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“Is he …”
“Would it make you love him any less if he was?” Mom asked, as if she knew what I was about to say, that I’d ask if Mateo was my half-brother.
“No, of course not. I would still love him the same,” I admitted.
“Well then”—Mom wiped the last few tears from her cheeks—“that’s that.”
ChapterSeventy-Five
BLAISE
Saturday afternoon, I parked in the skatepark and pulled my board out of the back. Vera was at work today for another hour, so I had some time to myself here. Not that I didn’t wish she were with me.
But I’d had so much on my mind lately, especially with Skylar’s murder and Callan supposedly having a meeting to find out who had really killed her and what had happened. Not only that, but I still couldn’t get the thought of Vera actually lovingmeout of my head.
After blasting music through my new headphones that I’d bought, I dropped my skateboard on the side of the skatepark’s ramp and hopped onto it. All night and all day, I had thought about the way Vera had looked with Ana.
My own family was so fucked that, when Vera and I were ready, I wanted to be the best fucking father to our kids. I would love to start a family with Vera because she’d be so much of a better mother than my mom was.
“Harleen!” someone shouted a while later, so loud that I could hear it over my music.
I glanced up from my board and spotted Avery standing on the side of the park with his arms crossed over his chest and a pissed off expression on his face.
I kicked up the board and walked over to him. “Last time I saw Callan Avery at the skatepark, he was threatening a kid with a gun.”
“Where’s your girl?”
“Vera?” I asked. “Why do you want to know about her?”
Avery snatched my arm and dragged me to the parking lot. “I’m not here to play games and talk shit to you, Blaise. This is fucking serious. I talked to someone who had more insight on Skylar Walker’s murder.”
“What’d they say?”
“Get in the car,” he said, shoving me into the passenger seat of his car. After slamming my door, he slipped into the driver’s seat and locked the car, which meant that this was more fucking serious than he’d led it on to be. “Skylar was fucking your father.”
My eyes bugged out of my head. “What?!”
“Don’t fucking scream,” Callan scolded, glancing around the park.
“You can’t drop a fucking bomb on me like that and expect me to whisper-yell it to you,” I said more quietly, though I couldn’t believe this. “Dad is barely ever in Redwood, never home. How the hell was she fucking him?”
“He was never in Redwood to see you,” Avery said. “Apparently, he met up with her a few times these past couple months before her death. They’d been seeing each other in secret for nearly a year, meeting at an upscale hotel.”
I ran my hand through my hair. “What the fuck? So, are you saying my dad killed her?”
“That’s not even close to everything,” Callan continued, gripping the steering wheel. “There’s a sex trafficking ring happening within the high school. Cheerleaders and many of the popular senior girls have been roped into it for a few years now. I’ve been trying to stop it, but—”
“What the fuck?!”
“Blaise, listen—”
I stared at him in shock with my mouth wide the fuck open, unable to believe another word that he said. This was all going on within our school, and nobody had said a word about it? How the hell had they all kept it a secret?
“Was Skylar in it? How didn’t Principal Vaughn find out?”
Avery’s grip on the steering wheel tightened. “Oh, he fucking knows.”
No. Fuck no.
