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CHAPTER 7
I lead us into the living room, one of my favorite rooms in the house, besides my own. The walls are a cozy deep green with one whole side of the room being built-in bookshelves, the couches are worn caramel-colored leather, and an intricately-woven red rug covers most of the original hardwood floors. I sink into a corner of the couch, folding my legs under me while Everett settles down on the opposite side, three whole cushions away from me.
Distance should mean business. Distance should mean no fluttering hearts or racing pulses. Distance should mean I don’t think about how I wish things between us could have a different future.
He puts his left elbow up on the arm of the couch and leans on his fist. There’s that flash of silver again. I press one hand over my heart, trying to calm it down.
My husband.
The words fill me with longing for a home of my own, a family of my own, a person to call me “wife.” Why am I imagining a white house with green shutters and a wide porch? I’m a city girl, I don’t want rural, pastoral scenes of domesticity. And yet, the longing remains.
I glance over at Everett who seems entirely unperturbed, completely unaffected. In fact, he’s stifling a yawn. “Sorry. Okay, let’s talk about what’s going on.”
Time to switch gears, no more thinking about unattainable marital bliss.
“So I’ll start with what I know,” he says. “A few months back, the cyber guys at Black Swan noticed that people were looking into your parents’ deaths through back channels. Just asking around, probing, lots of internet searches for their death certificates. We started to connect the dots that it was all leading back to associates of the Vidovic Group. Remember the day you left for your trip, that guy in the crowd that you were worried about? He was a guy that had come up in our profiles, so your instinct was right.”
“Wait, I was right? There genuinely are people who are after me?” All the blood drains from my face.
“It’s okay, it’s good I know what to keep an eye out for. Don’t get too worried yet.”
I nod, tight-lipped and terrified. “So, what’s the latest?”
“The firm recently told me there’s a theory going around that your dad is still alive. I got bent out of shape about it because I didn’t want anyone dredging that up and I especially didn’t want you to get upset if you heard about it. So I started researching on my own and found some stuff that seemed off. Then I got the case file to research The Vidovic Group and found out some more.”
Could he know already? “How much more, exactly?”
Everett shrugs. “You’re definitely being watched. As soon as you cut your trip short, I was suspicious that it had something to do with all that. But when I saw you step off that plane, I knew, I just knew that you had seen something. I knew you would need to say something, to vent to someone, and I thought it might as well be me. Because if you’re about to say what I think you are, this is going to get ugly fast and I want to stay in front of it, to keep you safe.”
The air in the room is heavy and my heart is beating a mile a minute. I shiver, partly from cold, partly from sheer fear.
“That’s my end of it. Is there anything you want to tell me?” Everett asks.
“Yes,” I say. My throat is dry and if I held out my hands, they’d be shaking like paper in the wind. I hope I’m doing the right thing. “It’s safe to talk, right?”
“Definitely. The car is harder to secure than the house, oddly enough.”
“And you swear yourself to secrecy?”
He puts his right hand over his heart. “I pledge my fealty, body and soul, to you and you only, Wife.”
He says it with a shy grin, a joke to lighten the mood, but it only makes me want him more.
Everett Park, my bodyguard, all striking and handsome with his crisp white Oxford shirt, his gelled hair that he keeps running his hands through and messing up, and his earnest eyes, just called me “Wife.” I’ve peaked when it comes to romantic scenarios and it’s not even real.
But now comes the difficult task of reliving what happened in the Maldives. I swallow hard and take a shaking breath before launching right in.
“Okay, so, about four days into my trip, I went for a walk on the beach and a guy in a hotel uniform approached me. He had this huge burn on his face and I didn’t recognize him until he said my name. But it was my dad.”
Everett’s eyes go wide with a mixture of interest and disbelief and he leans forward, nodding for me to continue.
“Dad has evidence against the Vidovic Group that was compiled by Adam Lourden, Vidovic’s money launderer. There’s a dossier and I’m the one who needs to get it and hand it over to one of my dad’s underground associates.”
I flick my fingers across my cheeks, surprised to find there are tears there.Everett’s studying the fireplace opposite us, but he has the armrest of the couch in a white-knuckle death grip.
“There’s a series of steps I have to go through,” I continue. “But it starts with me accessing something in the family safe and then we go from there.”
Tears still come, but I talk through them. “I think I’m just now realizing how traumatic that was. It’s a very strange thing, to see my dad alive and know that my mom is still gone. I don’t know, it’s just…it’s just a lot, Ev.”
