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Nor did I notice anyone standing beside the door, waiting for me to walk through.
I didn’t notice any of these things until they grabbed me and pressed me against the wall with a gun pointed at my head.
20
CHRIS
About a few weeks into our ruse, something was starting to gnaw on my brain. It felt like there was some huge part I was missing.
To start with, Ansel said the Moranos hadn’t made any recent moves to leave town or even done anything to suggest they were after Emily. They weren’t going by her old apartment or putting out tracers to try to find her. Nothing showed they even remembered she existed, and Ansel had been watching them for weeks already.
It was to the point where I sent Doper out to New York to do some on-the-ground scouting. He reported the same thing Ansel did, which was that the Moranos had no idea she was even here.
It seemed like an open-and-shut case, but I still felt like there was a significant piece of the puzzle that I just wasn’t seeing right now.
“Are you sure they’re not lying to you?” I asked Doper as I walked back home. My car brakes had malfunctioned on the way home today, but it was a vintage Mustang, so luckily, I’d been able to steer it to a safe stop before calling the dealership to come pick it up for servicing.
They’d offered me another car ride home in the meantime, but I declined. I already had a Jeep and a Jaguar, and with Emily’s Camry, the driveway was starting to get a little crowded. I could do without the Mustang for a few weeks, so I decided to walk home instead.
“No,” Doper answered. “They have no clue of anything that’s going on. They’re all preoccupied with some other heist.”
“Mm,” I murmured. “So we don’t know who broke into Emily’s home.”
“No. But it would help if you could ask your woman who she thinks it was.”
“I will,” I told him. I just needed to figure out how to do it without freaking her out even more. She was freaked out enough about being haunted by the brothers, but an unknown enemy would be even worse.
Unless, of course, the cops had set everything up so she would think the Moranos were after her, which would therefore make her more vulnerable to being persuaded to risk her life working for them.
But I really hoped it wasn’t that. Because that just might send me over the edge.
If I found solid proof, though, that the police set this entire thing up just so she could spy on me, then there would be hell to pay.
I didn’t know how, but I was going to make those motherfuckers pay for doing this to her. I was going to do it. Everything else, be damned.
Blazing fire rolled through me, and it should have surprised me that I was this protective and vengeful over her.
But then again, none of my recent feelings toward her made sense.
Not the fact that I enjoyed cuddling with her at night or eating meals with her in the daytime. Or that, for some reason, I enjoyed the stunned pleasure in her eyes whenever I so much as got her a gift or even just flowers. I got a bouquet for her on a whim the first time, but then I saw how shy she became when I came home that day. She’d arranged the flowers in a vase, and throughout dinner, she would glance at it, and a little hint of wistfulness would appear on her face as if trying to recapture the moment she first discovered that the flowers were for her.
I sent her one nearly every day after that just to see that look on her face again.
And I was man enough to admit it was for a similar reason that I bought her the car and the jewelry. Oddly enough, she hadn’t liked any of them quite as much as the flowers.
Strange girl.
And I knew if I let it happen, my feelings for her could get entirely out of control.
Luckily, I wasn’t stupid enough to do that. I couldn’t love her or anything, but no rule in this game said I had to not like her or show her zero affection. And it only made sense that I would care for her since her father and I were close when he was alive.
Care for her? You’re using the poor girl.
And that was another thing that bothered me.
My conscience was getting louder and louder when it came to her.
The fact that she was so young and I was using her bothered me now.
