Soon as I figure out where the hell that is.
“Coffee?” Rube asks.
“Yeah. Can we get something to eat?”
He frowns, and then nods. “But no lobster.”
With Zachary gone, we only have a handful of cash between the three of us. We never figured a day would come when Zach wouldn’t be there, swiping a card for whatever we needed.
How naive.
I still can’t get over what he did, even though I kinda expected something like that to happen eventually. He’s never been on board with Trinity. He’s been treating her like the enemy from day one. And we went right along, because he laid it out so logically that it only seemed right.
I guess we’ve trusted him for too long.
Cass saunters back a minute later with a piece of paper dangling from his fingertips. I snatch it from him before he even has a chance to sit down.
I snort when I see what’s written on the back. “She gave you her number?”
Cass shrugs, lounging in his chair like he was born without a spine. “Told her I wouldn’t call.”
Reuben rolls his eyes and then watches me type in the password.
It’s one of those generated ones that are supposedly so secure. But the more random a password is, the easier a hacking program can crack it. It’s passwords made out of words or phrases that are the hardest to crack. That’s why Bitcoin wallets are usually protected with a seed phrase—a string of twelve random words that are easy enough to remember, but near impossible to crack without the use of a supercomputer.
That’s why I know for a fact that the password to Gabriel’s secret archive is some kind of phrase. My program’s still trying to crack it, but I doubt it’ll happen any time this century.
Soon as my laptop connects to the diner’s wi-fi, I start looking for Trinity.
The world dissolves as I hunt through every database I can access.
Baptism.
Reuben laughed when I told him. We all laughed. Because it was so damn basic, we should have thought of it hours ago.
Trinity was baptized. Had to have been. Catholic parents and a priest as a family friend? No way around it.
And parishes keep baptism records. They have all kinds of useful shit on them like parent information, addresses, stuff like that.
I have Trinity’s date of birth from the admin file. Her parent’s first and last names too. But the rest of the file was empty. There were a few notes sent to Social Services requesting more info, but I guess their turnaround time is longer than she’s been at Saint Amos.
All I need to know is which parish keeps her records.
I hop around the Internet, finding bits of information to add to my search.
Someone shoves a cup of coffee my way. I drink it down without tasting it, but fully appreciating the jolt of caffeine. A plate of food arrives, and it smells damn tempting, but I’m already down the rabbit hole so it grows cold beside me.
The light changes. Hues shift. Streetlights come on. The temperature drops.
And then I have it.
An address.
I look up. Cass and Rube are staring at me. “Well?” Cass says. “Tell us.”
“It’s not much.” I grab a fry off my plate, swallow it down despite how cold it is. “But it’s a start.”
Chapter Eleven
Zach
I’m driving down the I-44—going too fast and giving way too few fucks. The joint I’m smoking helps. The bottle of whiskey in the glove compartment I sip at every now then, that helps most of all.
I never thought it would be this hard walking away from them. Or, in my case, driving away. Never thought I’d feel compelled to go back to them. To her.
But I am. And it is.
I hit the joint again. Tasteless. But I guess that happens if you keep smoking the same shit over and over.
No it doesn’t.
I could have stopped Gabriel. If I didn’t want to get my hands dirty, I could have called my brothers, warned them. They could have stopped him.
But I didn’t.
They said they’ll never forgive me for that.
Fuck—I’ll never forgive myself for that.
A part of me was grateful he was leaving. And that part of me managed to take control long enough to sit back and let him walk away. But the rest of me? Numb, because it felt like I was losing something more important than my charred and blackened soul.
“That’s because I am more important.”
I glance in the rear-view mirror. A jolt goes through me when I see Trinity sitting in the back seat.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I peer at her over my shoulder.
She’s wearing the same lacy white thing she did when we took her virginity. Except now it’s freshly laundered and her curls bounce around her shoulders like she’s just come out of the salon.
And her lips are red.
Like the Whore of Babylon.
“You should watch the road,” she says, an easy smile tugging at those cherry-red lips.
I smile back, glance at the road.
And almost lose control of the car as I swerve out for a truck. It blares its horn at me, the near miss rocking my now stationery rental like Trin and me are fucking in the back seat.
I turn around. She’s not there anymore.
When I straighten and look ahead, she’s standing by the hood of the car with her back to me. A gust of wind toys with her curls as she looks over her shoulder and beckons me with a crook of her finger.
I fumble for the car door, my composure shattered by the fact that I almost died. That I almost got Trinity killed.
Impossible. She’s with Gabriel.
But that doesn’t change the fact that when I walk up to her, when I grab her arm, when I turn her to face me, she’s as real as I am.
I press her against my body, testing the theory. But there’s no mistaking the way her hips press into the tops of my thighs. Her breasts into my ribs. And she makes a sound, a protest to my manhandling, as if I’m hurting her.
So delicate, like a dandelion. One breath and she’ll scatter.
But I won’t let her. Not again. The parts of my brain that held me frozen on Saint Amos’s front steps aren’t here right now. Maybe they clocked out after the deed, I don’t know.
I grab the back of her neck and I kiss her right then and there on the side of the road.
Hard.
Relentless.
Forgetting how easy it was to break her. How much I enjoyed it.
“Here?” she murmurs against my mouth. “Right here?”
I don’t know what she’s talking about until she pulls back and climbs onto the hood. Spreads her legs.
Black underwear, which is wrong, because that’s not what she was wearing. But maybe she changed, right? Girls like her don’t go around commando.
My dick’s out a second later. Too eager, but I can’t help myself. I have to be inside her again. Feel her suffocating me. Milking me.
I thrust into her pussy with enough force to make her cry out.
Her fingers bite into my shoulders. “Harder,” she says.
Her curls bounce. Her mouth forms a perfect ‘o’. A car comes past, hoots at us. I give it the finger without looking. And then I yank down the top of Trinity’s dress so I can draw one of her nipples into my mouth.
This isn’t right.