Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 74005 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 370(@200wpm)___ 296(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74005 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 370(@200wpm)___ 296(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
A beat. “Do you want me to let him go?”
I can’t answer. And I hate that I can’t. Because I hate Hernando Reyes as much as Hawk does. Probably more.
A small silence grows between us. I hear him breathe. I hear myself breathe. The car’s AC whirs.
“Dani,” he says finally, softer. “I can put people on Jordan. Quietly. I can move Reyes out of the barn and into something cleaner. I can—”
“Cleaner?” I swallow a humorless laugh. “This isn’t about optics.”
He’s quiet. The weight of it lands. I hear it hit him.
“I don’t want your protection like this,” I say. “Not if the price is you.”
“Dani—”
“I can’t do this on the phone,” I say. “And I can’t do it at all if you won’t listen.”
“I’m listening.”
“Then hear me,” I say. “Hire a PI. Cut the rope. Step back.”
He doesn’t answer.
I stare at the windshield until the world blurs. “Say something.”
“I can’t promise that,” he says.
“That’s not good enough.”
“I know.”
It breaks something cleanly inside me. No jagged edge. Just a snap.
“Then don’t call me,” I say. “Not until you can.”
“Dani—”
I end the call.
The phone screen goes black. My reflection is small and wrecked in the glass.
I set it face down on the passenger seat. The tears come hard and fast, hot tracks down my cheeks. I press my forehead to the wheel and let it happen.
No gasping. No drama. Just a steady, ugly cry that I can’t stop.
I cry until the tightness in my chest loosens and the ache under my ribs dulls. I swipe my cheeks with the heel of my hand and stare at nothing.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know how to love a man who will burn himself to keep me warm.
I don’t know how to let him.
I don’t know how to watch him turn into someone he isn’t, or maybe someone he always was. How would I even know? I barely know him.
I get back onto the road.
And I drive.
35
HAWK
If I weren’t driving, I’d probably throw my phone down on the hard pavement. Watch the screen shatter.
Shattered—like the mirror at Reyes’s house.
Shattered—like Ted’s skull in my father’s office.
Shattered—like whatever I had with Daniela.
“Feel better?” Falcon asks.
“Why does everything end up broken?” I say, more to myself than to Falcon.
Falcon’s mouth flattens. “You want to ask me that? Really?”
“No. I know that’s not fair after what you’ve been through” I rub the back of my neck. “I need a drink.”
He stares straight out the windshield. “You sure that fixes anything?”
“No. I’m sure it doesn’t.” I keep my eye on the road. “Where do you go when you need to not feel like this?”
He doesn’t answer right away. He keeps staring straight ahead. I’m asking about quiet. Distance. A place where the noise in your head gets drowned out by something else.
“I know a place,” he says finally.
“Good.” Then I start thinking. “You sure Peter will handle this?” I ask.
“He always does. Unofficially, like you wanted. If Dad trusts him, I trust him.”
Right. Falcon doesn’t really know who our father is. And now isn’t the time to tell him. Not when all this other shit is going on. I don’t have time to listen to my brother extol his non-existent virtues.
“Where?” I ask.
“Cut past the next exit,” Falcon says. “It’s a little dive bar outside Summer Creek about thirty miles.”
I do as he says. We drive past a strip of pawn shops and a busted laundromat and then into a neighborhood that looks like it forgot what year it is. I hit a pothole, and my bones rattle.
“There it is.”
The neon sign flickers. It says only “Bar.” No name other than that.
I pull into a spot and kill the engine. “What the hell is this place?”
“The kind of place you want right now,” Falcon says, opening the passenger side door. “It’s a dive. The kind of bar that never closes, even though no one other than a few locals go in.”
“Sounds like a front for money laundering,” I say.
“Could be.” Falcon scratches the side of his nose. “But I doubt it. I think it’s just one of those dives that refuses to die.” His mouth curves in a half-grin.
I glance at the cracked brick, at the way the neon sputters.
Falcon steps out first, boots crunching on gravel.
I take a breath and shove open my door.
“Why here?” I mutter, falling into step beside him.
“Because in a place like this,” Falcon says, pushing the door with his shoulder, “no one asks questions, and no one remembers faces.”
My brother’s words strike something in me. “Fuck, Fal. This is why you didn’t want me picking you up when you got out. You came here first.”
“Yup, I did.”
“Breaking your parole already?” I shake my head.
He chuckles lightly. “Only once. Didn’t have a valid ID either. But the bartender, a middle-aged woman named Iris, served me anyway.”