“I can’t leave you and him here. I can’t. What if something happens to you? If you two go, I’ll go.”
“Damn it, mom.”
“Drop the case, Pri.” She motions to the waitress. “We need to-go boxes, please.”
“I’m leaving in the morning. I’ll take you with me but you cannot tell Dad.”
“No. I need to talk to your father. I’ll meet him at the airport and talk to him.”
“What time does he get in?”
“Four o’clock. Meet me here again tomorrow night. I’ll try and get him to come.”
“Okay,” I say, though the agreement doesn’t sit right in my belly. And I suspect it won’t in Adrian’s either. “I’ll be here tomorrow night.”Chapter Thirty-EightADRIAN
Blake and I are sitting in the back of a van, listening to Pri and her mother’s conversation at the restaurant when the bombshell of her father’s blackmail is delivered.
“Fuck.”
It’s the only appropriate word for what just happened, proven by the fact that I don’t say it. Blake does.
Then comes her mother’s insistence that Pri meet her for dinner tomorrow night when we’re supposed to leave town in the morning. Followed by, of course, Pri’s subsequent agreement.
“Fuck.”
This time I’m the one cursing.
My foot starts to thrum on the floor of the van while I wait for the moment Pri and her mother decide to get their food to-go. Her mother leaves first and Pri lingers behind, ordering extra food that I know is for me. The very idea that she thought of me shouldn’t surprise me, but then, it does and somehow makes this entire situation all the more combustible. I’m in this with her now. I don’t want it to be any other way, but there is no denying just how dangerous this has become.
Eager to get to her, I reach for the door and Blake captures my arm. “No. You need to meet her at the house. Too many people are looking for you.”
“Fuck,” I mutter again because he’s right and I can’t protect her behind bars or dead.
I shift back onto the bench where I’d been sitting and stare at the damn ceiling without really seeing it, battling the rush of adrenaline spiking through me. “I know you just want to get her to safety,” Blake says. “But you know you’re going to have to kidnap her to get her to leave before that meeting tomorrow night. And that’s not an answer.”
My gaze collides with his and I snap, “Neither is her ending up dead, Blake, and I know you know that. Don’t tell me if it was your wife, you wouldn’t feel the same way.”
“All right, then,” he says. “What are you going to do?”
“Everything I can to keep her alive.”
I don’t say anything else. I don’t have to. He knows anything means anything, and he knows he’d be in the same headspace if he were me.
***
The minute Pri is safely in the vehicle with Mason, she calls me. “I know you don’t want me to stay,” she says the instant I answer, “but they’re my parents, Adrian,” she adds. “And right or wrong, deserved or not, I love them. I can’t make myself leave until I know what is really going on with my father. And before you say anything, before you object and I know you want to, can I just talk to you alone when we get to the house?”
“Deep breath, baby,” I say, her torment a living breathing thing that is now becoming mine. Already I’m mentally backing off my push to get her to leave tonight. In other words, this is me getting my ass kicked by a woman who is not even trying to kick my ass.
“I get it,” I add. “All of what you just said. I do. I don’t like it, but if it were my parents, I’d feel the same. We still have to talk about the right and wrong parts of this equation.”
“Alone, please,” she says again. “I don’t want to get into a big debate with everyone involved until I talk to you and not because I don’t like and trust every single last person on the Walker team. I’m just—my family and Waters—and I’m not in a good place right now.”
Family. Waters. Two words together I understand. My mind flashes back to the past, to an image of my brother shoving a woman against a wall while she fought him. He was a devil then. He was with Waters and Waters is a devil maker.
With gritted teeth, I shove that little piece of hell away. “I think that’s pretty normal under the circumstances.”
“There’s that word,” she says. “Normal. I’ve decided I don’t even know what it means, but it’s kind of becoming a fantasy of mine.”
“Normal is overrated,” I assure her because she’s not a person who would enjoy normal any more than I would. Otherwise, neither one of us would have done half the shit we’ve done.