“Yes.” She nods. “Someone broke into my place. They were looking for something.”
My jaw locks.
I watch them closely, anticipating questions and reactions, this story becoming the talk of the evening.
I don’t know if this story is connected to my story.
If they are linked, and they get to my father’s ears, they might impact him one way or another.
I’m stiff in my chair, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
They don’t ask questions, yet she continues.
“They left some clues in my case,” Raven says, smiling before swinging her eyes to me, unfazed.
This woman impresses me with every passing day.
She laughs, detached.
“I’m ready for them if they show up again,” she says, sinking her fork into her slice of key lime pie.
Pleasure reads on her face when she fills her mouth with a bite. She doesn’t give a damn that some stranger was in her house and her life could be in danger.
“Maybe they were looking for something in your apartment too,” she drones on as if it’s a good joke, and I’m livid.
Francisco laughs. Alejandro misses the conversation entirely.
“I doubt,” Francisco says.
Like her, he doesn’t seem to be fazed by these things.
To be fair, they don’t know what I know. Or, to be more exact, what I suspect.
But even so, they are correct.
Whoever has checked their places isn’t after them. But with so much at stake, things could change in a split second.
I try to relax, pondering the information, my stare blank, our surroundings fading, the noise becoming muffled.
Why him?
Raven? I understand. She lives in that house. The house belonged to Major Wilson’s mother. The woman had nothing to do with anything.
No one has to do with anything, yet there is something that escapes me, so I go back to my initial supposition.
There is something valuable out there.
What are people looking for when it comes to these kinds of things? It’s usually a treasure or something incriminating.
A treasure? In my father’s case? I doubt.
He has more material things than he could count. There must be something more valuable than a treasure. Something lost out there in the world could come back and haunt him.
Something he is afraid of.
I know my father.
He wouldn’t chase stupid shit for nothing. He has all the money in the world to protect himself. Why is he afraid of this? Whatever this is.