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Her words send a chill through me because I kno
w what it’s like—I know powerful men who kill with a word instead of a gun. An order to an underling that gives them the illusion of keeping their hands clean.
But Sebastian’s not like that, I remind myself. He’s not like my father, not like Carlo. I don’t have much to hang on to in the middle of all this misery, but I have that. It will have to be enough for now.
“Dylan was a good boy,” Janet says, pulling away from me to stare blankly down at the picture she is still clutching. “He had his problems—all teenage boys do—but he had a good heart. He didn’t deserve to die like that. Beat unrecognizable, body thrown in a ditch by the side of the road like garbage. He didn’t deserve to die like that.”
No one deserves to die like that. Most people who come here see only the glitz and the glamour, the bright lights and the money. Always the money. But what they don’t see is what people do for that money. How they lie and cheat and steal and smuggle for it. How they kill for it—and die for it.
“No,” I tell her, lifting the mug of tea and pressing it into her free hand. “No one should die like that.”
“He wasn’t perfect,” she tells me. “But neither was Sebastian, even though everyone thought he was. Everyone thought Dylan was the troublemaker. But Sebastian is Richard Caine’s son. And that man doesn’t have an innocent or decent bone in his body. The apple never falls far from the tree, Aria. Sebastian Caine is just like his father—a cold, brutal, evil man who will do anything for money. Anything to get his own way.”
Her words hit me like blows, send icicles skating down my spine, through my veins. There’s a part of me that’s screaming no. It’s not possible. This is Sebastian. He’s a decent guy. He’s nothing like Janet describes.
But there’s another part of me that wonders…that has to wonder. Because anyone meeting my father would think he was the kindest man in the world. Little would they guess just how much blood and violence and misery he has on his hands.
And there’s something about Sebastian. Something about his need for control, something about the darkness I see in his eyes when he’s fucking me, that makes me wonder if she might be right. There’s something seething under the surface there. Something dark and dangerous and desperate. I don’t know what it is. Don’t know if I want to know. But it’s there and I’d be a fool to ignore it.
“Dylan was the class clown,” Janet tells me as she drinks her tea, eyes far away from this couch, this apartment, this moment. “I was always getting notes or phone calls from teachers because Dylan had pulled a prank or started a rebellion in the cafeteria or had the whole class cracking up during some lecture or other.
“He was sweet and adventurous and yes, he made bad decisions sometimes. He drank too much, gambled too much, dabbled in drugs even though I told him not to. But he’d been running with Sebastian for years—since childhood, really, when I worked at the Atlantis and they became friends—and Dylan always felt like he had to keep up. Had to do what Sebastian did. Except he didn’t have the money. Or the rich father to bail him out.
“He only had me and I wasn’t enough.”
She lets go of the picture then, and it falls to the floor at our feet. I try to catch it but I’m not fast enough and a crack runs straight down the center of the glass.
Janet’s too caught up in the pain and the memories to notice, and I make a mental note to stop on the way to work tomorrow and buy a frame to replace the broken one.
“You should sleep,” I tell Janet, gently prying the empty mug from her fingers. Her words are slurred, her eyes nearly swollen shut from all the tears. I start to say that she’ll feel better in the morning, but that’s a ridiculous thing to say. Her son is dead. It’s not like the morning will suddenly make that truth easier to bear.
“I have nightmares.”
So do I. Terrible nightmares about those three interminable days—and the bloodshed that came after them. But— “Tiring yourself out will only make the nightmares worse. If you don’t get some sleep now, it’ll be twice as hard later.” I know, from bitter, bitter experience.
She nods finally, and after I move, stretches out on the couch. She even lets me pull the threadbare blanket from the end of the couch over her.
I make sure the water and her cell phone are on the table next to her, within easy reach, before carrying the tea mug back into the kitchen and rinsing it in the sink. Then I take the trash can from underneath, tie up the bag and put a new bag into it before carrying it the couch. She’s awfully drunk and the last thing she needs is to be cleaning up puke off the floor tomorrow. And neither do I.
She’s down for the count by the time I finish and I quietly let myself out, making sure to lock the door behind me. Once I’m outside, I take a couple seconds to breathe in the cool, clean night air. To breathe and think and just be.
My thoughts are a jumbled mess and I need to clear them before I see Sebastian. Need to figure out what I’m going to say to him. Because I saw him. I saw the torment on his face, the pain he couldn’t begin to hide. My gut screams that there’s more to the story than Janet told me—a lot more. And no matter what she says about his father, I won’t condemn him based on that. Not when I’ve worked so hard and for so long to walk a path different from my own father’s.
When the cloying scent of Janet’s sorrow has faded from my senses and the ache inside me is down to a dull, manageable pain, I head up the stairs to my apartment. But when I get there, Sebastian is nowhere to be seen.
I know, even before I walk to the railing and look down at the parking lot. Even before I register that his sleek, black Mercedes is no longer parked in my spot.
Sebastian is gone. And though I know exactly where to find him, I don’t have a clue how to reach him.
Chapter Two
Sebastian
I shouldn’t have left. I’d known that even as I’d climbed in my car and driven away. I owe Aria an explanation, I owed it to her to stick around and let her ask the million or so questions she probably has. After all, it isn’t every day that one of your friend calls the man you’re dating a murderer. Or, more precisely, screams it at him.
She’d asked me to wait, and I’d tried. I really had. But even as I stood in that deserted parking lot, staring at Janet’s door and seeing the ghosts of a hundred other visits to that very apartment, I knew I had to get out of there. If I’d stayed I would have just fucked everything up.
Even now, as I pull up to the valet at the Atlantis, my hands are still shaking on the steering wheel. My stomach’s a twisting knot of sadness and regret, self-loathing and rage. It’s the same emotional cocktail I felt when I walked away from this city ten years ago for what I thought was forever, and it’s the same one that’s dogged my footsteps from Haiti to Costa Rica, from Gaza to Sierra Leone.
