No. That’s not true. I have Tobias. He has always been with me. Our gazes meet from across the space, and before I know it, his mouth stops moving, and he is walking over to me and sitting down. It’s like he can hear my every thought.
“It’s okay,” he says as his arm wraps around my shoulders.
“How did you know?”
Tobias inclines his head, then raises his brow at me. I lean into him.
“I miss him so much.” I try to stop the tears, but they just keep coming. “He might not have been perfect, but he was my dad, and I loved him.”
Tobias lets me cry. Holding me close, he strokes my back and places kisses on my temple. “He was, and he loved you, too. He’s always with you, Skye.”
“He was my whole life. He was all I had.”
He pulls away and looks at my face.
“Always,” he says softly. “I’ll be here for you.”
We spend the rest of the day in Tobias’s house. He takes care of me. Holds me. He is everything I need.
I toss and turn all night, barely able to get more than a few minutes of sleep at a time. My brain is constantly trying to understand what happened all those years ago.
Finally, I can’t take it any longer and decide to call it, and just get up for the day. I don’t want to face the world, but I know I need to.
“What are we missing?” I say out loud to myself, but I must wake Tobias up because I see his hand lift, and he starts to rub the sleep from his eyes. I’m not sure what, though. “Did I wake you?”
“Kind of, no biggie.”
“Sorry,” I say squeamishly.
He moves to sit up. “You look exhausted. Did you sleep?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I can’t believe the asshole had the nerve to show up at his funeral.”
“The fucker sure has a lot of fucking nerve, that’s for sure. Is that what kept you up?”
“Not just that. I’ve been thinking about it, and I haven’t found a connection to Felix.”
We need to figure out the last piece of the puzzle.
Dad’s journal.
“Where’s the journal Gideon grabbed from my dad’s house?”
Tobias stands from the bed and rifles through a box in the corner.
“Here.”
I collect the journal from him and get comfortable. It’s thick. Riddled with Dad’s messy script, tiny and slanted.
An hour later, my eyes are tired from deciphering his handwriting, but I have a better understanding of his role in all of this.
From what I read, the attorney general put everything into place. Dad included records of payments from Fitzpatrick, in exchange for detailed accounts on Baros.
The ledger and phone logs won’t be enough to prove murder, but Dad left me a parting gift.
A confession.
A statement of the role he played in the massacre.
I skim the words again, rereading it over and over. There’s a boulder lodged in my throat. Tobias slides the journal from my fingers, sets it on the mattress, and takes my hands in his, simply being here for me.
I turn to face him. “Fitzpatrick had Dad on his payroll.”
We knew this, but it’s different reading about it from my dad’s own journal. Surreal, even.
“We already knew as much.”
“I know, but . . .”
“But he’s your dad,” Tobias finishes, and I slide my hand out of his, press my knees to my chest, and wrap my arms around them. “It’s okay to be sad about it.”
“Dad thought he was helping Fitzpatrick clean the city. In the journal, he says he didn’t know anyone would die when he provided Fitzpatrick with Baros’ location that day.” I pick up the journal again, turning it over in my hands. “We need to do something.”
“Yeah. I got nothing.” His dark brows slant with his frown.
“As of right now, all I have is that the attorney general was Reddington’s district attorney, and he paid Dad to keep the city clean. Somehow, the information Dad gave led him to a massacre. What’s the connection with Felix—”
“Wait!” Tobias stills. “Remember the gala?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“Remember when we were in the closet?”
“Of course, I remember that.” That was when he first kissed me. I feel my cheeks starting to warm.
“Not that part.” Tobias chuckles, the sound making me smile. It’s a sound I will never grow tired of. But now is not the time for these thoughts.
“Which part?”
“The commotion. The fighting. That was Felix and Fitzpatrick.”
“There’s a connection between the two?”
“It was pretty heated, so I’d have to say yes.”
“What were they fighting about?”
“The attorney general wanted Felix gone.”
“What else happened?”
“Felix bitched about the contribution. That Fitzpatrick didn’t care that it was dirty money when it got him the attorney general position.”
“Interesting.” I close my eyes, trying to connect the pieces of the puzzle. “Do you think Felix—” My mouth opens.
“What?”
“I just had a thought. It might be nothing.”
“Or it might be everything.” Tobias’s brow raises.
“Give me that.” I point to the printouts of the files Jaxson provided for us. They are from the zip drive I downloaded from Felix’s computer.
Tobias jumps up from the bed, moves to the table in the corner to the makeshift office we’ve made to look at files, and tosses it to me. Then I’m settling into all the documents, desperately trying to find the connection that will bury him.
An hour passes before it hits me. I’m looking at this from the wrong angle.
“I think I know what we need to be looking for,” I tell him.
“Really? What?”
“Okay. So recently, Felix wanted me to find a loophole so he could build on a property he owns.”
“I’m not following.”
“When I was working for Felix, he asked me to look, he implied if I couldn’t find something legal, he would find another means to get the land and build on it.”
“Okay.”
“Which makes me think maybe he’s done this before. Maybe in the past, he’s done shady things to get land. What if . . . What if Fitzpatrick is tied to another property? What if this is over property Felix owns in Reddington?”
Tobias throws a file to me, and I look down at it. “What is this?”
“I don’t know. It looks like a list of some sort.”
“Interesting. Let’s see what it says.”
Together, we look over the list to decipher its meaning. There are a few names on the list. The next page has lists of court cases. Fitzpatrick’s name is all over it.
Tobias looks over the page. “It looks like someone threw out a case and tried another one . . . over land.”
“Do you think this is the proof?
“It’s hard to say.” He is staring off into space. “But I think we are on to something.”
I lean back in my chair and toss my pencil on the table.
“I found it!” I scream a moment later.
“What is it?”