It sounded like he had a plan.
“Frankie what are we gonna do? Can we really just disappear?”
“I hope you guys can. I want you to. The boss still has the thing Xander came to get. The blueprints.” He said that in a way to let me know he knew.
“The blueprints?”
He nodded. “He still has them and while he does it’s not good. I won’t be able to just get back inside so I don’t know what’s going to happen on that front.” He gave me a poignant stare. “I think it’s best we take one thing, one step at a time. Get off radar first then think about the other stuff after.”
I agreed. That was definitely in order.
“What can I do? I have to do something to help.”
“No, Jia. I know through this whole thing you hated being told what to do, but I’m gonna need you to do exactly that. This is out of your league. There’s some people we’ll head to in San Diego. I reckon we can hide out there for a max of a day or two. We get there and I hide the truck. Your boy needs to heal. He needs to heal something bad. Don’t be surprised if …” He paused and the linger of silence worried me. “We just have to hope your father didn’t drain him out too much. That whole setup was designed to kill him. The last guy… well, fucking hell, the last guy that was attached to the torture chamber blew up. The voltage was too high.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh my God.”
“Yeah. He came to kill your father and that was how your father got him to talk. Guy gave a name; your father got the person who ordered the hit but he still killed the guy for fun. Set the fucking volts to blow the bejesus out of him and that is exactly what he did. Xander was just a few volts away from that and he was whipped. I’m hoping there was no internal damage.”
I gazed down at Xander in my lap. He really did look injured. Pale and weak.
“We should take him to the hospital. Frankie we can’t let him die.”
“Can’t go to a hospital Jia. There’s a doc at the place I’m heading to. I’m hoping they can fix him up. I’m hoping we can get him fixed up because honestly I don’t know what we’ll do after. We got to get out of the state. Get fucking far away. He wasn’t able to tell me about his people. You know anything about who they are?”
I did but I wasn’t sure if I should say.
“Can I tell you Frankie?” My tone told him it wasn’t really a question on whether or not I could. It was a matter of should.
He tilted his head to the side. “Doll… okay fine. How about we talk when he wakes up. Would that be better?”
“Yeah, I just don’t want to feel like I betrayed his trust. That’s all. I trust you though. I do. Please don’t think I don’t.”
“I know you do, it’s why I’m here.” He held my gaze. “You know everything, don’t you?”
I drew in a breath and nodded slowly. “Yeah.”
“You knew and you kept your silence. That took some serious balls Jia, it seriously did. And with your father…I’m proud of you for doing that. You chose the right thing.”
I bit back the wave of emotion that came over me. Hearing that I did something right was so uplifting. It truly was.
“That means a lot Frankie, it really does. It’s very rare that I’m told such things, very rare. You know on this occasion I had to choose Xander.”
“Yes, doll, I know. It made me think. If you could stand up to the boss and do the right thing, I could too. Your actions did not go unnoticed.”
I remembered how he’d looked when I walked into the castle courtyard earlier today, and I remembered through my tears how he’d looked as I was carried away from Xander.
I knew he’d noticed what the whole thing did to me, but I hadn’t realized he’d seen deeper.
“I think for the first time I truly realized how evil Pa was,” I stated, blinking back tears.
No one, no matter who they were could be so easily accepting of the fact that there was so much darkness in a person they were supposed to love.
A parent.
Pa had turned my love to hate. Nevertheless, it didn’t make me hurt any less. It didn’t ease the depth of disappointment in him.
“My dear you have no idea. I’m guessing since you know a lot I can share this with you,” He focused ahead on the road. “Something feels off Jia. Giovanni was really concerned with who hired Xander. I don’t think it was because he wanted to simply get a name, it felt more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just a feeling bellezza. It occurred to me from the way he tortured him, he would have just killed him. I think he would have done. I’ve worked for your father for nearly twenty years. I know the man. I know him and know that he doesn’t pussyfoot around shit for no simple reason, asking the same questions.”
“I understand. So you think what?”
“I don’t know, that’s just the thing. I don’t fucking know. What I feel now is that Armand is definitely in cahoots with The Ra.”
Okay, he’d said Ra. I could talk about them.
“A man from the Ra came to my home yesterday. His name was Balthazar Kane. He’s a leader of sorts –”
“I know who he is Jia.” He cut in and glared at me. “Fuck, this just keeps on getting better and better. That is not a name that is thrown around lightly, nor is it one to trifle with. Didn’t fucking know he went to your house. Fuck.” He hit out at the steering wheel.
A shiver ran through me just watching him.
Christ. I knew to be afraid from yesterday. Balthazar had someone with a rifle trained on me. The last time I’d felt fear like that was when Ma was killed. I’d been seconds away from death. Yesterday was like that, knowing I could be dead before I drew my next breath.
“Frankie, he said he knew I was Xander’s weakness. He killed… he killed Xander’s girlfriend.”
Frankie paused for a few seconds and looked to me. “This is not good Jia. Not good at all. Armand is involved, but he’s just a pawn. A guy like Balthazar wouldn’t have gone through someone like Armand. He wouldn’t and we can’t have a guy like that on our ass as well as your Pa.”
“What do we do?”
“I pray your boy wakes up with some ideas. He’s no mere person either. That did not go unnoticed by me at all. Tricks up his sleeve and secrets. I can tell.”
I looked at Xander and again I agreed.
Pa said to me the other week that I didn’t know much about him, even after all that had happened I still didn’t know as much as I’d wanted to.
All the same, I still loved him. I knew his soul and it was enough. I fell in love with his soul. That was enough to love him.
Even so, we’d reached a point where I needed to know more.
I needed to know more because I wanted to help.
One hour passed and we pulled off the highway.
All around us was desert land.
It was just a dark expanse of nothingness, reminding me of something from the set of one of those films where one of the characters breaks down on the road and then ended up stranded. Then some kind of a serial killer would take her, kill her and bury her somewhere in the expanse. Nobody would find her.