Chapter Two
Ana
I’d say I’m living in a twisted episode of The Twilight Zone, but the room echoes with lies.
With Kurt standing in front of me, my weapon aimed at him with the steady hand he trained me to maintain, his famous words ring in my mind: Trusting is your choice. Proving you wrong is your enemy’s decision.
He not only made his decision, but he also has to live with it.
I went from elated to see the man I once considered my father, to ready to kill him in all of about thirty seconds. I can’t trust him and I know this because he told me that the instant he held the gun at my head. Then he killed Parker and drove that point home. He’s not here to protect me. He’s here to protect himself and as he stands here before me, I swear to the good Lord above, he’s going to tell me the truth of what’s going on here. All of it.
“You sure you want to point that gun at me, Ana?” he challenges, his eyes calculating, as is his demeanor. If he was all about love and reconciliation, why is that what I read in him? No good reason, I’m certain.
Luke steps to my side, a silent source of support, who knows me well enough to know that I need this confrontation to be mine, just mine, at least for right now but I appreciate his presence. It’s right, in ways Kurt’s is not.
“I went to your funeral, Kurt,” I remind him as if that says it all, and it does. His very presence defines his death as a lie. It also sends a message. The past died with him, and that past included me.
“Some people might suggest you should be happy I’m alive,” he replies.
“Unless you tell me you’ve been held prisoner for three years and just escaped, I’m going to assume you washed your hands of me and everything in your life, and only showed back up because you need something.”
His jaw tics. “All right. You want to do it this way, then we’ll do it this way. Here are the cold hard facts, baby girl. I had a good life. You have a good life. Kasey fucked that up. He got involved with the wrong people. He owed them money. The only way I could save him was to agree to do a job for them.”
“Who is them?” Luke asks, echoing the question that’s in my mind.
Kurt continues as if Luke hasn’t spoken, “One job turned into another job and another. You would have eventually gotten pulled into it. You were their leverage. I had to work for them to protect you.”
I grimace at the ridiculousness of that reply. “Aside from the fact that you would never, ever allow someone to intimidate you into disappearing,” I state, “what happened to working for them to protect Kasey?”
“Kasey stopped being my son long before he died. These people are not stupid. They knew I was going to walk away from them and him.”
He speaks those words with the kind of icy certainty that would cool off hell and tells me more than I ever wanted to know about Kurt. Because I’d idolized the person who’d raised me, in blind and stupid ways that didn’t allow me to see the real man.
“Then he was never your son,” I state, a fact, not a question. “And I’m not your daughter.”
“You are not Kasey, Ana,” he assures me, an irritated twitch to his jaw as if I’m the one being unreasonable right now. “You know that. You’re a smart person, choosing to play dumb. You know what your brother was like.”
He taught me to turn off the emotional switch, and never allow myself to be baited. I will not be baited now. “He was your son,” I repeat.
“Don’t even go down that bullshit path with me,” he snaps. “I gave up everything for that boy, only to discover he’d happily hang me, and you, out to dry, to line his pockets. Even parents have limits.” He holds up his hands. “I get it, though. You think I’m a cold-hearted bastard.”
My lips press together and I fix him in a stare as cold as his behavior. Sometimes silence says more than a million words, another Kurt teaching, I know all too well. This is one of those times.
He gives me a deadpan stare, void of emotion, but there is a calculating quality to his mood.
Second tick by in which he seems to assess just how hard my code is to crack, before turning his efforts in another direction. He lifts his chin in Luke’s direction. “I wasn’t there the day you killed Kasey, but I know you. And I know for a fact that you tried to spare him, and did so to protect Ana. Kasey was another story. He didn’t care about saving you. He cared about getting you out of his way. Even if that meant you had to die. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“I find it interesting that you know that I was the one who killed him,” Luke counters. “It was never in the news. Ana made sure of it. So how did you know?” He motions toward Parker’s lifeless body. “Him?”
“He’s one of them,” Kurt replies, “one of the men after a treasure big enough to please their boss. He saw me as that prize. He would have told them I was alive, and then they would have come for me and Ana. And probably you. Kasey—”
“Is dead,” I state flatly. “You are not. We need to know who these people are. Debating Kasey’s personality and decisions gets us nowhere.”
“And yet it does,” he counters. “The jobs I was forced to take, just kept coming, right along with the threats against you, Ana. I couldn’t find the head of the snake to cut it off. These people—they have no name that I’ve ever discovered—are well funded and well hidden.”
“You have connections in the government,” Luke reminds him. “Why not get help?”
“You think I didn’t try? One phone call and my phone pinged with a photo of Ana and a promise there was a man with a gun on her. That’s when I told Kasey it was time to disappear, to stage our deaths, to bury my money, so there was nothing for them to come for. That way all you represented to them was a badge and trouble.”