He looked visibly shaken. “Be careful, Allen. I still do business with your father.”
My grin was gone. “Yeah. The very few recordings you had on him, where you blackmailed him, those are gone. You’ll never find them again. Don’t enter into a pissing contest with me. You’re an artifact when it comes to technology. In that world, I’m the giant and you know it.” I nodded at his phone. “Make the call, Mitchell.”
He did.
There was protesting on the other end, but he got him to drop the charges, saying he recently rethought about pissing off Allen Sr. The chief agreed about a bit, telling him that my lawyer would be notified within the hour.
Once he was done, I showed him the cloning program and hit the stop button.
He was searching his own phone for where it was, uninstalling it immediately.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that actually activated the secondary one I had planted because that’d been the plan. With guys like Mitchell, I figured I might want to keep an eye out on what he was going to be doing in the next few weeks, just to be safe.
“Your girlfriend still has an account at my bank. She doesn’t use it, but it’s still there.”
I had started to leave, feeling there wasn’t anything else to say. I was corrected and I spun around, my old smirk back in place. “No. I closed it for her this morning. All records you have on her are wiped.” I gave him a two-finger salute, heading for the back door.
“Zeke,” he called after me.
I didn’t turn around but paused with the door half open.
He said, “Be careful. I’m a small bee in a larger hive.”
I gave a small nod because I was fully aware of it. There was always corruption that I could hack. This time, it was my first time doing it for something like this. Guess we all had to grow up at some point.
I waited until I was off his land, back in my Jeep, before I spoke to the person on the phone.
“Did you get all that?”
Logan Kade said back, “I did, and I concur. I had no idea what I’d be listening in on when I answered your call, especially fascinated that you told him someone had been listening the whole time since I only caught the last ten minutes. You’re full of surprises lately, Allen.”
“He had a murderous look to him. I was thinking on my feet.”
“I gathered, and I’m guessing the call I’m getting from the Fallen Crest Police Department will be the Chief letting me know your charges have been dropped. Would you like me to reciprocate and you listen in as well?”
I was starting to laugh and agree right as someone got inside my Jeep, on the passenger side and slammed the door shut. “Uh. I better not.”
“Zeke—”
I hung up. “What are you doing here?”
24
AVA
“You’re blackmailing people?”
I was furious. And trembling. And my God, I couldn’t stop shaking so I sat on my hands. But I kept glaring because that was really important. Glaring. Letting him see how enraged I was, and my word, I—I didn’t know what else I was feeling because it was all rolling together in my tummy, in one molten ball of lava.
His eyebrows shot up. “How do you—” Wariness came over him. “Aspen?”
“Yes, Aspen. She called me and told me what you were going to do.”
He cursed, looking away.
“Are you kidding me? Do you know how much trouble you’re going to get into for this?”
He looked back, his eyebrows furrowing together. “I’m not, that’s the point.”
“Zeke—”
“No, Ava. Listen. This is what we do, in my group of people. We blackmail and we burn buildings down and we fight people and we break into places—it’s what we do.”
“I don’t!”
I couldn’t. No, no, no. I had too much to lose.
My grandmum—my mom. I couldn’t lose my mom. I tasted salt and flicked away whatever tear had trailed down because it wasn’t helpful right now.
“You don’t get it.”
“I do!” I cried out, because I did. I really did. “You think that people don’t watch you? That they don’t see what you and your friends do? And I know you’re all connected. You to Blaise. Blaise to Aspen. Aspen to her brother. Her brother to the Kades. The Kades to my boss! My boss to Bren and her whole group. You’re all interconnected and I do know what you guys do. I just thought—” I looked away because what had I thought? That Zeke was different?
He wasn’t.
I was the fool for thinking that.
“You and people like you don’t understand that when you guys do the things you just said, you’re not the one who gets hurt. For whatever reason, it’s not you. It’s never you. It’s the others. The bystanders. The people on the outskirts. It’s people like my mom, like my grandmum. It’s people like me.” My voice cracked. “We’re the ones who get hurt and we’re the ones who have to spend the rest of our lives dealing with it, surviving it, existing despite it. My grandmother couldn’t escape my grandfather. She kept expecting him to come and ‘finish her off.’ That’s how he was, how she was. That kind of thing doesn’t leave you. It stayed with her, stayed with my mom, stayed with me. My mom lost her legs in an accident. Did I tell you how she lost them?” I turned away, tasting my tears, but my God, he needed to understand it. “My dad was drunk, and he got into a fight. And he was driving, and my mom was in the car, and guess what happened? She lost her legs, and then he left her, so she lost her husband too.”
He looked visibly stricken. “Ava—”
“She lied.” I just kept tasting those tears. I guess they needed to be released. “When the cops came in and asked what happened, because my dad was sober by then, she lied. She said he lost control. It was raining and it was just an accident. He repaid her kindness by leaving her because he didn’t want to be saddled taking care of a disabled wife. Those were his words. But if you ask me, she’s not disabled. She’s not anything. She’s my mom, and she’s never let her not having two legs stop her from doing a damned thing. It never will. If she’s gotta get upstairs, trust and believe, she will. She will lift herself all the way up, two stairs at a time, and she’ll rig a rope or something and get her chair up behind her. My mom can do anything.” My voice cracked again. “But I can’t. She’s the survivor, not me. I’m exhausted. That’s what I am. I am just exhausted from life because the whole of it, I’ve just been trying to get by while the rest of you, the God-blessed ones, you live. Not me, though. Not me.” I knew I was fully crying, and I didn’t care.
I was just feeling the crushing weight of the impending doom coming my way. This time, I knew I wouldn’t outlast it.
I loved him. That gave him the power to destroy me. The kind of destruction that I wouldn’t survive.
I was shaking my head before I knew what I was going to say, what I had to do. “I can’t do this, Zeke. Maybe it’s me. I can’t handle it again. I can’t stand by and… I don’t even know what will happen, but something will happen. To me or to you, and I can’t deal with it. I’m not made of that tough stuff people seem to need to thrive in the world. I don’t have it, and what’s worse, I don’t know if I want it. If I have to blackmail someone or break into someone’s house or set someone’s car on fire—I don’t have that in me to hurt another person. Whether they’re good or bad, or if they deserve it or not. I just don’t have it. Consider me weak, if that’s how you perceive it. I just don’t have it in me, that’s all I know.”