“He’s not a college kid anymore,” Grayson reminds me. “He’s a man who walks into problems, rather than away from them. I know this. I see it every day.”
“Is that good or bad?” Mia queries, crossing her arms in front of her. “Because if he really cares about Harper, and they, the Kingstons, I assume, tried to hurt her, the numbers in his head may calculate the odds of them succeeding next time as too risky. He might take the action, but the wrong action. We both know how much he hates that family.” She looks at Grayson. “A man held me at gunpoint and you tried to get him to shoot you instead of me. Think about Eric doing the same.”
I don’t know what she’s talking about, or who held a gun to her head and I don’t ask. I can think of only one thing. She just said that Grayson tried to take a bullet for her. “Eric’s trying to take the bullet for me, too, in some way, shape or form.” I take a sip of my coffee, just to do something, anything. “I need the phone to try to call him again.”
Grayson breathes out, scrubbing his jaw and dialing the number before handing it to me. It rings and rings, and I walk to a coffee table of black stone—a part of the black theme to the room that is as dark as I believe Eric’s past is—and set my mug down. Voicemail picks up and I leave a message he may never hear. “I need you to come back here alive right now. I need you, period. I do. Come back so I can tell you that in person.” I disconnect and dial again, and again, I get voicemail.
Grayson and Mia are looking at me when I hang up and Mia walks toward me. “Let’s busy ourselves unpacking what I brought you so you won’t worry. Or so you’ll fill up some of the space in your mind where the worry wants to live.”
A space the size of the city.
“I have such a bad feeling about this night,” I whisper.
“He will be back and safe,” Mia promises me.
I need her to be right.
No.
I just need Eric. Here. Now.
***
Eric
In the short time it takes for me to get an uneventful update from Adam, and exit my apartment building alone, my phone rings with a call from Grayson. “Sorry, brother,” I murmur. “Not now.” I hit decline. If anything important is happening, the Walker team will contact me
I place the phone on mute and cut right, walking toward my father’s hotel, bypassing the use of a hired car with a driver that might remember my travels. I push through the fog-laden, cold night for another three blocks and once I’m at the hotel, I dial my father.
“Back of the building in the alleyway.”
He snorts. “I’m not meeting you in the back of the hotel.”
Just the sound of his voice cuts me all the way to my black soul he helped create. “You afraid of the dark? Good thing I’m not or Harper would be in a dark warehouse dead right now.”
“I heard what happened, son. Why do you think I’m here?”
“You mean you ordered someone to kill her.” It’s not a question.
“You’re confused, son,” he says, using a familiar snide tone, “which is why we need to talk. Here. Now. In my room.”
“Not a chance in hell, even your version of hell, where you’re the devil that always gets his way. You have five minutes and then I’m gone. Back service door.” I disconnect the line and a notification pops up with a voicemail from Grayson. I ignore it and head down the alleyway toward the back of the building. If my father won’t come to me, I’ll go to him, but on my terms, in my way. I walk to the back of the building, finding the alleyway dark, with a dim overhead light spiraling down on a dumpster. I take a position in a dark corner by the door I’ve named, where I’ll wait to discover how desperate my father is to talk to me.
Three minutes pass and I become aware of someone else in the alleyway and he isn’t my father. He is, however, dressed in all back. He steps behind the trashcan and disappears. Waiting on someone, and of cour
se that someone is me.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Eric
The past…
I leave the social worker’s office on the heels of my father, who never looks back at me. When we get to his fancy car, he flicks me a look. “Backseat.”
His message is clear: I don’t belong in the front with him. I want to punch him. I want to hurt him like I know he hurt my mom. God, I want to kill him. He must see it in my face, too, because he charges up to me, grabs my shirt and shoves me against the car. “You got a problem with me, boy?”
“You’re an asshole.”