Page 69 of The Fixer

“Oh, Jet, I’m so sorry.”

There was a note from her tucked inside the pocket of my backpack near the back door. The same pale pink paper she always used, red lipstick staining the note from the press of her lips.

Giraldo,

I need to see you. Come to my apartment at 4:00.

With love,

Bo <3

I shoved the note back in my bag, gave some excuse to my father, and raced out the door as fast as my legs would carry me.

It was always worse if I was late. The woman would punish me in ways my young mind wasn’t meant to understand. And when I arrived at 4:06, I knew my life would never be the same.

“My father found out when I was fifteen,” I told her, trying but failing not to relive that moment in my head. When he’d barged into her apartment with Jacob Riser in tow, that note from Bo clenched in his fist.

She had me tied to her bed, her hand clenched around my throat. Squeezing so hard I thought I might die. And seeing the look of horror in my father’s and Jacob’s eyes made me wish for death.

There were some things a father should never see, and what Bo had done to me was most definitely one of them.

Neither he nor Jacob ever looked at me the same.

“What happened to her?” Eliza asked, lips brushing against the skin at my shoulder.

“Don’t know,” I said with a shrug. A shrug that knocked the girl off me. I rolled over and pressed a kiss to her lips. “I’d been working for Paulo for as long as I could remember. And when he found out…”

Eliza’s breath caught, and I knew she understood. She knew enough of the man, knew he wouldn’t tolerate the abuse of women or children.

She knew about the dark side of his world.

“I never saw her again.”

She gave a sharp nod, lips a tight line on her face. “Good.”

“Good?”

Eliza lifted her hand, swiping her fingers along my forehead, brushing back my hair. “She hurt you. In ways no one should ever hurt a child. It’s good that you’ve never had to face her again, no matter what happened that made her go away.”

I captured her hand, brought it to my lips. She let me hold it between us, letting me be in control.

“You surprise me,” I told her, tracing my thumb over hers. “You’re such a good girl, and here you are, talking like you’d be okay if she… was taken care of.”

The girl lowered her gaze. “After my mother was murdered, they put Benjamin Bell in jail. One night, he was found dead. There was suspicion around his death, talk that it wasn’t natural, that someone had gotten to him. But they could never prove anything.”

My tongue swept out, prodding at the corner of my lips. The girl paused, and I could feel her gaze burning into the side of my face.

“But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

There were things in my life no one could know about. Things I’d done or heard that weren’t for anyone else’s ears. But Eliza? How could I keep this from her?

“After everything,” I started, then swallowed down the jagged knife that seemed stuck in my throat. “My father sent me away. He didn’t want me at the funeral home, didn’t want me around. So, I went to stay with D’Angelo. Paulo, he took me back under his wing. I’d struggled for years, both in life and at school. And he asked me to focus, to find the love of life that I’d had before. He told me what happened wasn’t my fault.”

“It wasn’t,” Eliza whispered. Her hand raised to my mouth, pressing gently to my lips. I kissed her fingertips, kissed across her palm, kissed the thumping beat that pulsed through her wrist. Her fingers fluttered, slipping along the rough hair on my jaw, and I clenched my eyes shut. “It wasn’t your fault, sweetie, not one little bit.”

It took everything in me not to pull away when her hand cupped my cheek. Not to pull away and cower from her touch. She wasn’t Bo; I knew that. But it didn’t mean letting go of the past was easy.

Reaching for her, I curled my hand around hers. Held her warmth to my face, breathed in the rightness of her while I breathed out the wrongness of my past.