“Do you have any idea who did it?”
“I’m not at liberty to say,” he replied sympathetically.
I nodded, swallowing around the lump in my throat. “Thank you for letting me know.” I hurried around to the driver’s side of my car, slipping inside and cutting off whatever he had started to say.
CHAPTER SEVEN
NOVA
Sooner or later, we are all forced to dine at a banquet of consequences. Our actions catch up to us.
Some people call this karma.
I call it the result of poor decisions.
In the empty confines of my home, I pondered what Dean’s news meant for me. Martin Reedsy was my dad’s business lawyer, and just before his tragic ending he keyed me in on what exactly that vocation was. Suffice to say, dad was not the jeweler I, and everyone else in town knew him to be.
The red brick building that sat on a prominent strip of real estate, my Granddad’s surname on a large sign above it, had become nothing but a front. A generations old business now barred and chained. Partially because I knew nothing about running a company. The bigger reason, I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
This was yet another thing on the list of dad’s betrayals. Even more unforgiveable than the others. He’d made me complicit in his schemes by telling me way more than I wanted to know, but still not nearly enough.
I’d been freefalling down a rabbit hole ever since with no end in sight. Passed a torch of deceit and danger and expected to keep it burning. I thought I’d have more time to figure all of this out, get some sort of an understanding of what the hell was going on so that I stood a fighting chance at saving my families business and what was salvageable of our reputation.
Regardless of how angry I was, my dad was still my dad and I was still a Morkav.
With this new development I could only conclude that whoever went to see Martin would eventually be coming to see me. Sweeping a hand through my hair, I expelled a deep breath, clenching and unclenching my hands. My life could be moments away from ending and here I was, painting.
I stared at the image on my easel, still not finished. I’d added the blood late last night, the sky just now. I never knew where my creativity would take me, I just let it flow. Sometimes the vision in my mind formed so fast I couldn’t swirl the colors across the canvas quick enough. Other times my paintings came to me in fragments of nightmares, broken daydreams, or twisted fantasies.
The sound of a raw, powerful engine coming down the road had me rising from my stool and going out into the hall.
Peering through the window at the end of the hallway, I watched as a sleek Hellcat pulled up in front of my house. Rhett’s immaculately tamed head of dark hair popped out a second later, a pair of shades covering his eyes. He paused at the end of my walkway and looked right up at where I was standing.
A few different thoughts shot through my mind. Like, how the hell did he know where I lived? And more importantly, why is he here?
He motioned for me to come down. I held up a finger signaling for him to hold on and went to grab my cell. By the time I emerged through the door on the side of the garage he was already back inside his car. His gorgeous, shiny muscle car.
I walked right up to the passenger window and leaned down, bracing my hands on the windowsill just to feel the powerful vibrations. “What are you doing here?”
“What does it look like? Get in.”
“Why would I do that?”
He turned his head and looked at me. The lens covering his eyes not strong enough to trap the intensity of his stare.
I bit the inside of my lower lip, refusing to look away. Rhett didn’t intimidate or scare me. He intrigued and excited me, which was worse. And then there was the dangerous butterfly dilemma. Forget the fact that I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol aside from the shot I’d taken when I got back from Pete’s. Usually I was procuring a second and third bottle by now.
“You said you weren’t going to run.”
My brows slanted. I had no clue what he was talking about. “I didn’t.”
“You’re right, you more or less vanished from the parking lot before I could get outside.”
This guy had a lot nerve. That had nothing to do with him.
I hadn’t even been thinking about him when I peeled out of there. “I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but the world doesn’t revolve around you Rhett.”
“Yours does.”
“Oh, my god!” I laughed. “You can’t be serious.”