Rules of Survival (Entangled Embrace) (21 page)

That’s when I remembered where I’d seen the ring. The hooded man in the window.

Bengali wasn’t Jaffe. It was Mick.

His laughed echoed in my head. “You probably should have read the entire letter…”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Dripping water. It was the only thing I heard.

Drip-drip-drip-drip-drip.

At first it was comforting. Noise to banish the silence and make the dark a little less scary—but after a few minutes, I wanted to scream. The constant, methodical sound was like an annoying nature CD on skip. I almost would have preferred the quiet.

Almost.

I tried to move my arms and, of course, failed. I did manage to flex my fingers around and figured out my wrists—and Shaun’s—were wrapped with about two inches of smooth surface. Duct tape.

I shouldered him. “Shaun?”

No answer. Not so much as a twitch. He had drunk more of the milk than me.

I squinted in the darkness but couldn’t make out anything other than a large, nondescript shape on the other side of the room. We were in some kind of basement. At least, that’s what it smelled like. There was dampness in the air and the strong stench of mothballs and mildew that made my nose itch and my eyes water.

My head was fuzzy but starting to clear. Mick. My
dad
. He’d done this. Drugged us. How the hell had I been so stupid? I’d waltzed into his house, plopped myself down at the table, and totally disregarded the rules. Again.

I ticked them off, one at a time, in my head. It was completely pointless now, but they made me feel better. Never let your guard down. Don’t enter any place that you can be trapped. Don’t trust anyone… And why had I blown them off? Because he was
my dad
?

Mom should have warned me that applied to relatives.

Really though, I should have known. There was a reason she wasn’t with him. And I should have known if he was a good guy, she would have told me more about him. She’d been running all this time, and I was ready to bet all ten of my toes that it was
him
she had been afraid of—not Bengali. The letter had warned me. I just hadn’t put the fragments together correctly.

“Kayla…?”

“Shaun?” I twisted toward him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Hazy, but fine. Are you?”

I nodded, fidgeting with the tape. It didn’t budge. “I think so.”

Beside me, he wiggled and squirmed. There were several moments of cursing and some grunting before he said, “I think we might be fucked.”

I brought my legs up close to my body and tried to move them apart. Nothing. They were tied, too. Stretching, I tried to reach the tape with my fingernail, but the way he had us bound, it wouldn’t work.

“Shit,” I swore. “I can’t reach, but I think if we move together, we can stand. Maybe we can find a way out.”

“Can’t hurt. I’m not really interested in waiting around to see what he’s got in mind for your family reunion.”

I leaned sideways as far as I could and hit something solid. “The wall. We can use it to sort of slide up. You ready?”

“Yeah. I think so. On three?”

“One…two…”

“Three,” we said together and pushed off the ground.

But as it turned out, my plan was better in theory than practice. We
did
manage to get off the ground, but the height difference between us, and the way Mick had us trussed, allowed Shaun to stand faster than me. Since we were cuffed to each other, he’d taped each of our hands together—then bound both pairs. The whole thing sent me off-balance and I tipped forward, taking Shaun with me. Without the use of my hands to help break my fall, I hit the ground face-first—and hard.

The entire right side of my face stung. I ran my tongue along the edge of my teeth, convinced for a moment I’d knocked several of them loose, but they all seemed to be in place.

“You okay?” Shaun asked, voice muffled. He managed himself back into a sitting position, which by default pulled me upright as well.

“I think so. Okay. So that didn’t work. Your turn.”

“
You’re
Plan Girl.” He laughed. “I, ah, got nothing.”

“Fantastic.”

“So, what do you want to do tomorrow? ’Cause I’m thinking if you haven’t got any plans, maybe we could try pissing off the Mafia. That’d be a fun change of pace.”

“Aren’t you a riot?”

He chuckled. The sound was oddly comforting. Something that in the short time I’d known him, I’d come to love. “I try.”

“Do you think he’s going to kill us?”

Shaun tilted his head back until it rested against mine. “I think he wants to. I don’t think we’ll give him the opportunity.”

“Feels like he’s got all the opportunity he needs—and then some.”

“Maybe. But we’ll think of a way out. I’m not worried.” He nudged me with his head before straightening and nodding to the door. “Besides, you’re forgetting about Patrick.”

“We left Patrick at the diner, along with the trace he had on you. He doesn’t know where we are,” I reminded him, even though a small seed of hope bloomed in my chest.

“But he knew that you wanted to hit up Mick. It would be the next logical place for him to check. Patrick will come for us,” he said, resolute. “I’m not worried at all.”

And he wasn’t. I could tell from the relaxed set of his shoulders and the easy tone in his voice. It bothered me. “Can I ask you something?”

“Go for it.”

“What would it take for you to lose faith in Patrick? You just found out he lied to you about his past. Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Don’t do that,” he said with a fierceness that caught me off guard. “Melissa kept things from you because she felt it was the right thing to do. She thought it would keep you safe. Don’t lose faith in her because she made a bad call.”

“I feel like she had this whole other life, and she hid it from me.”

“Of course she hid it from you. Kayla, you’re eighteen. No parent is going to tell their kid about the dark spots in their past.”

“Maybe—but not telling me about Mick was worse in the end. I could have been prepared. I could have stayed away.”

“It was a bad judgment call on her part. Cut her some slack, okay? She probably thought she’d always be around to keep you safe. Plus, you don’t know what the rest of that letter says. She might have come clean.”

That letter. That damned letter had started all this. If I’d never gone back for it, chances were I could have just kept running. “Guess I’ll never know now.”

“Sure you will. I’ll take you back to the cabin myself once this is all over.”

“What if—” The words caught in my throat. “What if she did kill that kid?”

I felt his shoulders lift with a shrug. “This is gonna sound harsh, but so what? I’ve listened to you talk about Melissa for days now. And I don’t agree with how she did things, but it sounds to me like she loved you.”

“She did,” I admitted. No matter what she did or what she’d neglected to tell me, there would never be any doubt in my mind about that.

“You knew her better than anyone—whether you realize it or not. The things she didn’t tell you about didn’t make her who she was. So ask yourself—do you really think she murdered anyone?”

Mom wasn’t a murderer. I knew it deep in my gut just as sure as I knew my own name. “If she did do it, she had to have had a reason. A good one. Or it was an accident.”

“There ya go. You have the only answer you need. The rest doesn’t matter. Not in the long run.”

I wanted to ask him when he’d gotten so smart, but there was a loud creak and a thin beam of light flooded the room from somewhere behind me. “Everyone comfy?”

Mick.

His shadow danced its way down the wall by the stairs, distorted and resembling more of a monster than a man. Fitting, I thought. Because that was what Mick was. A monster. I wanted one thing in that moment. To hit him. Over and over until he was lifeless and still. To make him
feel
all the years of fear and pain I’d lived. “It was you. You did it.”

He stopped in front of us. “I’ve done a lot of things—most illegal. Which one are you referring to?”

“You killed my mom.”

“She got exactly what she deserved,” he snapped, stomping his foot against the concrete. The beam of light from upstairs fell across his face, giving him an almost inhuman quality. “She stole my heart and my money, and then to top it all off, threatened me.”

He might have been waiting for us to ask questions so he could continue his little monologue, but I refused to give him that. Unfortunately, he continued anyway. If he was the one who’d been chasing us, then he’d been saving this up for a long time.

“I
loved
Melissa. From the first moment I saw her, I knew she had to be mine. We met in high school when we were fourteen and started running the con. It was little stuff at first. Identity scams. Credit fraud. Stuff to pay for nice dinners and exotic hotel rooms, but she wanted to go bigger. She was always looking to ‘trade up.’ She pulled in that shmuck Patrick, and that’s when things fell apart. I got so tired of hearing her go on and on about how smart he was and how we’d never be where we were if it weren’t for him.”

Mick started to pace.

“Every idea I had—she needed to run it by him first. When she told me she was pregnant and wanted to quit, I was thrilled. I was finally going to get her all to myself—and then she had to ruin it. She mentioned him and the plans she had for
all
of us. Well”—he snickered—“I kind of lost it. I’ll admit I acted a little rash and things got a bit out of control, but, well… You know how love is.”

This guy was insane. “Something tells me whatever you think you felt for her, it wasn’t love.”

He ignored me.

“So I went along with one last job, figuring it could kill two birds with a single stone. It was one final score to set us up for a long time, and the opportunity to get rid of Patrick once and for all.”

“How would that get rid of Patrick?” And then I understood. “Oh my God. It was you.
You
killed Bengali’s son. You were going to frame Patrick.”

“I left for five minutes.
Five fucking minutes
! No one was supposed to be there for hours.”

But someone
was
there. “Mom came back, didn’t she?”

He stopped pacing and nodded, expression furious. “She found the kid and screwed it up. Put her prints all over everything in the room. I came back and, while she was distracted, managed to plant a small piece of evidence. Patrick’s wallet.”

“And she just believed you?” I found it hard to believe, even in her younger years, that Mom would ever be that gullible.

“
No
. Patrick was an angel in her eyes. He could do no wrong. We ran, and she took the wallet with her. God forbid her precious
Patrick
be implicated. She needed more convincing—and luckily, he took care of that for me.”

Shaun balked. “
He
took care of it?”

“Later that night we met up outside town to decide what to do. The cops were crawling all over town and a witness had seen Melissa fleeing the house, covered in blood. Bengali had also reported one of his accounts was completely cleared out. It was all over the news—along with Melissa’s picture. Patrick confronted her. It was funny, really. He came at her like a madman. Never gave her a chance to get a word in. He accused her of killing the kid and taking all the money.”

“And what, she didn’t
defend
herself?” I snapped. Mom would never let anyone attack her like that. The woman I knew would never take that from someone.

“That bastard was her weakness. The accusation in his eyes. The fury in his voice. Melissa was devastated that he believed it all so easily. That he had no faith in her.”

No faith in her
. And maybe that’s why Mom had never told me the truth about her past. Because the harsh reality of it had already cost her someone she’d obviously cared about. Maybe she was worried about what I’d think.

Suddenly I hated myself for second-guessing her.

“Once I got her away from him, I was able to convince her that maybe the reason Patrick had attacked her so viciously was because he really
was
guilty. The kid was dead and the money was gone. His wallet had been at the scene.” Mick smiled. “Eventually she just began to believe me.”

“And it was you,” Shaun growled. “You killed the kid and stole the money just to get rid of Patrick?”

Mick shrugged. “Guilty.”

“That’s all good—in a twisted, douche-bag way—but it doesn’t explain why you killed Melissa.” Shaun prodded.

“She never really let go of him. Every once in a while, she’d become obsessed with finding out the truth. Then, one day, she did.”

Now I understood. The information the letter mentioned must have been the proof she had against Mick. It would clear her name, and if the cops could actually find him, free mine, too. “She found evidence, didn’t she? That it was you, not Patrick. That you’d planned the whole thing.”

“And then she stole
my
money and ran.”

“Your money? Dude. You
stole
it,” Shaun said with a laugh. But Mick was lost in recollection.

“When I realized she was gone, I went crazy. I looked everywhere.”

“You have to be the sickest shit I know,” Shaun said. “And believe me, that’s saying something.”

Mick ignored him and continued like he wasn’t even there. He was lost in his own world now. Swept up in a memory. “I’ve built up my resources over the years.” He chuckled. “I dare say I’m almost neck and neck with that fool Bengali. But Melissa had a talent for disappearing. That woman could drop off a grid like no one else.”

He thumped his chest and grinned. “She learned from the best. I got close quite a few times, but she always slipped past me. She always stayed one step ahead. Finally, I created John Jaffe and hired a collection of the best bounty hunters to do the legwork for me. Patrick was working for me all along, and the fool didn’t have a clue.”

“But why?” My voice cracked a bit. “Why not just leave her alone? She obviously wasn’t going to turn in the evidence.” Mom would have never gone to the cops. They would have arrested her for various other infractions, and with no family, I would have ended up in the system.

“Think about it from my point of view. That evidence was like a pendulum swinging back and forth over my head every damn day. Add that to the fact that she stole from me, and then left me. I gave her everything and she
left
me. She would have gone back to him eventually, and I wasn’t going to allow that.”