Delilah’s shoulders snapped back and we lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. I felt like this was another one of those tricky situations, only this time I was afraid Delilah was a ticking timebomb—and one more wrong word and she’d explode.
“Do you live in Maryland?”
“Yeah.”
“And you haven’t been home since you started looking for me?”
I stopped brushing and waited for her to continue. When she didn’t I reminded her, “Can’t look for you if I’m sitting on my ass in Maryland.”
Delilah hunched forward and whispered, “You know about my life.”
Jesus fuck. The minefield was getting harder and harder to navigate.
“I do.”
“So you’d know, since there’s no father listed on my birth certificate, I never had one. He didn’t even stick around to give me his last name. And since then my mom’s moved from man to man. She dragged me along but it was like I wasn’t there. She gave me her maiden name but since then she’s been married so many times, had so many different last names I’ve lost count. But not me. I’ve always just been Delilah Watts, Venessa’s forgotten daughter.”
I had no clue what any of that had to do with me living in Maryland or being on the road looking for her. What I did know was I hated the sadness in her voice. And she wasn’t exaggerating—her mother had been married twelve times. All of them ending in divorce, ten of them ending in healthy settlements. This was because Venessa Hudson exclusively married rich men who simply threw money at her to make her go away. Which she did, then promptly went back on the hunt and just as promptly found another sucker to sink her claws into.
“Thank you.” I could barely hear her soft words.
“Not sure why you’re thanking me.”
“No one has ever looked for me and not because I’ve never been missing. They’ve just never looked. I’ve never mattered to anyone. So, thank you for looking even if it was your job.”
The fuck of it was, it hadn’t been me who’d stepped on one of those mines that littered our path, it was Delilah who blew the bitch sky high. I felt my body string tight, bracing far too late, thus I had no way to defend the pain—her pain—as it sliced through me. No child should ever feel forgotten.
“Since we’re being honest, you should know Evette London was the client, not you. When she came to us, she thought those emails and pictures you sent were threats, not you passing her intel. Initially, Kevin and I were sent to apprehend you. It took some time for us to realize your role, then realize you were in trouble. You should also know once Evette was safe and she had the opportunity to look at everything with clear eyes, she became your champion. She figured out you were helping her and she was worried about you. The rest of us were on the fence. You were sloppy when you were communicating with Evette. We couldn’t be sure if it was a setup, if someone was using you as the fall guy, or if you were on the up-and-up and were trying to bring down Abrams.”
I was glad Delilah was facing away from me. It was easier to admit uncomfortable truths when you weren’t looking the other person in the eye.
It was also a damn good thing I couldn’t see the hurt on her face when the sound of it in her voice cut me to the quick.
“You thought I was trying to harm Evette?”
“Yes.”
“Do you still think that?”
“No. If I did I wouldn’t’ve continued to look for you even though Zane pulled the rest of the team back to Maryland. Two weeks ago we ran out of leads. He wanted everyone back to the office to regroup. They went but I stayed.”
“Why?”
“Because there was no way in hell I was going to fail you.”
I heard her swift inhale and that hurt like a sonofabitch.
What I didn’t tell Delilah was that I knew the sour taste of failure and I was never going to choke on it again. I would never blindly obey another order. Unlike the Army, Zane didn’t argue with instinct, he allowed his men to follow their intuition. He might’ve bitched about it but ultimately he’d given me the latitude to follow my gut. He believed me when I told him I knew Delilah was close. He hadn’t scoffed when I explained I could feel her near.
And that was the weird part—every time I’d gotten close to a location where she’d been held I could sense her. I don’t know how or why but I couldn’t deny there was a connection.
I could just feel her.
Chapter 8
Silent tears wetted my cheeks. A useless talent I learned at a young age—I couldn’t control the emotion from leaking from my eyelids but I could control the noises I made. I could quietly release the pent-up hurt and not move a muscle while doing it. My mother liked me quiet, her husbands didn’t mind me around as long as I wasn’t any trouble. So I never caused trouble, I rarely spoke, and I learned to cry silently.
My problem was I didn’t know the source of the pain. I didn’t know if I was hurt because Evette thought I was behind the murder attempts, that Myles had thought I was capable of such horrible deeds, that I’d screwed up and didn’t know someone at Abrams was watching me. Or if the agony burning through me was from the knowledge that Myles hadn’t given up. He’d continued to look for me after he’d run out of leads, that he hadn’t been home in a really long time because he didn’t want to fail me—a stranger. Yet, my own mother had no clue I’d gone missing, nor did it sound like she cared when Myles spoke to her.
“Delilah?”
God, I like hearing him say my name.
“It was never my intention to hurt Evette,” I told him. “And I wasn’t being sloppy. At the time I didn’t know the program I’d installed to mask my IP and email server had been disabled. I didn’t know I was being watched.”
“When did you figure it out?”
“When Garrett replied to an email I’d sent Evette. I had a no-reply mailbox set up, but his email showed up in my work inbox. I opened the raw source header and saw that the original email I sent to Evette had gone through Abrams’s servers—which it shouldn’t’ve. I checked the rest of the messages and found that all of them had. So, I guess I had been sloppy in a way because I wasn’t diligent in checking my machine. If I had been I would’ve found the software someone installed. Whoever did it was good; they buried it deep and I had no clue everything I was doing was being logged.”
“Why didn’t you just come straight out and tell Evette what was going on?”
Such a simple question with a complicated answer. One that would make me sound a little nuts. A question that would mean I’d have to go explain what Abrams was really doing and that was not a rabbit hole I was ready to go down.
“How are those knots coming?”
Myles had stopped brushing but I was sure he was nowhere near done.
I heard his disappointed sigh, then I felt him lift my hair off my back. I ignored the tingles his hands in my hair caused and readied myself to justify the change in subject.
But Myles let me off the hook.
“I’ll give you that, Delilah. I get why you’re holding your cards close but you gotta know I can’t help you if you don’t let me.”