"Why not?"
He looks at me like I'm the idiot here. "I don't know, Sev, because I put trackers on all our cars, my Mercedes included."
I twist the cap off my Gatorade and take a swallow. "All right, but she made it pretty clear she didn't want to be tracked any more than necessary. You could have mentioned it."
"Yeah, well, I forgot, okay?"
I shake my head at him. We both know that isn't true. Atticus doesn't forget shit.
"Fuck, man, fine, maybe I didn't forget, but if I'd told her about it she probably would've made me remove that one, too. She doesn't get how dangerous this is."
He stabs the cake with his fork, breaking off a mammoth bite and stuffing it in his mouth. I grimace as he speaks around the mouthful like some kind of heathen savage I don't even recognize. "So damn reckless."
"Something doesn't add up."
I watch him closely. See the tell in the knot between his brows and the tension in his shoulders. He's feeling guilty.
"We all have our moments, but she wouldn't go this far unless…"
He swallows audibly.
"Atty…you lied to her, didn't you?"
His eye twitches and I sigh.
"She asked me if there were any other trackers," he admits. "Made me swear there wasn't."
I nod, sighing. That's what I thought.
It's insane what she did, but this is a lesson Atty needed to learn and I think Ro might be the teacher neither me nor Eli could ever be for him.
Atticus must know now that if he'd explained the necessity of the device to her, she probably would've allowed it—so I don't harp on it. Instead my focus narrows on the rest of the facts.
"So, wait a sec, you're telling me that she somehow found your tracker, right?"
He grunts.
"And then drove her caroff a bypass?"
His throat moves as he swallows. "Insane, right?"
Something flutters in my chest as I picture her behind the wheel, racing to the edge of the unfinished road. Did she drive it and jump out at the last second? Or would she have used a cinder block?
I'm willing to bet the seven-figure contents of my bank account that she was behind that wheel until the very last second.
God, I'm hard thinking about it.
"What's that look on your face?" Atticus asks, his cheekbones flaring around another mouthful as he chews.
I rub at the goosebumps on the back of my neck and smirk, leaning against the counter. "Just…sounds like something I would do."
Atty is not impressed by this revelation. He drops the fork again and shoves the cake away from him.
"Yeah," he agrees in a harsh tone. "It is. As if I need anotheryouto deal with. One is more than enough."
I'm still smirking, and I think it's only making him more angry as he gets up and takes the remaining cake, walking it to the garbage to dump the whole thing into the bag before throwing his fork in the sink.
"Do you have any idea how many hours I've spent making this look like something else?" he bitches, viciously scrubbing the fork in the sink under a stream of steaming water. "How many arms I had to twist?Hmm? How much blackmail I needed to dig up to get the deputy in Boone on board with the story? Not to fucking mention all the red-light footage that needed to be corrupted because I was forced to take off after her ass when I saw where she was headed."
