into that unit.

“I’m prepared. But I can’t just sit around and do nothing!”

“You don’t have to do nothing. You can keep yourself busy, Mom. Go out to eat, join a book club, chat with Mrs. Rosenberg in the backyard over your trowels like you used to.”

She was already shaking her head. “I can’t do that. I need to focus on Dani until we have an answer. We need to know where she is. Tom died without knowing what happened to our baby and I won’t let the same thing happen to me,” she said, invoking my late stepfather’s name.

I glanced up at movement in the doorway, seeing Athena staying mostly out of view, trying not to intrude. There was no point. I nodded her in and she took her place back next to my mom.

“Did Lukie tell you about his half-sister?” Mom asked, wiping at her cheeks and putting on a smile. “She’s so beautiful. Long honey-blonde hair, hazel eyes just like Lukie’s, and just the sunniest personality you’ll ever meet.”

“She sounds wonderful.” Mom’s use of present tense wasn’t lost on me, and neither was the careful way Athena mimicked it.

“She is.”

“Can I show you some pictures?” Mom was already pulling out the photo albums from under the coffee table.

Athena looked up to meet my eyes, nodding her agreement. Although she’d probably make fun of me later for being a mama’s boy, no matter which team she played for, I felt confident she wouldn’t hurt my mother. The kindness she showed my mom made my heart beat a little faster, but I did my best to ignore it.

She might be a morally gray, promiscuous, annoying person, but she had enough kindness to go where Mom led, letting her share her heartbreak over Danielle’s disappearance.

Remembering the way Athena clearly dated around, wearing those tiny little dresses that showed off just as much thigh as her skimpy little pajama shorts, I felt the anger rise up in me again. Did she dress like that for Leo Lombardi before cutting the date short? It was hard to imagine she would if she saw his picture first, so maybe it was a blind date? She said someone else set them up.

“Okay, what the heck is going on here?” Athena asked, pointing to one of the pictures. She was smiling widely, but it didn’t meet her eyes. What was she thinking?

“Oh, Lukie had to be about seven or eight I think? Because Dani looks about three. He was going through this phase where he wanted to be a magician, and well, he wasn’t very good at it.”

“Thanks Mom,” I teased, smiling at her. I’m sure the smile didn’t meet my eyes either, but Mom needed a sense of normalcy.

“This was when he was in his escape artist phase of magic, and it didn’t occur to him that swallowing a key—” Oh dear god, it wasn’t really that picture, was it? “—wasn’t helpful if you had to wait for the key to come back out. But he handcuffed himself to his poor sister!”

“What about the spare key?” Athena asked, smiling softly at me. Those blue eyes really were beautiful when she looked sincere, but she needed to cut that shit out. I didn’t need her pity.

“He gave it to Dani, but three-year-olds are notorious for losing things, so who knows where it ended up!”

“No saw at home to cut them free?” she asked, turning that gentle smile back to my mom.

“No saw,” Mom confirmed. “So we had to go to the hospital to get poor Lucas an x-ray and figure out where the key was in his digestive tract!”

“You were stuck to a three-year-old long enough to poop out a key?” she asked me, real amusement in her eyes this time. I could handle that.

“No, when they saw how much farther we had to go, they got us free.” Was I really discussing this with her?

“Surgical saw?”

“No, that would have still left both kids with half a handcuff around each wrist!” Mom said.

“Then what did you do?” Athena looked fully engrossed in the story. I wasn’t sure if she was feigning interest to be polite or if she really wanted to know what happened next, but I was grateful; Mom was finally starting to sound like her old self again.

“One of the nice nurses on duty also had a son who was into magic tricks so she taught us all how to pick a lock with a bobby pin. And no one was ever stuck again after that, but Lukie spent the next six months with bobby pins hidden all over his body.”

Athena giggled again. Great, more ammunition for her to mock me with .

“Don’t get any cute ideas,” I cut in. “Modern handcuffs won’t be undone so easily.”

Her laughter cut off. Why did I get the feeling I ruined one of her plans? At least I got to feel ahead of the game for once.

“That’s true,” Mom said, clearly not aware of the unspoken conversation happening next to her. “You can’t use a bobby pin on real handcuffs unless you’re really experienced because of secondary hidden locking parts, only magic ones. So Lukie spent the next six months figuring out how to get out of all sorts of traps: straightjackets, duct-taped hands, police-issue handcuffs. And there was no internet back then, you couldn’t just google it like you can now, so it was even more impressive. Instead of just pins, he was always hiding spare keys, Swiss army knives, shims, everything—all over his body. It was just so adorable. Lukie always made sure he knew the ins and outs of whatever he decided was important to him. He was really thorough.”

The past tense here was very obvious as well. She didn’t understand why I couldn’t secure my promotion yet and thought I wasn’t doing a good enough job. She didn’t understand that wasn’t how things worked now. It wasn’t always about how hard you worked, and especially with the CACHTU. There just hadn’t been any openings in a long time.

“Lukie, can you teach me how to get out of a pair of police-issue handcuffs?” Athena batted her eyelashes at me. Fuck if it wasn’t sexy, even with the obvious sarcasm.

“Not a chance in hell,” I told her. “If I’m wrapping handcuffs around those wrists, they’re going to stay right there until I get my way. ”

“Lucas!” Mom gasped. “Manners!”

I couldn’t tell if she was outraged at the breech in etiquette to a guest or if she heard the innuendo, so I just shrugged.

“What? I told you she’s not a girlfriend. She may even be a criminal,” I added, throwing in a wink so my mom wouldn’t get too worried. “I’m not being inappropriate, just telling it like it is.”

Mom scoffed, turning back to her guest. She didn’t believe a word I said. “Are you kids hungry? I could make you some breakfast.”

“I’m starving, Margaret. Can I help you in the kitchen?” Athena smiled graciously at her, playing along with Mom’s little fantasy. I was going to have a hell of a time explaining everything to my mother when all this was put to an end.