She looked away, rubbing her hands down and up again before taking a deep breath. “I think Robert’s found us.”
“Your half-brother?” he asked. She nodded. “Why are you scared of him?” She hesitated long enough that his next question made his voice tremble with outrage. “Did he hurt you?”
“He tried to kill us.”
Her quiet, calm, blatant statement made it all the more shocking. A surge of protectiveness shot through him, stunning in its intensity. “He what?”
“We were in an accident a few months ago. My brakes failed and I’m almost positive Robert had something to do with it. I saw him under the hood one day and he claimed he was checking the oil.” She shook her head back and forth, her lips pressed in a thin line. “He never bothered with my car in all the years I’ve been driving.”
Colton shifted to better face her. “So what, you think he cut your brake lines or something?”
“Yes,” she confirmed emphatically. “Only, I had no way to prove it.”
“Wasn’t your car inspected afterward?”
Bitterness twisted her features. “Robert’s best friend Jeremy was in charge of the investigation—if you can call it that—and everything was simply ruled an accident.”
More than resentment resonated in her voice. Cold hatred. Fear. Her small hands curled into fists and Colton reached to cover the closest one, instinctively offering support.
She stared at his hand on hers as she added, “Not long afterward, I heard Robert on the phone telling someone he’d be all set once he had his sister taken care of.”
It sounded like a plot from a movie. Or one of those crazy TV soap operas that played in the background when he visited his father on a weekday.
Colton tilted his head slightly and gently squeezed Kendra’s fingers. “Are you sure you weren’t mistaken?”
She stiffened with a sharp intake of breath and snatched her hand away. “I’m not making this all up.”
Colton huffed out his own breath. “I didn’t say you were, but I don’t understand why your brother would want to kill you and Noah?”
“He’s the beneficiary to our trust funds.”
He frowned and stated the obvious. “So change them.”
“It’s not that simple,” she snapped. A second later, she sighed with frustration and her shoulders slumped. “Robert and I didn’t get along much, but he was the only family I had left besides Noah. The money was my dad’s—Robert’s dad—and Noah has his own Trust fund, so I saw no reason for Robert not to get mine if something happened to me.”
She cast him a hesitant glance, almost as if she expected him to belittle her reasoning, but that part made perfect sense to him. When he simply waited silently, she drew herself up straight, and squared her shoulders with the iron will he’d come to admire.
“Obviously, now things have changed. That lawyer I met? The one you thought I was using for a sexual harassment suit?”—another quick glance and a quirk of her lips—“He’s actually helping me with the trust fund and stuff. We’ve changed mine, but I can’t touch Noah’s until I turn twenty-five and become his legal guardian.”
“When do you turn twenty-five?”
“In six days.” She paused, her fingers picking at the seam of her jeans, then added in a desperate yet hopeful whisper, “Six days, and he’ll be safe.”
“How much are we talking about here?” Colton asked. Really, what was the going rate for a family murder these days? He didn’t mean it flippantly, but the entire situation was still a little hard to comprehend.
Kendra lifted her gaze. “Last statement I saw, just over five million each.”
His jaw dropped. He’d expected her to say…hell, he didn’t know what he’d expected. A couple hundred thousand, maybe, at the most. He’d known she came from money, but that was money. “That’s a hell of a motive.”
A quick, humorless smile flashed across her face.
Regrouping, he asked, “What’d the police say about that?—you did tell them about the money, right?”
Resentment filled her expression once more. “I reported my suspicions to a captain at the NYPD, but the officer who called back for my formal statement was the same one who swept the accident investigation under the rug.”
“Jeremy?”
“Yes.”