“Slade.” She grinned. “You know and remembered his name. That’s something.”
My dead stare remained glued to her until the light went on in her head.
“Of course, you know his name, and you know it well because you’re stalking him. I knew it.”
“His record is clean.”
“Great! Case closed. Well wishes to Livy on her new relationship. Now, let’s go spar. My boss was an asshole today. I need to hit someone.”
“It’s too clean.”
She rolled her eyes. “He’s in his twenties. Maybe he comes from a nice family. Clean record.”
“There’s not a father’s name on his birth certificate.”
“It’s not a crime to be raised by one parent.”
I nodded slowly. “I know. But he has no social media accounts. And he dropped out of college for three years before going back to finish his senior year.”
“Family emergency? Health issues? Second thoughts on his future? Money issues? Seriously, Jackson, you’re looking for something that’s not there.”
“That’s my point. He’s too clean. Not just squeaky clean. I’m talking unrealistically clean.”
“So what are you going to do? Go to LA, tie him up, and interrogate him?”
I cork-screwed my lips. “That’s not a bad idea.”
“Yes.” She laughed. “It’s a horrible idea. The kind of idea that ruins your relationship with your daughter.”
With my thumb and middle finger, I rubbed my temples, staring at everything I could find on Slade Wylder in multiple screens. “The day Ryn died … I was uneasy all day. I couldn’t explain it. A sixth sense feeling. I must have messaged her twenty times, checking on her, checking on Livy.”
“You said that. It’s not unheard of for people to have a feeling that something bad is going to happen, but it still doesn’t mean that it was anything other than an accident.”
I leaned back in the chair and laced my fingers behind my head. “I’ve had the same feeling for several days about Livy. You don’t know how many times I’ve considered getting on a plane to go check on her in person. Stay there until the feeling goes away. In the fall, I had the same feeling.”
“You did?” Jessica narrowed her eyes, an odd expression morphing her face.
“Yeah. I tried messaging her a million times, and I was ready to head straight to the airport when she texted me back, confirming she was fine.”
Jessica rubbed her lips together, forehead tense. “Did you have this feeling before the house fire?”
I shook my head. “Clearly she wasn’t in danger. She was at his house doing God knows what.”
When Jessica didn’t jump at the chance to make a joke about all the times I was doing “God knows what” in my twenties, I knew something wasn’t right. I sat up straight. “What aren’t you telling me?”
She pinched her bottom lip, gaze aimed off to the side. “What can you find on a Stefan Hoover from Nevada? Two kids and a wife. He was killed in LA after attempting to rape a college girl.”
“Why?” I asked, my hands already moving over the keyboard to look up his information. “Over a hundred K in credit card and gambling debt. No prior record. But yeah, he was found dead after attempting to rape a girl behind a convenience store in Septem—” My gaze shot to Jessica’s.
She swallowed hard.
“This is when I had that feeling.”
Another hard swallow as her eyes remained unblinking, like prey would eye its predator.
“Jess.” My fists clenched on the table, jaw set. “So help me God, if this was Livy …” I couldn’t even say it. My chest filled with rage and fear of something I didn’t want to be true.
“She told me over a month later when I was in LA for business.”
“Why the fuck am I just now hearing about this?” I stood, sending the chair backward with my violent outburst.
Jess held up her hands. “Let me explain.”
“EXPLAIN?” I took my water glass and pitched it into the wall, glass, ice, and water flying everywhere. “How the fuck are you going to explain not telling me that some guy tried to rape my daughter?” I moved around the table so quickly she flinched, and my sister never flinched. “If it were one of your girls, what would you do?”
She stared at my chest, holding her own in posture, but shame filled her eyes. “You know what I would do,” she whispered. “She made me promise not to tell you. He didn’t rape her. Had he … I would not have kept her secret.”
“That’s fucking great, Jess. You’ve just kept it a secret that she’s in LA, dating some guy I know nothing about, and completely defenseless.”
Her eyes shifted upward. “Not defenseless. I’ve been training her.”
I squinted. “Training her? What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. I don’t. You’re her aunt. Period.”
Her jaw flexed along with her hands. “You taught her how to punch and run. How to use a bottle of pepper spray.”
“Because that’s what I told Ryn I would teach her. That’s it. A normal college student with a normal upbringing. Everything we didn’t have.”
“Well, after her incident, I decided she deserved a normal adult life. A safe adult life. I decided no man would ever pin her to the ground … would ever leave the kind of scars that never heal.”
Emotion crushed my chest. It wasn’t the life I wanted for Livy. “How long?”
“Three months.”
“That’s not enough.” I shook my head.
“I’m not done.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “How much? What have you trained her to do?”
Jessica tipped her chin up, lips in a firm line. “I’ve trained her to bleed.”
“Fuck … Jess …” I winced thinking about my little girl experiencing the things I experienced, the things Jessica experienced. Even if it was a fraction of it, it was too much.
Jessica tipped her chin up another inch, shoulders back, reminding me of everything she’d survived in her life. “I trained her to get up. I trained her to feel the pain and channel it into one thing …”
“Her next breath,” I whispered the words that were repeated to us over and over.
She returned several slow nods. “This feeling …”
I shook my head. “It’s probably nothing.”
“But what if it’s something?”
“You mean Slade?”
Jessica shrugged. “Slade. Stefan Hoover. The house that burned down. The cause of the fire was not determined for certain.”
“You think it was meant for Livy?”
“No,” Jess said as a knee-jerk reaction to keep me from losing my shit. “Maybe.”
I grabbed my phone. “She’s at Slade’s.”
“You’re tracking her?”
I frowned at Jessica and her stupid question. “I bought her a new phone after the fire. Of course I’m tracking her. I track her Jeep too. If I could have gotten away with chipping her, I would have.” I called Livy and put the phone on speaker.