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“Does daddy’s mind hurt? Is that why it needs settling?” I ask. He bumped his head on one of the pipes at work today and said a lot of words I’m not going to tell mum about.
She laughs and shakes her head. “Something like that, luv,” she says as she picks up the teacup and carries it out of the kitchen to my father.
I gripped the jar tighter. Even with the lid screwed on tight, I could smell the floral, slightly earthy scent of the chamomile tea inside. It made my hands shake and my eyes sting as something livid writhed in my veins.
“You bloody liar,” I hollered, and I chucked the jar at the kitchen wall, watching the glass explode into a thousand shards that dropped soundlessly onto the counter.
No sound. Nothing at all.
“It’s your fault I can’t hear that,” I seethed, staring at the shards that lay scattered among tea bags.
“It’s your fault,” I yelled. My hands clenched into trembling fists at my sides as I thought of every moment I’d spent alone and every night I’d cried myself to sleep. All the times I’d needed them and all the years of missing them so much that it had etched a permanent ache into the center of my chest.
All for money. All for a hidden treasure he never got to spend.
I shook my head and tried to cast the knowledge aside, to shove it down in a box, though I knew it had no hope of staying there.
Stepping around the few shards of glass that had landed on the floor, I moved to my five-by-five dining nook at the back of the kitchen. I pushed aside the blinds that covered the arched window.The stale air in the apartment made it feel stuffy, and after spending too much time locked in rooms, the last thing I wanted to feel was cloistered.
Outside, the sky was still dark. The lamplights cast an orange glow along the sidewalks below and the row of parked cars in front of the building. Most nights, even this late, there were people coming and going from the vehicles, some of them in uniforms, off to early shifts, others still wearing the rumpled clothing of the day prior.
In all the time I’d spent watching the street from this window, though, none of the people down below had ever really noticed me before.
Not like the man in the all-black sports car who was staring up at me now.
Chapter Twenty
Heidi
Three o’clock in the morning. Still there.
Four thirty. Still there.
Five thirty-five?
I slipped my fingers between the gap in the dining room curtains and peeked out.
Gone.
The black sports car that had been parked outside all night was gone.
I dropped the curtains and looked around, holding a kitchen knife tight in my hand. I checked the sitting room, the bathroom. All empty.
I dropped the knife on the olive green vanity and scrubbed my hands over my bleary eyes.
“I don’t think tea’s going to cut it this morning,” I told my reflection, then grabbed the knife and returned to the kitchen for the French press I kept stored in the cupboard above the sink, moving carefully around the glass I had no intention of cleaning up at the moment. But there was also no sense in trying to sleep now, not when I needed to be up for work in half an hour.
Fortunately, the morning passed in a blur—as any shift in an emergency room tended to do. But it was my lunch break, and time had slowed and brought the world into sharper clarity, particularly the woman who stood in front of me at the table in the far corner of the cafeteria with a tray of French fries in her hands.
“Do you mind if I sit down?” Raven asked, then sat down without waiting for a response.
“I don’t know what Deo told you about me,” she said with no further prelude. “But I hope we’ve been working together long enough that you know what I am—at least here, at the hospital,” she said, pushing the French fries around on her plate.
“Raven Luca is about as steeped in the ‘criminal’ world as a person can get,”Amadeo had said.
My father had been steeped in the “criminal” world, but he’d been a father as well. Could a person be both?
Nothing seemed to fit inside my neat little boxes anymore.
