“We are working to get rid of them.”
“That is not what I asked.” I need to know what the disturbance is all about.
Jed looks from me to Rachel then back.
“Ava Sinclair was stabbed this morning in her suite at the Gold Dust in San Francisco.”
I freeze.
“She’s currently in intensive care,” Jed continues, “and we know the attacker was her brother. She was expecting him. The tapes show she let him into her suite…” I can’t hear the rest of what he says. My head is pounding.
I didn’t find him, and he attacked her, in my hotel.
He could have killed her, and it would be my fault.
“How is she?” Rachel asks, her voice full of concern.
Something happens in my chest. If he could get into the Gold Dust, how many more people in my life can he reach, and hurt…
“She’s in intensive care,” Jed is saying, “but from the reports I’m getting, they’re sure she’ll be fine.”
“And Evans?”
“They don’t know where he is.”
“You’ll shut this down?” She gestures to the entrance, and I realize we’re still in the lobby. My head is still pounding. I should take control of the situation, but I just want to be as far away from it as possible.
“Already on it,” Jed says.
Rachel turns to me. “Come on. Let’s go up and decide what we’re going to do.”
I follow her silently. Poor Ava. I was too harsh on her. I dismissed her too cruelly, and now she’s hurt, maybe even close to death.
Because however long it takes, everything I touch eventually suffers.
In the apartment, Rachel hands me a drink. I take it silently, downing half the fiery liquid in one gulp.
“Please don’t blame yourself.” Her voice comes as if from far away. “There’s already so much you feel responsible for.”
She’s an angel, and I don’t deserve one of my own. I never have.
“But I am responsible.” I close my eyes. I can feel myself slipping into a dark place. “She was meeting him, probably trying to talk him out of his insane vendetta, and he stabbed her, his own sister, because I put her in a position where he saw her as an enemy.”
Rachel is shaking her head. Her eyes hold mine, pulling me out of the darkness. “Landon, he’s clearly insane. You can’t blame yourself for that.”
She has no idea, no idea how much pain already lives in my past and how much of it I’m responsible for.
“Can’t I?” I down the drink and face her. “He wasn’t insane before I bought the Gold Dust out from under him. He was happily running it into the ground, but at least he was sane.”
“Landon…” Her eyes are pleading. How can she not see that under everything else, this is all I can give? Pain.
“Don’t you see how messed up everybody around me is? Evans is crazy. Ava is fighting for her life. Aidan is dealing with severe depression…did you know that? Sometimes he goes off the rails and disappears for days.”
She reaches for me, but I shrug her hand away.
“You already know about my mother and my father, that miserable… We might as well have killed him, you know, me and Aidan. That’s why Aidan can’t bear to look at himself at times. The last thing he told our father was that we would all be better off without his alcoholic, useless presence, and I stood there and said nothing, because I felt the same.”
Remember when you told me you wished your father had died along with your mother instead of lingering for a decade after? So dark, Landon. Do you share things like that with her?