Lies (Deceit and Desire Book 1)

by Cassie Wild

  They’d lived in a mountainous area, and while they’d searched, there was no way they could search everywhere. My plan was to tell her that the ‘spirit’ of her eight-year-old brother would come to me and tell her what happened. He’d gotten lost, then fallen and gotten hurt. After a while, he’d gotten tired and drifted off, and that was all he remembered. Nothing bad, nice and peaceful, and it would give her closure.

  I had no idea what really happened to her brother.

  The case had been deemed cold years ago. After digging up the contact info for one of the investigating officers, I talked to him and learned what they thought was likely. That was how I came up with the story. There hadn’t been any signs of forced entry, and the cops thought it was entirely possible that he woke up and couldn’t find his sister, got worried and went outside to look for her. While the parents couldn’t believe he’d gotten lost in the area where he so often played, the mountains were different at night, and it was easier to get lost, especially for a young child.

  It was a viable enough story, and I’d wrap it up in a nice neat little bow, telling her she could move on.

  I had the money she’d brought to cover my time and the ‘trouble’ it took to reach a spirit without any sort of so-called line. If I was a little more morally bankrupt when this was done, at least my sister was safe from marrying Ephraim.

  “There’s…” I hesitated a moment. “Okay, there’s somebody here, but it’s a woman.” Opening my eyes, I gave her a strained smile. “I’ll have to deal with her. I can’t leave her out here unconnected.”

  I went through that charade two more times, then luckily, I sensed the presence of a young boy, and it was on.

  I couldn’t say I felt anything resembling victory as I rushed to the school to get Joelle. I’d already told her she needed to be ready to go via text, ignoring her questions about why.

  I’d had to sign her out before so it wasn’t an issue for me to show up to take her out of school, but as we rushed down the sidewalk, I had to resist the urge to send furtive glances all around.

  A few of the kids from other families in the clan had kids who went here. I didn’t want anybody noticing us for fear it would be reported back.

  I’d fought Papa tooth and nail so he’d let us go to public school and not be homeschooled the way many kids in the clan were, and he’d agreed, mostly because he didn’t want to mess with it. School had become less of a problem for Rom kids with modern society. If you wanted to live in the modern world, you had to go along with some things. Otherwise, things like gadje police and social workers tended to come a-knocking. That had happened with Papa twice, social workers coming by to check and make sure we were attending school and doing all the things good little girls our ages should be doing.

  Papa had hated it, but it was entirely likely those visits were the reason we’d gotten to go to public school and have something that resembled a normal teenager’s life – for a little while, at least.

  But if we were homeschooled, I wouldn’t have to make this extra stop right now. We could already be on the road.

  Think about some of your cousins. They’re homeschooled in the clan and can barely read on a ninth-grade level. They care about appearances, not about an education, I reminded myself.

  Once we were in the beat-up car that Papa let me use, I looked at Joelle. “We’re leaving. I’m not letting you marry Ephraim.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “What?” she sputtered. “How? How are we going to take care of ourselves?”

  “I’ve already worked all of that out. Come on. Papa is out doing his rounds for Vano. We’ve got a little time, and I’ve already packed up most of our stuff, but we need to get it and get out of the house before he gets back.”

  “You…” Joelle sounded dazed as I started the car. “What do you mean you took care of it? We need money, sister. We need a lot of…” She gasped, her hand coming up to cover her mouth. “Oh, no. Suri, tell me you didn’t.”

  Her hushed whisper had me tightening my hands on the wheel. “Don’t worry about it, Jo,” I advised her. “I got this handled.”

  “Tell me you didn’t work a job outside the clan. You could get in so much trouble for that!”

  “I’m not telling you anything other than not to worry. My job is to take care of you, and that’s what I’m doing. Now…” I hit the right blinker and merged so I could take the turn to get to the house. It was only a ten-minute walk, but we didn’t have time for a walk. We had to hurry. Our new life was waiting.

  Eighteen

  Suria

  I could hear Joelle through the thin walls that separated her room from my father’s.

  I’d crept into his private domain because I needed our social security cards and birth certificates. It was a miracle the man let me have my driver’s license.

  After jimmying the lock on the fire safe, I flipped open the lid, ignoring the money. It wouldn’t do any good to take it, and it would probably give him that much more reason to come after me. That was the last thing I wanted.

  As I rifled through everything, a picture fell out and landed on the bedspread. I picked it up, studying the unfamiliar woman. She held a small boy in her arms. Flipping it over, I saw two names scrawled on the back. Catherine and Nicco.

  “I’m done,” Joelle whispered from behind me.

  Shoving the picture into my pocket, I hurried through the rest of the documents and found what I needed. After locking the box and tucking it back into its spot, Joelle and I left the house.

  I’d written a note for Papa, telling him that Joelle was helping me work a job, and we wouldn’t be back until late. Sometimes, I was out until all hours working, but I rarely took my sister with me. It had happened before, and I’d done it more frequently lately, mostly because I’d been trying to prepare her for the life she might have to live – running the con. Now, I hoped the lie would hold together.

  As we slid into the car, I looked over at her.

  “Nervous?” I asked.

  “Hell, yes.”

  I looked at the sign in the window, dark and silent. The window itself was blank, like an eye gazing out at me.

  I’m watching you.

  I suppressed a shiver and turned the ignition.

  It was time to get out of there.

  I’d already tucked a letter into Trice’s things, hoping she’d find it sooner rather than later so she wouldn’t worry.

  I hadn’t been able to think of a way to get all three of us out of there on the money I had, but I hadn’t forgotten about her. I wanted her to know that. Once we were set up and safe, I’d send money to her so she could come to us.

  Nineteen

  Kian

  My mood was toxic, and all I wanted to do was get the hell out of the garage so I could go home, maybe have a drink or five and crash. Okay, no, what I really wanted was to go find Suria, demand to know why she hadn’t returned my calls, then fuck her silly.

  But I’d gone by there earlier today and knocked to no avail.

  Hard to find her when I didn’t know where to look for her.

  “Hey, boss,” Donut shouted from the door separating the office and the bay. He had the cordless in his hand and came striding toward me without waiting for me to answer. With his hand on the mouthpiece, he shoved the phone in my direction, not even giving me a chance to wipe my hands off. “It’s your mom. She sounds really upset, dude.”

  Great. As soon as the thought entered my mind, I immediately felt like an asshole. It wasn’t like she called me to bug me or anything, and I knew that.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” I nodded at Donut and turned away from the guys in the bay as I headed for my office.

  “I am such a fool,” she said, her voice tight and high with strain. “Baby, please don’t get upset with me, but…well, I think that psychic I went to see took me for a ride.”

  A sick feeling settled in my gut. Closing the door behind me, I leaned up against it and rubbed at my temple.

&nb
sp; “What do you mean, Mom?”

  “It’s…” She huffed out a breath. “Damn it, give me a second. I’m so upset I can hardly think. I paid her so much money! Do you know how much I paid her? Let me tell you.”

  And she did.

  Red started to blur before my eyes.

  It wasn’t going to hurt Mom financially, not in the long run. When my uncle died, he’d left us his estate, and we’d been careful. Mom had made some investments that were paying off in spades, and other than her penchant for visiting psychics and mystics and all that shit, she was a level-headed person. But that was still a fuck-load of money.

  “Why don’t you start from the beginning?” I said, struggling to keep my voice level.

  So, she did.

  “I didn’t really start getting suspicious until this morning. I…well, I wanted to call the officer who I’ve kept contact with…remember how I’ve talked about Detective Jenkins?” she asked. She’d rambled a bit, straying back to the money, and something that might have been a séance, but she wasn’t sure. Now, though, she finally seemed a bit more focused. “I wanted to call him and thank him for how he’s always been there for us. I know he kept looking long after everybody else had given up and it meant the world to me. Now that I finally had some closure…well, I just felt I needed to tell him thank you, one last time.”

  She paused, and I could picture her shoving her hand through her neat hair, although it was probably a mess by now, as agitated as she was. She’d be pacing too. If this had happened five years ago, she’d be smoking as she paced. But she’d given up the nicotine, thankfully.

  “He told me how it was so odd that I’d called because he’d just talked to a young woman about the case. I asked who’d called and he gave me her name. She said she was a writer doing research, but I looked her up, and she doesn’t exist. I asked him what he told her, and he told me almost exactly what Sirene had told me happened. It was like she took his story and just…narrated it. He’d always suspected that Phillip just woke up, and when he couldn’t find me, wandered off…” Her voice cracked, and I knew she was reliving that guilt all over again.

  I wanted to punch something.

  And maybe wring a fake psychic’s neck.

  “Mom,” I said gently, keeping the anger out of my voice. “It’s going to be okay. Is there anything else?”

  She sniffed and said, “Yes. Well…I tried to call her. I wanted to know what was going on, if she’d called the detective, but her number has been disconnected. I tried to go by the place where she works – it’s just this little old house, but the sign was off, and I knocked anyway. This man told me that Sirene wasn’t around, and he didn’t know when she’d be back. That was when I knew something was right. She swindled me, Kian! And she used my brother to do it!”

  After a few more moments, I finally got her to calm down.

  “Okay, listen…I’m going to come over and pick you up, then we’ll go to the police station and file a report.”

  “No, honey,” she said, reluctance thick in her voice. “I can’t do that. Everybody will know what a fool I am.”

  “You weren’t a fool,” I told her. Naïve, maybe, but not foolish. My mom was a good woman, one who maybe trusted a little too easily when it came to certain things, but she wasn’t the one in the wrong here. “You just trusted the wrong person. She’s to blame for this, not you.”

  “But…Kian, I still feel so stupid.”

  “Mom, what about the next person she swindles? You’ll be okay without the money, but what about the person after you? And the one after you? Sooner or later, she’ll hurt somebody who can’t afford to lose the money. And that’s assuming she hasn’t already.”

  Her soft sigh drifted across the phone, and I knew she got it.

  “I’ll be there soon.”

  Once I disconnected, I stood there gripping the phone so hard, the plastic casing cracked a little under my grip. I put it down before I gave into the urge to throw it.

  That wouldn’t help anything at all.

  Well, it would help me feel better, but not for long.

  One thing would make me feel better – getting a hold of this psychic and dragging the money out of her, one dollar at a time.

  Twenty

  Suria

  Fresno, California wasn’t my destination.

  It was merely a stop off.

  I wasn’t sure what the final destination would be, but I’d figure that out. I needed to do it soon, though.

  The hotel we were staying at was one of the stay-by-the-week places, and I’d paid in advance to get the cheapest rate. My plan was to be out of there before the week was up, preferably on a bus out of the state. I wasn’t planning on taking the car. While Papa didn’t have friends on the police force, Vano did, and I wasn’t taking the risk that the car could be traced to us.

  I’d already done a few things to make it harder to link it to us for the time being, but that wasn’t going to solve the problem for good. I’d stopped by the Los Angeles International Airport and visited the long-term parking area, removing a few license plates at random and putting them on various cars, a bit of musical chairs, as it were. I’d left mine on a car that was a similar color to ours and the same make and model, then put the license plate to that one on a completely different car and taken one of the other license plates to put on mine. I had no idea whose plate I had.

  It was a risky game, and as soon as I could, I was ditching the car.

  Right now, it was parked in the hotel parking lot across the street, and if I didn’t need to go back and get it, I wouldn’t. I’d chosen a hotel within walking distance of the bus station so we could always hike it and leave the car there. I wouldn’t miss it.

  There wasn’t much from that life I would miss.

  An image of Kian’s face flashed through my mind, but I banished it. I couldn’t let myself think about him, or what I’d done to his mother. I had my own problems, and one of them was sleeping in the bed behind me. Joelle hadn’t slept much at all the night before, and it had finally caught up with her. She was worried about everything we were doing – so was I, but I couldn’t convince her to stop worrying and let me handle it.

  I knew, because I’d tried.

  Sighing, I got up and paced over to the window, staring outside.

  For now, we were safe. It hadn’t been that long since we’d left Papa’s house, and even though I knew they were looking for us, they wouldn’t be able to track us down as quickly as that.

  Once we got out of the state, we’d be safe.

  You could always go to the police…

  I cut that thought off before it went any further. Going to the police would be the last step now, especially after what I’d done. I would go if I had to, if that’s what it took to save Joelle, but unless it came down to that, and that alone, it wasn’t happening.

  I didn’t want my little sister ending up in foster care.

  I didn’t want me ending up in jail, even if I deserved it.

  “You’ll figure something out,” I told myself, shoving my hands into the pocket of my sweater. Something crumpled under my hand, and I frowned, pulling out the picture I shoved in there the day before.

  The woman and the child stared out at me from the picture as I studied it. The little boy reminded me of somebody, especially his smile, but I couldn’t figure out who. Were they somebody in the clan? Flipping it over, I eyed the two names scrawled on the back.

  Catherine and Nicco. There was also a year – it had been taken close to thirty years earlier.

  I couldn’t think of any Catherine I knew, or a Nicco, but I didn’t know every single person in the clan.

  Still, that smile…

  With time to kill, I sat down at the small desk near the window and pulled out the laptop I’d brought with me. I’d bought it myself from somebody in the clan. I’d told Papa I needed the money, true, and he’d given it to me, true, but I’d bought it, and I was the one who used it, therefore, as far as I was co
ncerned, that made it mine.

  He wasn’t the one who did all the research on the cons that got ran out of our house anyway.

  As the old thing whined its way to life, I pulled out the hotel card with the WIFI connection information on it and hoped the damn thing would actually stay connected.

  One of my favorite tools online these days were ancestry websites. It helped to have a little more than a first name, but I was still going to take a stab at it. I plugged in a couple of last names from the clan as I searched but came up short.

  When it finally occurred to me that there was one name that should have been the first to try, it hit me with the impact of a hammer swung at my gut. Automatically, I shied away from the idea, even as part of me already knew it was right.

  In the search bar, I punched in Catherine Marks, then picked up the picture, studying it closely. She looked young. Like maybe even as young as Joelle was.

  “Please don’t let that be the case,” I muttered. But I already knew it was.

  In the search area, I added in a year of birth that would have made her roughly eighteen at the time the picture was taken, with a margin of error for five years on either side.

  “Let the search begin.” Hitting enter, I leaned back and waited.

  Her name was now Catherine Alexander.

  According to the records I’d unearthed, the boy – well, he was a grown man now – was Nicco Alexander. His name had been officially changed at some point.

  I had a brother.

  Catherine had been married to my father.

  I had a brother.

  And neither of them were part of the clan.

  My breath came in harsh bursts as I struggled to deal with that knowledge. I wanted to hurt Papa for keeping this from me. How dare he!