“I’m so glad to hear it.” She folds her arms over the high countertop. “We’re supposed to meet my dad for lunch. Is he in his office?”
“Oh. I don’t think he remembered.” Officer Dean frowns. “He stepped out in a rush for a meeting.”
“Can we wait for him in his office?”
She practically bats her lashes and has this guy eating right out of her hand. I have to fight back a smile.
“Well, you’re not supposed to, but…”
“Oh, you’re right.” Maisy sighs. “I just wanted to surprise him.”
The officer softens. Pushover. “You know what? Go ahead. He’s been stressed lately and I think it’d cheer him up.”
Maisy lights up. “You’re a gem, Officer Dean. Thanks.”
We leave the front desk behind and I lean close to murmur in her ear. “You’re like a dangerous little honey trap.”
“I’m saving the honey all for you,” she says with a sly grin.
Richard’s office sits in the corner of the building with big windows overlooking downtown Ridgeview. It’s cushier than anyone would expect, even for a chief. I peer around while Maisy keeps an eye out for her dad.
A large polished mahogany desk sits in the center with an expensive leather chair. There’s a family photo on the desk. I pick it up and the corners of my mouth tighten. It’s from the trip both our families took to California. I’m in it, right between Maisy and Holden with our arms all linked around each other. We’re grinning with sunburnt faces while Richard and Jacqueline stand off to the side. My mom is on our other side, but my dad isn’t there. Instead of looking at the camera or his wife, Richard’s gaze strays surreptitiously toward Mom. She’s looking his way, too, peeking out of the corner of her eye while she tucks her hair behind her ear.
My heart thuds as I stare at the old photo. There’s no way. I refuse to believe the hints of what I’m seeing, forcing my mind to shy away from the whispers of memories scratching at the edge of my awareness, that back up what my gut is telling me. Times the two of them would take us on outings. No. No fucking way Richard and my mom had a thing.
Swallowing hard, I put the photo down. It’s the only one on the desk. For someone who wants to seem like a family man, he doesn’t have anything else to remind him of them in here. The rest are photos with the mayor and with other prominent members of Ridgeview society. It’s easy to guess money ties each of these men together. Favors. Bribery.
This is what Richard sold his soul for.
Muffled footsteps approach through the closed door. Richard comes in and his cheeks turn red when he realizes he’s not alone. He rushes toward Maisy.
“You—I’ve been so worried!”
Before he reaches her, I step between them and shove him against the wall. “Don’t touch her. You don’t have the right.”
Maisy calmly shuts the door. He fights against me. Despite his broad stature, I’m stronger, easily able to keep him in place.
“Why are you here? What do you think you’re doing?”
Richard’s face reddens more as he struggles to free himself. He goes for his holster, but I cut him off, twisting his arm.
“Were you just about to pull your weapon on your daughter and another civilian?”
“Civilian?” He barks out a harsh laugh. “With the whispers going around town about you, I’m sure you’ve probably done something to warrant an arrest.”
“I thought you’d be happy to see me, Rich. No love lost for your old friends’ son?” My lip curls and my fingers dig in harder to his designer three piece suit. I move to grab him by the throat. “I guess you did have me shipped off and figured I’d disappear so you didn’t have to look at me to remind you of your sins.”
His lips move, but he can’t get any words out when I tighten the chokehold. His eyes bug out.
“Fox.”
Pushing out a breath, I ease off from squeezing the life from Maisy’s dad. He puts on a show of coughing and fighting me. It’s futile. I’m bigger and stronger from the years I’ve spent keeping in shape while he sat behind a desk and enjoyed steak dinners with a side of cash under the table. Knowing he won’t crack me, he appeals to her.
“Maisy, what is this? I told you to stay away from this boy. You’re standing there while he assaults me? Sweetheart, look at me.”
She won’t. In my peripheral vision she keeps her gaze locked on me, remaining silent while he becomes increasingly agitated.
“Maisy!” Richard blusters. “Answer me, damn it. I’ve been lenient since you left the house, but this is too goddamn far. You need to come home. Your mother and I—”
“I just have one thing to say, Dad. Arthur Jones.”
Richard jolts at the name of the man who was supposed to be chief of police before Richard was hastily installed into the position instead. Color drains from his face and he turns a sickly shade of gray. Maisy huffs and a humorless smile twists my lips.
“Yeah. The one who was supposed to have your position right now.” I grab him by his silk tie and jerk him against the wall. “Funny, he had a heart attack about two months after you were sworn in. Shocked his family, since he was healthy before that. Weird, right? I have the obituary.”
“You shouldn’t be looking into this. You don’t understand,” Richard warns when I go for my phone.
Maisy turns away from us and I listen as she plugs the flash drive she brought into Richard’s computer. I drag him away from the wall and sit him down at one of the seats in front of his desk while she turns the monitor around. All the evidence we’ve gathered is on the big screen. He releases a sound as if someone punched him in the stomach, shaking his head.
He’s pathetic, unable to face what he’s done. All the years I’ve spent imagining retribution, I never pictured him blubbering like this. The Richard Landry I remember from my childhood had a backbone, but it seems to have been whittled to nothing in the last decade. The single family photo is next to the screen, but I focus on him.
“Here’s how this will go,” I say, deceptively calm with an undercurrent of deadly fury lurking beneath the surface. “Resign, or this gets out. Everything you’ve done, the bribes you’ve taken, the blood on your hands—the people of this town are going to find out exactly who you are and your precious reputation will be ruined.” We point out each piece of damning evidence we have against his years of being a crooked cop. Grabbing him by the collar, I lean down to snarl, “Your bosses don’t like scandal, do they? And to be clear, I’m not talking about the taxpayers of Ridgeview. They might pretend to operate like a corporate investment firm, but we both know that’s not what they really are.”
“You’re in over your head,” he says hoarsely, picking up the photo I don’t want to look at. Staring at it, his shoulders tremble and his throat bobs with a swallow. He turns to me with dead eyes. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I? You put me in the fucking foster system after my parents died, Rich!” I drag a hand through my hair as bitterness pricks my throat. “You signed off on the incident report, closed the case for the crash. You had to have seen the coroner’s report. You knew my mom was pregnant. You helped cover up their murder.”
Richard explodes from the chair, the photo clattering on the mahogany desk. He turns into a different person, shedding the flimsy remorse. Grabbing fistfuls of my leather jacket, he gets in my face.
“You’re not walking out of this fucking station. I’m charging you with assault and then you’re going to go away.” His voice shakes with rage. “You’ll never see my daughter again and poison her head with your lies. We’ve worked too hard to have it go up in smoke because you doctored proof.”
I catch Maisy’s disgusted expression from the corner of my eye as I stare down a man so different from the one I remember as a kid. His spittle hits my chin, eyes bloodshot and angry graying brows drawn into a deep wrinkle. This is not the same man who taught Holden and I how to hold and throw a football when we were seven at a bloc
k party in our old neighborhood.
“Dad!” Maisy shouts, coming around the desk. “Stop!”
He swipes an arm behind him and catches her off guard as she stumbles back, grabbing the corner of the desk to keep her balance. From the shock on her face, I guess he’s never raised a hand to her before. I jerk, wanting to kill him for it.
“You think you solved the mystery?” Richard laughs, the sound dark and chilling. “You’ve got shit. This will go away. No one will believe biased testimonies.”
Releasing me, he snatches the flash drive, drops it to the floor, and crushes it beneath his heel. Triumph has him standing tall against us.
“That’s not the only copy, Dad. We’ve got backups of the proof. You can’t run from this.”
“Proof? Sweetheart, I know you’re smarter than that. Don’t be an idiot. Having your friends sign letters without witnesses to corroborate the story isn’t proof of anything. There’s no hardcopies of anything.”
“What’s your soul worth, you greedy bastard?” I ask coldly, stopping him in his tracks when he rounds the desk.
Confusion crosses his aged features until I throw down the final nail in the coffin, the payment buried in the Landry’s financial records from an offshore account. Colton and Connor came through when they uncovered it after months of searching.
“Three quarters of a million.” Richard’s shoulders stiffen. I set my phone on the desk with a photo of the statement. He stares down in horror at the damning evidence. “Not a bad payout for murder, but you’re still scum. Resign. Go away silently, or I’ll make sure what the guys at Stalenko have threatened you with to keep you obedient will sound like a goddamn island vacation.”
“How did you get that?” His voice is barely above a whisper. To himself, he stumbles over his words. “They swore no one would find it. Couldn’t trace it back to us.”
“It doesn’t matter. If you don’t resign, we’re going to the press with this,” Maisy says. “Step down, Dad. It’s the right thing to do.”
“Maisy,” he says brokenly when he sees her clenched jaw. “Sweetie, I didn’t… We had no choice. If we didn’t follow orders, they’d kill our whole family.”
“So you let them kill Fox’s parents?” Her features twist in an appalled expression. “How did you justify that to sleep at night and look Holden and I in the eye for ten years?” There’s only a faint tremor in her voice and I’m proud of her for standing up to him. “You’re nothing more than a pawn and a coward. So you’re going to do this, because if you don’t I won’t stop until you’re behind bars where you belong.”
Defeated, he sinks into the expensive desk chair and drags the discarded family photo, tracing his thumbs over the frame. The emotions flitting across his face sour the satisfaction I get seeing him knocked down to his knees. He touches my mom’s side of the photo and my stomach revolts. No.
I snatch the photo from him and toss it aside. “What’s it going to be, Richard? Do you have a shred of decency left in you?”
With a sigh, he begins to type. I move to stand over his chair from behind when he pauses to look at Maisy.
“Do the right thing,” she says as she picks up the photo. “I remember this day,” she whispers, gaze flickering. Richard flinches. “It seems like it was the last time we were all happy before…”
Before my parents died and everything changed.
Richard says nothing until he finishes drawing up his resignation letter. It’s not until he signs it that I release a breath it seems I’ve been holding for ten years. Setting it aside, he turns to me with regret filling his gaze.
“I’m sorry, Fox. I never wanted it to be like this.”
It’s too little too fucking late.
“I loved your mother.”
The room goes deadly silent and I stand rigid as another bomb drops on me. Maisy’s eyes widen and she comes to my side to hold my hand as I grit my teeth.
“No,” I bite out. “No you fucking didn’t.”
If it were true, how could he let her die. He’s lying.
“We were…we wanted—”
“No!” I slam a fist down on the desk.
Richard swipes sweat from his brow and his shoulders slump. “It’s the truth, son.”
“Was the baby yours?”
“No. We were waiting for the right time.”
It doesn’t bring any relief.
“What are you saying?” Maisy demands, squeezing my hand.
Keeping his gaze pinned on me, he continues in a mournful voice. “It destroyed me when I found out about the crash. It wasn’t supposed to happen. I wanted to protect her, too, but your dad just wanted more and more money. He wouldn’t leave it until he got what he wanted. They weren’t going to budge, so they eliminated them and made us cover it up.”
“Stop it,” I growl. “Just shut up.”
I can’t listen to this, or I’m going to explode. I don’t know whether to wring his neck or deck him.
“How do you live with yourself? I don’t even know you anymore,” Maisy says. “I only wish I’d known sooner.”
“Sweetheart,” Richard begs. “I swear to you, everything I’ve ever done was to protect you and Holden. I just wanted to give you a good life. Please, please go home.” He gets up, clearly intent on trying to patch things up with her. As he reaches out, Maisy takes a step back. “You’re going to get hurt being around him. Just listen to me, honey.”
“No! You think anything you say is going to make it better? I wanted my dad back!” Breathing heavily, her nails dig into my hand and it grounds me. I can’t drown in my own misery when I have her at my side. “You lost me and Holden the minute you agreed to this insane deal. You and Mom destroyed our family. I don’t want anything to do with you.”
“Maisy, no, please—!”
She turns away from him. When he charges, my protective instinct takes over and I block him, hauling him by the lapels of his suit as I push him back.
“You’ll never be able to hurt or control her again,” I swear. “You’d have to go through me to get to her and I’ll die before I let anyone touch her. Do you understand?”
“Maisy!” he tries again and I shake him hard enough his teeth clack.
“You’re done, Richard.” I let him go and he slumps against the wall.
“Bye Dad.” Maisy won’t look at him again.
Pausing at the door, I turn back. “Don’t tell your wife or your bosses about this. When they ask why you resigned, you give them any reason you want but the truth. And if you warn them? We’ll make sure this gets out.”
Taking Maisy’s hand, we leave behind a broken man as we walk out.
Thirty-Six
Maisy
The day after Dad steps down as Ridgeview’s police chief, I invite Holden out for burgers at our favorite place in town.
Fox lets me take the Charger. Once we sorted things out between us, he told me I could consider it mine. The way he makes sure I feel free ignites a glowing ember of happiness in my chest.
After Dad admitted to loving Fox’s mom, my stomach has been in knots. I don’t know how to tell my brother what I know. God, all the things I know. It’s enough to make my head spin. I meet Holden out front and relax when he ruffles my hair, then pulls me in for a hug.
“Did you hear about Dad?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“The house is so different without you,” he says. “It’s weird.”
It hasn’t been a full day, but since we left the station I’ve been worried Dad wouldn’t take Fox’s threat to heart. I’m afraid he’ll warn Mom and Stalenko Corp anyway about the information we have on the whole operation.
“What’s it been like at the house?” I ask as we head into the shop.
Inside it’s decorated like a beach bar with bamboo counters and tropical plants. We place our orders and sit at one of the hightop tables with yellow stools. He shrugs and fiddles with a jar of drink umbrellas on the table.
“Well, at first it was fi
ne. But I haven’t been home much after they started fighting constantly in the days after you split. I think they want to get a divorce and they’ve been waiting for us to leave home before doing it. You believe that shit? Like they’ve made it easier for us by staying together.”
I refuse to feel guilty for leaving after arguing with them. It’s only the learned response I have that bucks up, so I shove it down. They had no right to treat me like they did.
“Have you been there since yesterday?” I watch him carefully.
“Yeah, I was there for dinner last night before I went out with some friends. Mom was pissed when Dad announced his resignation out of nowhere in the middle of eating. She threw her plate at him and called him a dickless coward.”
My eyebrows fly up. Mom’s always been the more cutthroat of our parents.
“What did he do?”
“Nothing.” Holden swipes a hand over his mouth. “She stormed off and slammed the office door. I was sitting there with salmon halfway to my mouth and he just kept eating even though there were broken pieces of plate all over the floor and her dinner staining his shirt. Top ten most uncomfortable and awkward moments of my life, Maise.”
When he doesn’t mention how or why, I unclench my fists in my lap and pluck at the frayed threads of my shorts. The plan is going okay then. That makes me feel better. Now we’re only waiting for the DEA agent Devlin was in touch with to review what we sent. The wait is killer.
Our food arrives and Holden changes the subject, stealing my milkshake for a sip before I’ve had any. “You’ll never guess what happened. Like, fifteen minutes before I pulled up.”
“What?”
“Ohio State reached out. A guy from the admissions office called and said there was some mix up, but if I still wanted to play for them I could transfer from the community college and start next semester there.”
“Holden, that’s great.” I lean across the table and squeeze his wrist. “Will you go?”
One of his shoulders hitch. “I don’t know yet. At first I was like what the fuck, you know? I’m hesitant because in the last year I think I’m actually glad I lost the draft.”
Savage Wilder: Dark New Adult High School Bully Romance (Sinners and Saints Book 4) Page 31
