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Boyd
Ripping the plastic smock from around my neck, I walk to the apartment bathroom and rinse the stains from my hands, glancing at myself in the vanity. Aside from some of the splatter, everything else looks normal. There’s no blood on my collar, no evidence of the brain matter smeared on the walls just outside, which is good since I don’t exactly have time for a second shower.
Riley hogs all the hot water, anyway.
Drying my hands on a paper towel, I adjust the lapels of my suit and exit the bathroom, scanning the studio in all its horrible glory. LeeAnn’s ex-boyfriend, a skinhead who made the mistake of staying at the house she was supposed to be at, lays on a gurney with his intestines half hanging out of his abdomen, his blood painting the tarp spread out on the floor.
His refusal to tell me where my darling mother is was not met with mercy—that word doesn’t exist in my vocabulary anymore where she’s concerned.
Since the night I found Romeo trying to gut Riley like a fucking fish, LeeAnn’s been in hiding, skipping her usual drop spots and bouncing from house to house, somehow evading even my top private investigators.
Considering the things she has to atone for, she’s playing her cards right. But the time on her freedom dwindles with each passing day, my anger for the woman mounting every time I don’t find her.
Turns out, the person who’d attacked Kieran and Craig earlier this year and sent me the blackmail on the flash drive had been Juliet Harrison’s mom, who had ties to the human trafficking ring Murphy Ivers was involved in that Kieran got shut down. Hurting financially, she’d been seeking revenge and only ended up saddled with felony charges.
But she hadn’t acted alone—we tracked the operation back to the Bianchis and had been watching them closely ever since, waiting for a slipup. I didn’t mention this to the team at Ivers International, but my hunch was that Riley was meant to be sold to Romeo the night he assaulted her and that my mom was somehow more involved with the mob than ever before.
So, I’ve been scouring the ends of the earth ever since, destroying anyone who gets in my way.
Today, though, all of that gets pushed to the back burner as I close up the apartment and head back into the house for a pair of sleek, black oxfords to match my suit. I’m lacing them up when Riley hobbles down the stairs wearing a pair of black jeans and an oversized sweater—funeral attire, but also the norm for her these days.
Her blonde hair is cropped in a short bob, sticking out by her ears in different angles; it’d been matted with so much blood and skin after the attack that she decided to chop it all off, and she looked slightly freer because of it.
The shadows follow her, though, same as they do me. Demons lurking everywhere she looks, waiting to consume her and drag her to Hell. Her blue eyes aren’t as bright as they used to be, replaced with a guarded ambivalence that sometimes chills me to my core. The mangled skin on her cheek where they grafted part of her thigh and the scar at the corner of her mouth are the only visible reminders, but neither of us need the proof.
She’s safe, though, and for now, that’s what I’m focusing on. Becoming a sudden parent to a teenager is hard enough without the added pressure of trying to fix her.
At least, that’s what the online parenting forums say. I check them before bed each night, searching for reassurance from strangers on the internet that I’m not completely fucking this up.
Hard to beat the job LeeAnn did, though.
“We aren’t going to the wake, right?” Riley asks, leaning on the stair railing. “I don’t think I can look at a dead body right now.”
I grunt, lifting my other foot and tying that shoe.
“You know, I was legally dead for two minutes back in May,” she continues, sending a pang of guilt scorching down my sternum.
“I’m aware, yes.”
“I just don’t want someone to mistake me as a corpse and add me to the collection of bodies beneath the St. Killarney Cathedral.”
“Riley,” I snap, irritation spiking. “Stop joking about that. You don’t look like a fucking corpse.”
She shrugs—at one time, my tone would have bothered her, as if she directly correlated the way I spoke with the way I felt about her. Which, I suppose, I did before.
The resentment is still there, a dull ache I’m not quite sure what to do with, but it’s buried beneath fear now. The expectation of loss, something I’ve become too familiar with in my life.
The only thing that truly terrifies me.
Now, though, Riley doesn’t appear to be affected by or interested in anything, and I’m not exactly sure how to handle that, either. So far since we began our living arrangement, we’ve just been coexisting in the same house, not bonding and certainly not healing.
Part of the reason is because I’m so hellbent on finding LeeAnn and Romeo, but the other is because I just don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
Too many parenting books and articles say that the most important thing is to show up for your kid, but that’s all I do and it doesn’t seem to be working. Riley slips farther from my grasp every single day, farther into a pit of despair, and I don’t think I’m equipped to pull her from it.
Can’t even figure out how to pull myself out.
“If you keep joking like that, they’re going to try to make you go to therapy again,” I tell her, getting to my feet and swiping my keys off the counter. “Remember how well that went?”
