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“She’s packed and gone.”
My body won’t move, my brain is struggling to compute this news. Gone. Packed and gone.
Why?
I get up, sit back down. The Audi. The black Audi.
Standing on unstable legs, I walk away, calling her cell. She doesn’t pick up.
“You need to see this,” Higham says, pulling my attention back to the table. He throws something down, and James picks it up, his face deadly. An envelope. He pulls something out, studying it.
I don’t know what, and I really don’t care right now. I walk up and down, trying to call Pearl. Nothing. No answer. Fuck. I dial Rose, lighting up, puffing anxiously. “Are all of her things gone?” I ask when she answers. “Everything?”
“No, not everything.”
“So you might be overreacting? Worrying over nothing?”
“Then where is she?”
I don’t know, but I’ll be fucking savage if she’s out in the city on her own.
“Brad,” Danny says, his attention on the table.
“Wait a minute,” I snap, going back to my call with Rose. “Can you go?—”
“Brad,” James yells.
“I said, wait! Rose—” My cell is suddenly missing from my ear, and I swing around, fuming. “For fuck’s sa—” I slowly register everyone’s expressions.
James inhales, sitting back in his chair, eyes on a picture on the table. “Bernard King,” he says quietly.
I snatch my cell out of Danny’s hand and walk over to the table, looking down at the image of the notorious London gangster. My heart slows. “What the fuck?” My cigarette hangs from my mouth, smoke billowing up into my face. It doesn’t hamper my view.
Red.
I look up at the men. Then back down at the image to check I’m not seeing things. Bernard King. With Pearl.
How the hell?—
What is she?—
But . . .
She said she loved me. Why the fuck of all the things I could be thinking about am I thinking about that? Because it was a lie. Yet she never actually said those words.
No, she said she’d show me with her actions. She never said anything.
Lies.
All fucking lies. Everything starts to click into place. The Audi was him. She brought him to the mansion . . . the shoot-out . . .
That he got away from.
Her cue to get the fuck out of here? And she has.
What the fuck has she been feeding him?
More thoughts hit my brain. The drive-by. The incident out the back of the club where I thought I’d lost Nolan. She wasn’t hit by any of the bullets.
