She went inside, slugging her backpack over her shoulder. Huffing, I took the rest of the bags out and slammed the trunk, going inside too.
I should have known she wouldn’t come. I don’t even know what I was thinking. She was safer back at home than she was with me, honestly. I just wanted her so damn much that I was blinded by my own selfishness.
Maybe she realized I didn’t deserve her after all.
Chapter Eleven
KANDY
It was seven in the morning, the earliest I had been up in a while. Cane’s letter was on my desk, and my heart was beating heavily in my chest.
A suitcase was on my bed, packed with enough clothes to last me for a month. I stared at it, contemplating, for a really long time. I didn’t realize how much time had passed as I paced my room, eyeing the letter, eyeing the suitcase, until a knock sounded.
I looked back, and Dad came inside. He was about to say something, but then fixed his gaze on the black suitcase on top of my bed. His lips parted, like he was about to speak again, but then it clamped shut. He closed his eyes, inhaled, and then exhaled.
“Dad,” I pleaded, but he cut me off.
“Your mother is downstairs. We all need to talk.” He turned away. When I heard him walking down, I sighed and reluctantly followed after him.
Rounding the corner, I spotted my parents in the living room. Mom was sitting on the arm of the love seat, and Dad stood right beside her, his hands in his pockets.
“Lora Cane visited my house yesterday?” Dad inquired.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“What did she want?”
“She gave me a letter…from Cane.”
“That said what exactly?”
I looked him in the eyes. “He misses me.”
Dad huffed and crossed his arms.
Mom stood. “And you miss him,” she stated, like she already knew I would say it next. She put her eyes on Dad, turning to face him. “The other night, she was whimpering his name, Derek. Whimpering. She was still a little out of it, but she claimed all she wanted was to be with him. She said it to me that night.”
“So what? It was probably just a dream!” Dad bellowed. “She doesn’t need to be around him again! You see what happened the last time we let her go!”
“I understand you’re upset,” Mom said evenly, “but I’ve had time to think about what happened, and we both know the stabbing wasn’t his fault. He can’t control Kelly’s actions, and he even reported that he’d just found out about her mental instabilities and about Kandy’s pregnancy. He had no idea what Kelly was capable of!”
“I don’t care about any of that, Mindy! Our daughter almost died—she lost her ability to have a child because of him!”
I had to admit, that statement hit me right in the gut. So he knew this whole time? I guess I should have known. He was Mom’s best friend, after all.
“Was Cane the one with the knife to her?” Mom snapped. “No, it was Kelly. You heard Kandy’s story, and you also heard the doctors. Cane saved her life by bringing her to that hospital! The least we can do is let her talk to him!”
“So now you’re going to back him up? A few weeks ago you were ready to have her press charges on him!”
Mom started to fire back, but I took a step forward. “Guys! Seriously? I’m still in the room!”
They both stopped arguing, whipping their heads to stare at me.
“Look, I appreciate everything you two have done for me and everything you have sacrificed for my sake. Dad, I understand your anger, but…like I told you before, I love Cane. I love him a lot. Just like how you and Mom are, and with all the stories you guys have told me about the things you’ve been through, I know that the best thing to do is to fight for what I love, not let it go to waste.”
“Don’t compare what your mother and I have to what you had with Cane! It’s only lust, Kandy! You’re young and easily manipulated, and he took advantage of that!”
I stepped closer to him. “No, he didn’t, and I have told you plenty of times before what really happened and how we started! You can’t always protect me, Dad! I’m not a kid anymore!”
“Kandy, he is not the man for you!” his voice boomed.
“How would you know? You aren’t around when we’re together!”
“You almost died!” he barked, getting toe-to-toe with me. “I had to watch blood pour out of you in that hospital, watch you cry and grieve, all because we left you to be taken care of by him, and he fucked it up! Forgive me if I don’t fucking trust him!”
“Derek!” Mom cut in.
I breathed hard through my nostrils while he raged like an angry bull. The room went absolutely quiet. If a pin hit the floor, it would have sounded like a heavy thud.
“I’m going to Charlotte to see him,” I stated, and didn’t give a damn how he felt about it. “I’ll be down there for however long I feel like it, so unless you handcuff me to something in this house, I’m going.”
Mom’s head dropped as she sucked in a breath through her teeth.
“You are out of your goddamn mind,” he snarled. He stormed around me to get to the hallway. He took my car keys out of the tray that all the keys were in and stuffed them into his pocket. “If you leave, it won’t be with the car I worked my ass off to buy for you.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Whatever,” I scoffed. “There are plenty of other ways to get there.” I turned away and rushed back up the stairs. Mom called after me, but it was too late. I wasn’t looking back.
I slammed the door behind me and snatched out even more clothes from my closet, stuffing the suitcase. I was livid, but he wasn’t going to stop me from going. He could be such an asshole sometimes, and the fact that he would withhold his support from me, going so far as to take my car, blew my mind.
I would find a way there and he knew I would, so taking my car keys was a pointless move.
* * *
It was nearing 6:00 p.m. when I heard the stairs make their usual deep croaking as someone made their way up, and then there was a knock on my door.
“What?” I muttered. I was in the bathroom, running a finger over the bags beneath my eyes.
Dad walked right in, taking a look around my room, before cracking the door behind him. He ran a hand over his head, the other hand in his back pocket. I couldn’t stand it when he acted like he didn’t belong—like my room was some magical portal he’d never been through.
“Mind if I sit?” he asked as I stepped around the corner to see him completely.
“It’s your house,” I mumbled. He sat at the end of the bed, letting out a long, weary sigh, then he patted the spot beside him.
“Sit, Kandy. We need to talk.”
I frowned at his hand, but to make sure I didn’t act like as much of a stubborn ass as he did, I sat, though not too closely.
We were both quiet, only breathing. Thinking. “Look, I know you think I’m overreacting about Cane, but I know so much about him. So many secrets that he will never tell you because he knows it will make you look at him differently.”
I tried hard not to look at him. “Secrets like what?”
“Like how he pulled a knife on a store clerk because he didn’t have enough money to pay for groceries once.”
I blinked quickly. “That’s not so bad.”
“Or how he almost killed someone who hurt Lora.”
“Would you not do that for me?”
My throat thickened as Dad locked his eyes on me. “You want to know how I really met Cane?”
“I thought it was because you saved his mom’s life?”
“No. We’d met way before that. We didn’t become really good friends until I helped her.” He ran his palms over the thighs of his pants nervously. “I used to get calls all the time about fights and suspicious activity in his neighborhood, and guess who was always the one being questioned or arrested?”
“Cane,” I whispered.
“Back then he was a juvenile, so most of it didn’t go t
o his record. Minus some fights here and there, it’s a pretty clean record, honestly. Lots of it was disregarded.” He sighed. “Anyway, when I really got to know Cane, he was eighteen. Fresh out of high school and didn’t know what to do with himself. I’d heard he was working for a man named Horacio, who was this big drug dealer in his area. Most of what we heard was rumors. We were never able to confirm it, and there was never any proof, but that was mostly because Cane was smart. He’d been pulled over many times, but never with any drugs on him. No…” Dad tapped his temple with two fingers. “He was too smart for that, but he slipped up one day. We got a call for an assault on a young woman. I was nearby with the partner I worked with back then, so we raced to the scene, and that’s when I saw Cane and his sister, Lora.”
I was shocked to hear that. “Lora? For what?”
“She’d gotten into an argument with some guy she talked to, he hit her, and she called Cane. Cane dropped everything to come for her, and when we got there, we saw him inside a gym beating the man to a pulp. I mean, he had blood everywhere. All over the floors, on his face. The man’s face was hardly recognizable by the time he was done with him. We pulled him off, my partner searched him, and we found a small bag of coke on him.”
“Wow.” My heart was racing now.
“Yeah. Anyway, I drew up the paperwork that night, but I couldn’t stop looking at him, you know? I mean, he was just a kid, and he was lost. I knew all about his mother and her addictions and how there were always reports of her getting abused. I also heard she was sick and needed a kidney…so I purposely didn’t report the coke. I left it off the record and only reported the fight.” He dropped his head. “I told him what I did for him and made him promise me to never get into any trouble again—to get his shit straight and get out of that fucked-up part of town. Stop selling, go to school—something. He promised he would. He spent two nights in jail and was out. Didn’t get into any more trouble again for a while.”
I dropped my eyes. Dad went on.
“Not even three years later, we got another report for that area—another assault. This one was on his mother. His father had returned and was threatening to kill her. He’d hit her many times, left her with a black eye and a busted lip. He’d even ripped some of her hair out, and had punched Lora in the ribs so hard that some of them were fractured. It was brutal, and the worst part was that he didn’t stop, not even when we got there. That’s when I stepped in, set him straight. That same night, I brought his mom and sister into the station, got their written statements about what happened, and then took his dad’s. Cane came into the station, took his mom and sister home, but not before talking to me. He was wearing khakis and a dress shirt. I remember because I’d never seen him wear anything like it. He had this nice Rolex watch on, his hair styled differently. He looked…different. That’s all I could say. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but he wasn’t the same eighteen-year-old kid who was getting into fights and selling drugs. His eyes were darker, like he’d seen bad things, but that was just his life in general.
“Anyway, he asked for my number, said he wanted to repay me for saving his mom. That’s when we started meeting for beers at that cheap bar up the street. We hung out a lot, and he really felt like family to me. He told me about school, about his sister and how she was thinking about moving out of her mom’s place to stay with one of her friends from school. He even told me how he had this idea to open a company that sells wine. He knew some man who had a vineyard and made great wine. He wanted to invest in it one day. Everything seemed to be smooth sailing, but there was one night in particular when he got a phone call. I don’t know who it was from, but when he looked at the screen, he seemed nervous all of a sudden. He told me he had to take the call and walked off. I watched him go, but when he talked on the phone that night, it looked like he was arguing. He came back, said he had to go. I thought nothing of it. But then it happened repeatedly—I’m talking for a solid month. I got suspicious then. I mean, he was a kid from the wrong side of the tracks and could have been pulling anything behind my back. Hell, I could have been in danger. Not only that, but he was a fucking genius—probably had the most street smarts I’d ever seen in a person.
“So he paid the tab one night, we left early, and I waited a while in my car before following him. He drove for a while, until he reached an abandoned warehouse. I parked a little ways away with my lights off, and saw him pull up beside a black truck.” He breathed a little faster. “A man stepped out with a black suitcase in hand, handed it to Cane, and then left. It was quick. Sudden. I knew it was an illegal exchange. From that moment on, I watched him every single time he left early. Every single time he answered that phone, I knew he was going to that warehouse.” He frowned and shook his head. “And then one night I saw him…a man the news had been talking about for months. A man that the FBI had been looking for, for a long time. He was the reason we started cracking down on the Hispanic gangs in Atlanta. The coke was too clean and more and more fights were happening in the cities. Browns against blacks. All of that.” He met my eyes. “The man I saw was named El Jefe,” he rumbled, and my eyes stretched so wide I thought they’d leave my skull. That name. God, why did it always give me chills? “I saw him one night during one of Cane’s drops, and realized Cane was good friends with that man—that he worked for him. I got down to the bottom of it and eventually confronted Cane. I followed him all the way to school and demanded to know what was in the suitcase. I’d taken pictures of him with El Jefe as leverage, just so he couldn’t deny it, and that’s when Cane told me the truth. There was money in his suitcase.”
“Money?” I asked. “For what?”
“Money he earned for pushing Jefe’s drugs. He was selling it to college kids, organizing what was being sold in Atlanta. He was taking trips back and forth for the drop-offs and the pick-ups, but was using me as his alibi. He was getting paid good money for it, I’m sure, especially if he got out of college without any debts and opened his own company right away.”
“Holy crap,” I breathed. “So what did you do?”
His eyes squeezed shut. “I kept his secret.” He shrugged. “I disrespected my job and made a mockery of my career by keeping his damn secret. And you want to know why I kept it?”
“Why?”
“Because Cane informed me that El Jefe knew who I was. To this day, he knows everything about me. He knows every single person that is connected to Cane. It’s the way he operates, probably so he can know who to target if things get awry.” His face was serious, eyes misty. “The only reason I kept his secret is because I knew telling it would have bitten me in the ass. I had a daughter to live for. A wife to take care of. After finding all of that out, I had no choice but to make his secret my own.”
“Oh my God, Dad,” I wheezed. “Why stay friends with him after finding that out then?”
“Because…he was a good kid. He was respectful, loyal, and I could tell he was going places. Not only that, but he promised he was going to get out of it, and back then I didn’t have many guy friends. Hell, I still don’t. At that point, he had already met you and your mother. He was in deep with us. I couldn’t just cut him off—not without lying to your mother, which I suck at doing—and there was no guarantee El Jefe would leave us alone even if I did.” He shrugged again. “It also looked like he needed a friend, you know? I mean we all have our demons—trust me, I have many—so who was I to judge? Who was I to tell him that in his position I would make different choices? I had no right to even think like that, and he guaranteed that as long as I kept quiet, things would be fine and he would get out, so I let it go. Things returned to normal. I think by now he’s gotten out—haven’t heard much about El Jefe since that explosion that happened at his home during the raid, but you never know what else lurks in Cane’s shadows.”
I nodded, lowering my gaze. Cane wasn’t out. That much was clear, from what I remembered with the black flip phone he had in his closet and how panicked he was when he saw the news.
/>
“Look, Kandy…I’m not telling you this to scare you or make you think he’s a bad guy. He’s not all bad. To be honest, he’s one of the best men I’ve ever met. He’s got wits, he’s talented, he thinks on his feet, but he has a hell of a lot of baggage. When you met him, he may have seemed like this nice, wealthy guy with a big house and nice cars, but I’m almost positive he had to do some foul shit to get all of it. I don’t know what all he had to do for El Jefe, but anyone who works for that man doesn’t get things easily, and for Cane to be in the position he’s in now, it only means that he sits at the same table that man eats at and is just as dangerous as he is.” He grabbed my hand, and I picked my head back up, meeting his eyes. They were sincere, watery. “I love you so much, Kandy, and all I want is for you to be safe. That’s it. It may seem like I’m holding you back, and that I’m putting you against him, but it’s for your own good. I only have your best interests in heart, and I know for a fact that your best interest is not Cane. If you go…I—I don’t know what I’ll do. I just know that it won’t sit well with me.”
“He wants what’s best for me too—that’s why he hasn’t shown up here. He gave me time to think things through, and I have.”
He scowled. “You ever think he didn’t show up because he knew he was no good for you?”
“No—and that wouldn’t be true. He sent me a letter—he didn’t show because he knew you’d run him off.”
“He’s just lonely, Kandy! And he has a lot to feel guilty for, so of course he’s going to send you some sappy letter to make you feel better! Going back with him wouldn’t be smart, and you’re a smart girl, so don’t let him make you stupid!”
A grimace took hold of every single one of my features. I should have known this conversation would go south. He could never let things go.
“Look,” he said, pushing to a stand, “just…stay home, okay? Be in a place where you know you’ll always be safe and won’t have targets on your back. Let him go, Kandy. You don’t need him.”
The Cane Series: Complete 4-Book Box Set Page 60
