I lifted a brow. “If you take his side, I swear to God, Gems…”
“I’m not. And to be fair, all the bad decisions he made, I told him not to. So he made his own choices. That’s not your fault, and you shouldn’t have to pay for that. What I will say is that you don’t date anyone, Kaya. Ever. Not that Andrew should take that as a hint or some declaration that you’re holding out for him to ask you out. But the only time in the last two years we’ve known each other that you went out on a date was so Andrew wouldn’t ask you out. Not that it’s any of my business. Even though we’re besties. You can tell me if you like girls or are asexual or something.“
I lifted my brow. “Thank you for the approval. I once did have a crush on Lizzie Dubois, but I discovered Henry Cavill shortly after that. And that was the end of poor Lizzie,“ I said with a smirk.
"Fair. Henry Cavill will make anyone salivate."
“Right?"
“You never date anyone though. And I just wondered maybe if you were worried about telling me something.“
“Trust me, if there was something to tell you, I would. And I wouldn’t be ashamed to be into women or asexual. Sadly, I crave the devil’s eggplant. Just not Andrew's eggplant.“
She howled with laughter. “Eww, Andrew’s eggplant.“
I held up my hands. “For all I know he has a very nice eggplant. I just don’t really want to know.“
“I just don’t like seeing you closed off.“
“I don’t need a relationship to make my life complete,“ I muttered.
“Of course you don’t. But I also don’t want to see you avoiding relationships like you’re hiding.”
That direct hit made my lips pucker. Sometimes Gemma was an easy friend. And by that I meant she didn’t dig too deep, didn’t try to unearth any scars. But every now and again she saw too clearly, and that made me nervous.
“Not hiding. Just not really focused on that right now.“
“Fine, I'll stop harassing you.” She started riffling for something in her bag. “Where did I put my bloody headphones?“
As she looked, out fell two notebooks, a pencil, and a magazine. I helped her dive for a wayward pen and the magazine that nearly toppled off the cafe table. I froze when I saw it.
Staring back at me was someone I hadn’t seen in five years.
The last person to see my mother alive before she vanished.
Connor Lohman.
KAYA
My home was normally a place of refuge. I loved my flat. It was the first place I ever lived where I was completely in control.
After my mother disappeared five years ago, I had been sent into care. Luckily for me, it had only been a couple of foster homes.
The first one was a disaster. Pure chaos. But not chaos filled with love. Just chaos and fear. The second one was a great family with three other kids. It was safe. I was fed and even cared for. But so much chaos with people and noise. There were still moments these days when I marveled at the silence in my flat.
To keep the place a refuge, I rarely invited people over. And honestly, by ‘people’ I meant Gemma. Even Andrew hadn't seen my flat. What was interesting was that Gemma seemed to understand once she learned a little bit about how I'd grown up.
Granted, she thinks you were always in care.
Another half-truth.
She assumed. I just hadn't corrected her.
But now my refuge had an intruder. Chaos in the form of Connor Lohman, now Phelps.
After I made my excuses to Gemma, I'd gotten the hell off campus and then done something I never did. I called off work. Luckily, another girl owed me for a double shift I'd taken last week. I hated to do it, but there was no way I could focus on the kids today.
Connor Lohman was on the cover of a magazine. But he was going by Connor Phelps now. I stared at my computer screen.
It was him all right. My brain did the work of matching the face to the one of the man driving the car my mother had climbed into five years ago when she disappeared.
The familiar knot of worry and guilt threaded through my gut. My mother was smart. She was capable. For fifteen years she'd kept me alive and hidden. And then one day she’d walked away.
You know full well she would never leave you by choice.
Something had happened to her. And I'd been young without any resources, so I'd done the one thing she always forbade me from doing; I walked into a police station and told them my mother hadn't come home.
When I was growing up, my mother was always going on and on about how we had to stay hidden. At the time it had made sense. There were bad people chasing her. Chasing us.
But as I got older, I realized that was just the chaos of the things that she brought about. I'd never witnessed anyone chasing us. All I'd witnessed was having to move every year. A new name, a new identity. More than once I'd moaned about how I was sick of it and just wanted a normal life.
But now that I had my normal life, I could feel the edges fraying.
I could patch it. Stop the madness. I didn't need to pull on that string. I could just snip it and put a bit of glue down. I didn't need to unravel it.
You don't, but you will.
I would. Because chaos was my constant companion.
It didn't matter how much I thought I could outrun it. It didn't matter that I thought I had found peace. None of it mattered. The eye of the storm was an illusion.
Connor Lohman, aka Connor Phelps, or whatever his name was, he was the one responsible for what happened to my mother. And I owed it to her to question him.
But as I stared at the news article, I could see the truth. Connor Phelps was no two-bit thug. He was a financier. At least according to this article.
I needed a way to get close to him, and I intended to get my answers by any means necessary.
CHAPTER 2
KAYA
For years, I’d wondered about my mother's sanity. The shadows she always saw, the fear she always lived in. I hadn't thought it was a real thing because I hadn't seen it.
But as it turned out, the boogeyman was real.
So what are you going to do about it?
At the very least, I had to talk to Connor. Find out what he knew. I had to try. But how the hell was I going to get to someone like him? I knew that he was surrounded at all times by security and yes-men. People who, for the right price, would say what he wanted to hear. I needed a way around them. A way to make this work.
What the hell are you going to do? You know who he is, and ostensibly where he might be. And how will you get to him? Men like that have dragon-guarded moats.
I stared at the article again. The kind of man he was, the circles he ran in, his access to money, it was all evident.
I did not have the kind of money or power it was going to take to get access to a man like that, so I needed to be smart. I scanned the article again, praying for something to jump out of it. A miracle.
Or you can leave it. Do nothing. Stay in your normal life.
I frowned at that. There was no normal life. There was no unseeing what I had already seen.
For years, I hadn't believed my mother, but she'd been telling the truth about dangers in the world and the people who didn't care who they hurt to get where they needed to be.
Connor Lohman was one of them. The last I had seen of him, he'd been a low-life thug. And in the five years since, he'd turned himself into a scrubbed-up money man. How did that happen?