Lacey takes her turn. She stares down at the game we’re playing, now looped and twisted around her fingers once more, and looks…impossibly sad. “Was she beautiful?” she asks. “Your mom. Was she really beautiful?”
I clear my throat, reining in the desire to clam up and avoid the question altogether. “Yes. Yeah, she was.”
“Do you…” She hesitates, as though she’s unsure whether she should continue on her train of thought. “Do you have any pictures of her? I’d like to see her.”
Her interest is understandable given that I’ve never mentioned my mother before and here I am suddenly talking about her. Lacey’s probably intrigued about the sly remark Newan made about her, too—And then of course there’s the history with your mother. A history I have no intention of ever openly talking about. I’d show Lace a picture, but I only have one photo of the woman who sometimes visits me when I sleep. I’ve kept it secreted away for years, and even though I haven’t looked at it, the knowledge of its presence here within this warehouse is fucking torture enough. I haven’t been able to look upon her face without experiencing a dark rage that consumes me for days, so I think of my fucking self instead of Lacey’s curiosity. “I don’t. I wish I did.”
Lacey just nods. She curls her hands into fists, loosening the threads and signalling that my duties are now over. I go back to pacing.
I need to get my head back in the fucking game. There’s so much I have to do, and being injured is just not part of the plan. I need to figure out where Charlie is right now. I’ve been fuming ever since I learned about him setting me up and sending me to Chino, and I’ve wanted him to pay. And in order to keep Sloane safe, I thought the best way to make him pay was to kill the motherfucker. Then there’s no chance he can ever put her in danger again, but while that solution appeals to my more pragmatic side, the vicious side of me wants Charlie to suffer.
Chino was not a walk in the park for me. Neither was Charlie killing one of my closest friends—the same murder that put me in prison. The lies, the deceit, the surveillance, the colossal sense of complete betrayal. None of these offenses are going to be resolved by Charlie’s quick and bloody demise. No, he deserves something a little more…appropriate.
He deserves to find out what Chino’s like first hand. He deserves to lose all he holds dear. He’s already lost the Duchess, and in all honesty there’s only one other thing I know of that Charlie genuinely cares about in this life: his money.
It’s a serious fucking shame that Rick’s dead. It would have been great to know more about what those bikers were doing, scamming information about Charlie’s businesses and their locations out of Rick. There is one other way of finding out, I guess. I could just ask the Wreckers. They might tell me, considering how much they clearly seem to dislike Charlie, but then again they might bury me up to my neck in sand, pour honey over my head and leave me to be eaten alive by fucking fire ants. The Wreckers don’t usually deal in drugs or guns—Charlie’s preferred method of paying his bills. They’re fences and thieves. They’ll steal and sell anything that’s not nailed down, and if they didn’t steal it, whoever did steal it can take it to them, knowing the gang will have no qualms about selling items in one of their many seedy pawn shops. For a healthy fee, of course. Their base is up on Aurora Lane, north of the city.
If I can just get them to—
“Zee?”
—tell me straight what they want with Charlie’s operation, then maybe I—
“Zeth!”
I stop pacing, snapping my head up. Lacey’s holding out the television remote, pointing it at the screen. “Are you listening to this?” she asks. She’s frozen still, a bowl of dry Lucky Charms balanced on top of her knees.
“…say that there is no risk of a contagion affecting any of the hospital’s patients at this stage, although no less than three nurses inside St. Peter’s have confirmed a worrying detail. One of the paramedics who answered the emergency nine-one-one request for urgent medical care at the gas station in Burien where the unknown woman mysteriously fell ill, is also displaying the same symptoms. Doctors have no idea what caused the woman’s death, or whether the staff and other patients inside are now at any sort of risk, but hospital administration have placed the building on lockdown, refusing to let anyone in or out. Our sources claim that—”
My heart is a jackhammer in my chest. “What the hell?” My voice is steady, but with every passing second the news reporter asks or answers more questions, I can feel a very unpleasant, sick feeling forming in the pit of my stomach. “That’s St. Peter’s?”
“Yeah,” Lacey answers. “There are so many cop cars out there. They think this is some sort of attack. And Sloane’s in there, right?”