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“You’re probably right.” He doesn’t look at me, but I know he hears the shouts from outside to come out with your hands up. “Just go. Don’t make them break down my mom’s front door.”
These aren’t the cops in Drumville. They don’t know me. They’re aren’t going to see the Rolex watch on my wrist or the leather Tom Ford limited edition sneakers that haven’t even dropped on this side of the Atlantic yet. I’m just another black guy in a place that he doesn’t belong.
Anton’s mother is nowhere to be seen as I head down the cluttered hallway, but she did leave the door unlocked. I turn the knob but use my foot to nudge the door all the way open so both my hands are in the air when the cops first see me.
It’s hard not to resist when one of them rushes at me and takes me down hard. The guy had to have been a linebacker in high school. At least half-a-dozen cops are out here on this speckled lawn to take me in, their weapons aimed at my back as I’m forced face down on the ground and handcuffed.
I don’t say anything as they read me my Miranda rights. You don’t send out this kind of response for simple trespassing. They don’t tell me the charges as I’m yanked off the ground and forced into the back of a squad car, but I can already guess what they’re going to be.
Aggravated rape.
Assault in the first degree.
Attempted murder.
Innocence doesn’t matter where Havoc House is involved. If they want me to go down, then that’s exactly where I’m going.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“I didn’t think even you could do something this stupid.”
My father surveys me with distaste as he delivers the insult that almost sounds like it could have been a compliment. This isn’t the first time he’s made it clear that I managed to surpass even his low expectations of me.
Surprise. Things can always get worse when Evangeline is involved.
“What are you doing here?”
“I might ask you the same thing.” His expression is heavy with disdain. “Imagine my surprise when I received an enrollment notification from St. Bart’s for Olivia’s spring semester. Initially, I assumed it was a mistake. I’d already been informed that her tuition payment was nonrefundable, so I planned to let it go.”
I have no idea what my father is going to do. Drag me out of here? He’d love to have me thrown in jail if it wouldn’t put a dark spot on his own reputation.
Regardless, I need to keep him talking until I figure out how to proceed.
“What changed?”
“You called your mother. Though I can’t for the life of me figure out why you’d bother.”
I’d called my mother. On a whim. A stupid, impulsive whim. I should have known that the call wouldn’t go unnoticed by my father.
And he would immediately want to know who was using Olivia’s phone.
“Dad…”
He cuts me off with a sharp wave of his hand. “If I thought you were just trying to avoid the mistakes of your life by taking hers, then I might have turned a blind eye. But coming here and digging into the past…you have no idea what you have unleashed.”
“Excuse me for wanting to know what happened to my sister.”
“The sister that you haven’t spoken to in years,” he scoffs. “You came here for yourself, to fulfill your constant urge to create chaos. As always, you never stopped to think about the collateral damage.”
A creeping sense of dread moves over me. He isn’t talking like a concerned father with a daughter lying in a coma. I wouldn’t have expected him to worry about me, but Olivia’s attacker is still out there somewhere. “What damage?”
His expression is pitying. “I hope you realize when all of this is settled that I’ve done the best that I could for you. This is a difficult situation, and you have made it a thousand times worse than it needs to be. There are going to be consequences.”
I don’t want to hear about consequences, not when he looks at me in a way that is both infuriated and pitying. “Olivia is in a coma and the guy who did it just walked away. You don’t care about finding her attacker at all.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I care more than you will ever know,” he snaps.
“That’s why you’re here lecturing me, instead of tracking him down, right?”
