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But he’d never been living it up.
If he was making enough to sock a million bucks away, why wasn’t he in a nicer apartment? Why didn’t he have a nicer car? Why did he still shop the deals?
The only possible explanation was he’d been skimming something off the top of the money he owed to the guys in the suits with the guns.
Nothing else made any kind of sense.
It explained all the new locks at the apartment. And the paranoia as he brought the money to its hiding place.
“Did you confront him?”
“I tried once or twice, but he shut me right down, told me I was being crazy, that if he had money like that, didn’t I think he’d be living an easier life?
“Can’t imagine you let it rest there,” Silvano said.
“I didn’t. But,” I said, breath catching, and I had to focus on releasing it, then taking another one.
Because this was all just the lead up.
To the worst night of my entire freaking life.
“It’s alright,” Silvano said, his hand squeezing my knee. “It will help to get it out,” he added.
I closed my eyes tight and gave into the desire to rest my head against his arm before trudging on.
“It’s my fault,” I said, speaking the words that had been eating away at me for weeks.
“No, Mills, it’s not,” he assured me.
But he didn’t know.
He wasn’t there.
“I guess they’d been onto him for a while,” I said, voice wavering as we got closer to the worst part. “Maybe they’d even said something to him at that point. I don’t know.”
I’d never know now.
“I was coming out of his apartment one night, and someone grabbed me,” I recalled.
There was no way to describe how that felt, how my belly dropped out, and a scream caught in my throat as I felt myself shoved into the back of a car, lowered down over the laps of two men, one holding my legs still, the other pressing so hard on my face that I was sure he was going to break my teeth.
I was sure it was just a random crime at the time.
That I would be another of those girls on the news and true crime podcasts.
A victim of men with twisted intentions.
Ones who wanted to use, abuse, and kill me.
I’d been too gripped with panic to really focus on them until I was at the second location. Until they were pulling me back out of the car, and dragging me, kicking and screaming, into an empty building.
My body had been dropped unceremoniously on the filthy ground, leaving me to scramble up.
It was right then that I’d seen him.
The man my father met with.
The one who’d beaten the man in the alley.
