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Abraham must’ve worked with Luke Carmine to set my father up, using his inside knowledge of the crimes they’d committed to make a compelling case against Dad.
But the truth was, both men were guilty.
Anger burned in my veins, and I decided to follow the rabbit down the hole as far as I could go.
The first thing I needed to do was dig up more information on the history between my dad and his old business associate, so I searched all of his files for the name Abraham Shaw. A lot of what I found was boring and indecipherable, contracts and discussions of acquisitions that made no sense to me. But when I pulled up file marked “Untitled,” I found something much different.
It was the record of a payment from my father… to Luke Carmine.
I felt like I had cotton in my lungs. It was almost impossible to draw a full breath, but I forced myself to keep reading.
Holy fuck. That’s exactly what it is.
Abraham Shaw had paid Luke Carmine to destroy my father’s life, but he wasn’t the only one who’d had that idea. If I was reading this right, my dad had tried to screw over Abraham Shaw, to recruit Luke to take his old business partner down several weeks before my father’s own arrest. But Abraham must’ve offered more money or a better deal, because he’d somehow gotten Luke on his side instead.
I blinked, staring at the screen as I tried to process this strange turn of events. No wonder my father had been so certain he’d been set up—he had been in the process of trying to set his once-friend up when he’d been arrested.
Does he know that Luke is the one who arranged the frame job that landed him in prison? That he was double-crossed?
As I gazed blankly at the screen, a door slammed in the distance.
My body tensed as my head whipped up, and I quickly closed up the apps on my dad’s desktop, put the computer back to sleep, and bolted from the room. I ran up the stairs on tiptoes, my bare feet silent on the smooth marble, and when I reached my room, I closed the door and leaned against it, sliding down until my ass hit the floor.
Everything he’s told me is a lie.
My father had pretended he was an honest-dealing businessman who’d been wrongly accused, set up when he was totally innocent.
But he wasn’t innocent.
He was as guilty as Abraham. Maybe even more so.
I wasn’t sure why that even surprised me anymore. But it did. Despite everything that’d happened over the past several months, there was a part of me that had still clung to hope that some parts of my life hadn’t been based on lies.
But as I looked around at the lavish surroundings of my large room, I felt more like a stranger in this place than I ever had before.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t belong here now.
I had never belonged here.
Eleven
I told Poppy I wasn’t feeling well when she came to fetch me for dinner, and although I expected one of my parents to come and drag me downstairs, neither of them knocked on my door.
My stomach kept tying itself into tighter and tighter knots as my thoughts spun around in my head. I couldn’t quite figure out why it bothered me so much that my father had broken the law. After all, the Lost Boys broke the law all the time. They worked for a man and for an organization that thrived on illegal activity.
So what was the difference?
Honor, a little voice in the back of my head whispered.
The Lost Boys had it. Even Nathaniel Ward had it.
They all existed on the wrong side of the law, but they still lived their lives according to their principles. Their own moral code.
The Lost Boys could be threatening and dangerous, but they used their power at Slateview High to keep the peace—something not ev
en the school admins or teachers could do.
Nathaniel was ruthless in his operation, but even he had lines in the sand he wouldn’t cross.
