Page 29 of The Dearly Departed

“Don’t even think about it,” I warned him.

With a glance over his shoulder, he gave me a knowing look, even as he said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“For the third time, why the hell are you here?” I asked once again, cutting to the chase. “And how?”

He sighed and turned to give me his full attention, a wry smile on his lips. “What? A father isn’t allowed to pay his eldest son a visit?”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “No. Not when those visits conveniently only happen when you need something.”

He grunted incoherently. “You make yourself pretty easy to track down for someone who doesn’t want to be found.”

“What do you mean?”

He raised a brow. “Abraham Crowley,” he said with a hint of sarcasm. “Not exactly a name you hear every day.”

I said nothing as something stirred within the pit of my gut. Something scary and foreboding that said I might have run away three years ago, but I never hid.

Why the fuck haven’t I changed my name?

But … no. No, of course I knew why.

Anna.

I wanted to give her the option of finding me, looking me up in the phone book and finding someone who she’d know without a shadow of a doubt had to be me. Of course, that was assuming she remembered my last name, which … I wasn’t sure she’d ever known it at all. I knew for a fact that I’d never known hers. But if she ever got curious, if she ever decided to do some digging, there I’d be.

Yet, by leaving my name unburied, I remained alive for the people I never wanted to find me.

Is anyone else looking?

No. Who else even cares?

“Actually, it wasn’t you I found,” he confessed. “It was your brother.”

My gaze narrowed. “Ike?”

“The only one you have.”

I thought about mentioning Shawn but quickly reminded myself that my father never considered him my brother, no matter how much Ike and I did.

“Public schools make it too easy to watch the little kiddies,” he sneered, his smile disturbing and making my skin crawl. “Took a while, sure, but I found him. Followed him back to this place.”

I wasn’t sure I was buying what he was telling me, but I didn’t have enough reason to call him a liar.

“Pretty sweet deal you have here though. Old man feeds you, gives you a place to live, puts clothes on your back, and what? You just gotta work a couple of days a week or some shit?" He seemed to study my stoic expression for a moment before lifting a finger, wagging it in my face. "Nah, there’s gotta be more to it than that. He keepin’ you in his bed? Is that what it is? Old man’s got a thing for young c—"

Before he could speak another word, my knife was pulled from my back pocket, where it always stayed, and flipped open. As I pressed the sharpened blade to his throat, a sinister, slow-forming grin spread across his face.

"There's my boy," he muttered, dropping his gaze to the hand holding the knife. "Glad to see you're still in there. Very useful."

"What the fuck do you want from me?”

Beneath my hardened tone was a hint of frantic desperation I wasn’t proud of, but I couldn’t help it.

There wasn’t a single thing I’d asked this man for in my life, not a damn thing. Yet every time I convinced myself he was gone, that we’d finally shaken him from our scent, there he was again. Back to fuck it all up.

I should’ve changed my name and found another way for Anna to find me.

Fucking idiot. She’s not looking. She doesn’t remember me.