“Fucking skirts.” Nico licks his lips, watching her retreat. “With pussy like that on the loose, Wild, I can’t figure out why you’d wife up. I don’t take you as the kind of man to have a girl on the side, either. Your dad never did that shit. He was respectful until the end.” Wilder doesn’t entertain a response, turning back into himself. Nico lets it go and nods to me. “What about you? Planning to marry Lydia?”
My brother spins his ring around his finger again, like our dad used to, as afraid to hear the answer to the question as I am to answer it. “Eventually.”
Nico whistles. “Never thought I’d see the day when the Ridge boys settle down.”
“You missed a lot when you were gone.” I meet his drunken stare and don’t waver. “Things changed.”
Arching an eyebrow, Nico shrugs and says, “Does your woman have someone in that office for a guy like me? I need to see what Hush is all about if it has motherfuckers like you putting rings on it.”
“You wouldn’t pass the background check,” I say.
“Speaking of background checks.” Once we’re in the air and the cabin lights come back on, Nicolai retrieves a folded piece of paper from his back pocket and tosses it at Wilder. “My connection at the police department ran a search on your guy. Elijah Read. Twenty-six years old. No priors, but listen to this, he’s still involved at the church where it all went down.”
Wilder unfolds the sheet of paper, and his jaw tightens. I look over his shoulder at the mug shot of some nerdy motherfucker with thin hair and eyes bloodshot like he was crying.
“You just said he doesn’t have priors,” I say.
“He doesn’t. Not technically. Last year, a fifteen-year-old girl came forward and told her parents the church pastor had kissed her during Sunday school. They went to the police, were met with hostility from the community, and a week later, the family dropped the charges. Read was set free, and the girl was arrested for filing a false report. His record is clean while she does community service every weekend.”
Taking the picture from Wilder before he tears it up, I refold it and slip it into my jacket pocket. The tips of my fingers brush along the handle of my gun like a vow. “Anything we can do for her?”
“Besides cutting his fucking throat wide open?” Nico asks. He sinks into his seat, crossing his arms over his chest. “Yeah, my connection is already working on clearing her name. Her family will receive an anonymous donation, and hopefully she’ll find some peace once he’s gone.”
“There has to be more than two victims,” Wilder says.
I slide my hand across his back and squeeze his shoulder, wondering if the plane is enough to contain his burning anger. “But there won’t be another one.”
The countdown to the end of Elijah Read’s life started the moment Camilla walked into our lives.
This is God’s work.
We land in North Carolina after eight in the morning with sunlight filtering through the oval-shaped windows. It avoids our row of seats, knowing better than to come this close to ill will.
Once we’re back on the ground, I send Lydia a text, leaving out anything about our flight or current location. She replies with a heart emoji, an olive branch after daring to look indifferent when my fingers were buried inside of her. Or maybe it’s to soften me up because she knows I’ve had to sit next to my brother and watch him spin his wedding band around his finger while mine is empty.
Wilder and Camilla were only supposed to be gone for a few hours, but they returned the next day married.
Lydia wouldn’t even look at me.
“You don’t want to marry me, Talent,”she said.
“I would literally cut my fucking heart out of my chest for you,”I said back.
“No, you don’t want me to get my hands on it.”
A car is waiting for us at the terminal when we disembark, the keys in the ignition. The plan is to go straight to Elijah’s house, circle back to the airport, and make an appearance at the office before our staff leaves for the evening. A mile down the highway, Wilder hands me his phone and tells me to follow the directions.
“Where is it?” I look back and forth between the road and the map. The address is only a few miles from our original destination.
“Pit stop,” he answers.
Nicolai falls asleep in the rear, head back and knees spread. After a thirty-minute drive, I park the car along a curb in front of a weather-beaten house at the end of a cul-de-sac. The wood porch is warped, large sections of the siding are sun-bleached and cracked, and the grass is dry, yellow, and patchy.
Rising like the dead, Nico sits up and looks over both of his shoulders before clearing his throat. He reaches for his flask. “Where the fuck are we?”
Wilder unbuckles his seat belt and opens the car door. “My girl’s parents’ house.”
My knuckles turn white around the steering wheel, and I groan, “Wild, this wasn’t the fucking plan.”
