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“Here?” Raine’s eyes widened. “He’s in Miami?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think he’s been here for a while.”
“Where did you see him?”
“We went to lunch at that place up Ocean Drive,” I said. “The one attached to a hotel.”
“You went to lunch with him?” Raine gasped.
I could just see the mental images in her head of Landon and me sipping fruity drinks at some beachside café. It was almost enough to make me laugh but not quite.
“He didn’t really give me an option.”
“Why didn’t you just walk away?”
My arms tensed and I gritted my teeth, which did nothing for my headache. This was the part I didn’t know how to approach. I wasn’t sure I could explain what it meant to be tied to someone the way I was tied to him.
“I’ve told you about him before,” I reminded her. “He’s not the kind of person who lets you just walk away from a conversation he intends to have with you. He asks; I answer. That’s how it works. He had shit to tell me, so he told me over food.”
“And he chooses now to tell you about your son? He had to have known about him before now.”
“He did,” I nodded. “It’s just…well, circumstances have changed.”
I took a minute to figure out how to continue, and Raine gave me the time. I turned to sit with my hands clasped together on my thigh. I twisted my fingers around themselves, wrapped them around my knee as some lame-ass support mechanism, and licked my lips before I went on.
“You know all about Jillian,” I started. “You know she got pregnant and then left with another guy. Well, they got married and were apparently raising my kid in Italy. Last week…”
I trailed off. I didn’t even know how to tell her this much. How was I going to get everything out? This was going to take a lot of talking if I kept stopping, though, and I had to get through it, convince her, and get prepared to fight. I couldn’t waste any time beating around the bush or whatever, so I just blurted it out.
“Well, they’re dead, and now he doesn’t have anyone.”
Raine bit down on her lower lip, and her forehead creased.
“What happened to them?”
“They were shot,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Murdered.”
She sat up a little straighter, and I could see both shock and sorrow in her eyes.
“Do they know who did it?”
It was just like Raine to be concerned about people she’d never met. Even if everything she knew about them was bad, she’d still be sorry something had happened to them.
“They’ll never know,” I said. “That’s usually part of being involved in the kind of business Jillian’s family runs. She’s related to Franks, so she grew up in it. She probably wasn’t expecting it to hit her like that, but the risk is always there.”
Raine eyed me.
“You know, don’t you?” she said. “You know who killed them.”
I took in a long breath and rubbed at my eyes. Apparently, I took too long to answer.
“Bastian?” Raine’s voice went soft, and I could hear the fear in her tone. “Did you…did you do it?”
“What?” I looked back to her quickly. “Fuck—no! Shit, Raine, when would I have gone to Italy?”
She scrunched up her face and glanced away before speaking so softly I could hardly hear her.
“You could have…had someone else do it.”
