The combination of fear and determination in Jonas’s voice had me looking through the scope. At some point, he’d turned around and was watching the traffic on the street below. A smile graced his lips as he said, “His name is Mace.” His voice dropped as he coyly said, “Yes, he is.”
Fuck, why the hell hadn’t I thought to have Mav clone his phone so I could hear the whole conversation?
Jonas laughed. “I am so not going to take creeper shots of him with my phone just to satisfy your curiosity.”
I couldn’t help but smile at that.
Jonas listened for a few minutes and then said, “Yeah, I will. Tell Devlin and the kids I say hi…I love you too.”
After hanging up the phone, Jonas stood at the window for a moment before finally turning his attention to the painting, putting his back to me once more. But I knew it didn’t matter either way because I wasn’t taking the shot.
The phone clicked and then Mav was saying, “I traced the call - he was talking to…”
I heard clicking of keys and then an indrawn breath which caught my attention. Mav was as cool as they came, so whatever he was seeing wasn’t good.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Fuck, he was talking to Casey Prescott.”
“Who?”
“Shit, Mace, don’t you remember that story a few years back about Devlin Prescott?”
I stiffened. Devlin Prescott was one of the richest men in New York but he’d made headlines four years earlier when he’d gotten caught up in a custody battle for a little girl who’d been left in his care after her mother died.
“He’s the guy who was trying to get custody of that kid.”
“His nanny’s four-year-old daughter,” Mav said.
I snatched up my phone and brought up the browser and plugged in the man’s name. As soon as I saw the first story, it all came flooding back to me. Devlin Prescott had ended up marrying the little girl’s aunt but not before her sordid past was exposed.
Casey Prescott had once been Casey Wilkerson, the runaway stepdaughter of a wealthy pediatric surgeon who’d started abusing the young girl after he married her mother. The details of the abuse had played out in court when Casey admitted that she’d run away to escape the sexual abuse the man had been inflicting on her in addition to the torture she and her older sister had endured at both his and her mother’s hands. Sadly, the young girl had only managed to exchange one tormenter for another.
“What the hell is going on?” I muttered more to myself than to Mav as I skimmed the article. My eyes caught on the tail end of the story that referenced Casey’s escape from a pimp who’d forced her into prostitution. She’d fled to a remote town in northern Wisconsin and had run an animal shelter for several years before Devlin had tracked her down. After her crushing testimony about what her stepfather had done to her, she’d returned to Wisconsin but had been confronted by the pimp who ultimately tried to kill her and was serving a twenty-year sentence for the attempted murder.
Where the hell did Jonas fit into all this?
“Mav, see if you can find the connection between Jonas and the Prescotts.”
There was moment of silence and then Mav said, “So it’s Jonas now?”
I cringed at the slip. It was one thing to call the young man by his name in my mind, but to refer to him as anything other than a mark on the job was a massive fuck-up. “Just do it,” I snapped as I hung up the phone and lowered the gun. Adrenaline surged through me and rattled my insides as I realized how close I’d come to pulling the trigger. In all the years I’d been doing this, my gut had never steered me wrong but my brief encounter with the young artist had managed to steal even that away from me.
There was nothing I hated more than feeling off balance. But that was all I’d felt from the moment I’d spied Jonas through the scope and I was starting to fear that even if I put all the pieces together and figured out who Jonas really was, it wouldn’t matter because I’d already started to feel some of the things that I thought had died along with Evan eight years ago.
Chapter Four
Jonas
This was stupid, I thought to myself as I pushed the front door open and made my way past the empty walls of my new gallery. Even though I’d signed the lease almost six weeks ago, I still got a thrill every time I walked past the blank, brick walls. My agent, Candace, had been adamant that I should paint the walls white since I wouldn’t agree to tear them down all together, but when she’d found out I had no plans to display my own art on them, she’d been apoplectic. I’d listened to her rant and rave all the way up to my studio and never said a word, and then enjoyed the sound of silence as she looked over the six paintings I’d finished since my arrival in New York. And just like that, her tirade about the walls ended and I practically saw the dollar signs in her eyes as she studied each canvas. All the paintings had sold within a matter of days and she’d found me spots in two upcoming shows in other galleries, and after that she never once voiced an opinion on what I was doing with my gallery.