“So … who was the guy at the house?” I sniff, hanging my head. Ashamed that I continued to stand up for him when he had obviously done what he was being accused of.
“We don’t know.” Titan sighs and places his hand on my back. He begins to rub it, but I pull away. “Em ….?”
“He was looking for more than money,” I say.
“He told you that?” Bones asks.
I shake my head. “He didn’t have to. The picture on the wall covering the safe was already on the floor, but when I entered the room, the drawers to the desk were open as well. One on the floor.”
“Maybe he thought the combination was there somewhere,” Luca adds.
“Maybe,” Titan agrees. “Let’s go back and look around.”
“I want to go.” My head snaps up to look at him.
“I don’t think—”
“Let her go,” Bones interrupts Titan.
They exchange a look that is far from friendly. Something is up between them. And I’m that something.
TITAN
“She doesn’t need to go back to that house.” I close the glass doors to my study once she leaves to go change.
“I don’t see why you want to hide what a piece of shit her father obviously was from her,” Bones states.
I run a hand through my hair. “It has nothing to do with her father and more to do with the fact that the house is not safe.”
He snorts. “She’s the safest when she’s with us. And we will all be there.”
“He has a point.”
“I didn’t ask for your fucking opinion, Luca,” I snap.
He throws his hands up in surrender. “I’m just speaking from experience. If you try to hide something from them, then they will go behind your back to get what they want.” His hard eyes go soft. “And that is when things can get very bad, very fast.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
EMILEE
I RIDE WITH Bones and Titan back to my house, and Luca and Nite follow us. Titan had called Grave and Cross over to his house to stay with my mother and Liv while we were out. It made me think that there is more going on than they’re telling me.
We pull up to the house and walk inside.
“How did he get in?” Titan asks. “There doesn’t seem to be any forced entry.”
“You guys didn’t check the cameras?” I ask.
Bones answers. “No. The security system had been disabled.”
I come to a stop. “George. He had to have done it.”
“As far as we know, he’s still out of the country,” Titan argues.
“How far back did the footage go?” I ask.
“To that night,” Bones answers.
I wrap my arms around myself. How had someone disabled the security system? How could they have known where to look? Or even what to do? I guess with the access to the internet now, it’s not hard to find out anything.
“Come on.” Titan takes my hand and pulls me into the office. It looks the same. Things thrown about. Glass broken. Computer monitors shattered.
“Did he have a weapon?” Bones asks me.
“Yeah, a gun,” I whisper. “He held it to the back of my head …”
I hear Luca enter the room, and I spin around to see him and Nite.
“He held it to the back of your head?” Titan snaps.
I nod. “Told me that if I didn’t open the safe, he was going to blow my brains all over it for Daddy to find.”
His eyes go from murderous to surprised. “He thinks your father is still alive?”
“I told him he was dead.”
“And?” Bones demands.
“And he didn’t seem to care about that. He was just indifferent. He wanted in that safe. He said he wanted the money.”
Titan runs his hands through his hair.
“Well, then let’s get in it and see how much is in there,” Luca states.
The guys go to work looking around the office. I go over to the bookshelf that sits on the back wall and run my fingers over the spines. They’re dusty. My father wasn’t much of a reader, but I was. These books were for me, but I hadn’t been home in two years. They had been untouched, left to rot on a shelf. It breaks my heart.
I come to the last one on the second shelf and pull it out. It was my favorite, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Opening it up, a piece of paper falls to the floor. I bend down and see numbers written on it, but I don’t recognize them. They don’t go with any birthdates or milestones that my father would consider important.
“I think I found something,” I say, walking over to the safe on the wall. I punch in the code and then hear the lock click. The door kicks open just a tad.
I reach in and see stacks of papers. But no money. “What are these?” I ask, opening up the black folder.
I read over the papers before me, and my heart picks up. “No.”