Chapter Seventeen: Devin
I didn’t feel good about where I’d left things with Julia the day before, but what was I supposed to do? She wasn’t ready for the truth.
Okay, that wasn’t it. I wasn’t ready for the truth.
All I’d ever wanted for her, from when she was just the Mahoney princess, her exact character a blank in my head, was to take her out of their house. To give her the choices I knew they wouldn’t. But to know why I even cared… that was much harder to convey. She might be a little brat who knew her way around a man far too well, particularly the parts inside the head, but she was going to struggle to not misinterpret this. It would either hurt her or bond her to me more closely, and neither was a desirable outcome. I had fought so hard to keep from putting her in another beautiful prison.
I had kept telling myself that, but it wasn’t protecting me from the truth: whatever my reasoning, I hadn’t handled this well. I wasn’t used to women as soft as Julia—which was saying something, because she was a tough little bitch. But she was also hungry for something neither of us had expected, and that had compromised her ability to focus on being the woman she needed to be away from her parents. After walking out of the apartment that afternoon, I felt like I had managed the whole situation in a way that held no prospect of ending well for her. And that made me a complete failure.
Maybe Julia was right, and trying to protect her from her feelings—or mine—was impossible. And who was I to judge or suspect her for desire or affection when she was trying so sincerely to accept the violence and espionage of the world she now knew she was a part of? Who was I to punish her because I hadn’t fully realised what she was offering to me that day we were together?
She didn’t deserve a punishment. She deserved… something I hadn’t intended to give her, something I didn’t think I would be able to give her. I’d actually planned against that outcome.
But she had changed the plan, and just as I’d tried to tell her so many times, it was stupid to fight against the way things were going to be.
I needed to stop shirking my responsibilities out of fear. I should invite her out for dinner that night, a non-threatening public activity, and push myself to get comfortable with the idea of going back to the apartment with her after and telling her everything. And however she reacted… I had to let her own that reaction. If she needed space to process it, I would give her more space. If she felt the need to make a physical connection… I wasn’t against that either. Not at all.
The afternoon was passing quickly, so once I was decided I sent off a quick invitation to be awaiting me by text, resisting a fleeting inclination to offer something apologetic or conciliatory. I was reaching out here, wasn’t I? That should be enough.
When she didn’t immediately respond, I wasn’t sure. She’d been obnoxiously responsive up until now. I tried calling, and she didn’t answer.
I called my mother. “I don’t suppose you’ve spoken with Julia today.”
Her words were slow, careful. I hadn’t spoken to her since I found out about the trouble she’d caused with Julia, but she had to realise Julia had probably let slip what happened. “I saw her yesterday. I haven’t visited today.”
“I can’t seem to raise her,” I explained. “I was going to go to the apartment and see if there was something—”
“No. Don’t.”
She seemed to have surprised herself by her insistence, and before I could speak she grasped for more words. “I’ll go myself. There are some things women can only express to other—”
“Don’t try to play me like that, Angel. I can hear what’s behind it far too well.” She made a noise acknowledging I’d caught her at something. “Don’t bother with Julia. I will go o
ver myself, and I don’t want to meet you there trying to do damage control on the trouble you’ve caused.” I suspected all of what she’d been up to was far worse than putting doubts in Julia’s mind, but I revealed just enough of what I’d worked out to keep her busy scrambling to hide the rest.
“Call me or drop by once you’ve been to see her,” said Mother. “I’ll be available to talk.”
I didn’t know if this was damage control for the thing I knew about or the thing I only suspected, but I cancelled the conference call I’d been planning to slip in before dinner, and drove myself over to Julia’s apartment almost without checking to see if I was in a decent condition. I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t answer a doorbell ring: I tried once and then let myself up to the apartment.
She wasn’t inside. No signs of a struggle—the only hint of violence was some damage to the inside of the door I’d noticed when I was there the day before, something being swung or thrown at it. I guessed some part of what my mother had said to her had really upset her.
I made a quick study of the apartment, now slumped into the same mild disorder as Julia’s bedroom at the Mahoneys’ house. Cups and plates that had been out and dirty when I was there were still out. Her bag and phone were gone. It was most likely she had left voluntarily, with someone she thought she could trust. Too much effort to make the place look this natural otherwise.
So if she had been taken, there was someone she knew involved. But there was a chance she was just out for the evening anyway and she’d switched off her phone or was not checking it. A good chance she’d left by herself and planned not to return, given the way she’d been talking yesterday.
I already had my hand on my hip when the apartment door opened again… but of course it was my mother who walked in.
“You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?”
“I don’t know what’s happened here,” she replied, closing the door behind her and curling her lip when she saw the dent on the back, “but I was certain you would need my immediate support and guidance.”
“What I need from you is the password to access the security system. So it’s good you’ve come.”
Her face turned sour at that, but she handed over her phone with the monitoring app open. “I need to know when Julia left, if anyone came to get her,” I explained. If Mother knew enough to be able to fill me in, she was clearly expecting me to drag the information out of her. “She was here yesterday, so we shouldn’t have too much footage to look back over.”
But when I tried to find footage from yesterday afternoon, the latest I knew Julia had still been in the apartment, there was nothing saved in the cloud storage. I met with the same result when I checked the directory for the current day’s recordings.
I stared at Mother, who widened her eyes back at me.