“We kept tabs on you for a year and a half. I figured since nothing happened, Monica realized it was a terrible idea.” I swallowed past the lump that formed in my throat. “Then, six months later, I saw on the news that you were missing.”
Tears started falling down her cheeks. I moved toward her, unable to resist. I pulled her into my arms and cupped the back of her head.
“I hired Red Wally and Willy with the sole intention of finding you. The five of us started tearing apart Monica’s life, learning everything we could learn to find you.”
She looked at me. “You felt guilty?” Her forehead creased. “But it wasn’t your fault.”
“I didn’t care. My only goal was to find you. After a week, I gave up being discreet about it. I had Jinx tap her phone, and Red Wally and Rhyan bugged your mother’s house. I needed to know what she’d done and how to get you back.”
“Why didn’t you confront her?”
“I didn’t trust her to tell me the truth.”
“Oh.” She pursed her lips and nodded. “I wouldn’t have either, I guess.”
“I didn’t know about Javier until you told me,” I admitted. “His name never came up. We found you because Jinx hacked into traffic cameras and followed what we hoped was the van you were in. We lucked out.”
“So you didn’t know there was a time limit?” she asked.
“No.” I peered out at the water. “Not until after.”
“You realize how close I came to…?”
I nodded. “I took care of him, Laikyn. Javier. He won’t hurt you ever again.”
“Did you kill him?”
I hadn’t. Not yet. I was giving him one last chance to prove he deserved to continue breathing. But if he fucked up, if he so much as came within ten miles of Laikyn or her mother, I would put a bullet between his eyes, and he would go into the afterlife with a hole that matched Diggy’s.
“I’ve got eyes on him,” I told her, figuring she didn’t need to know the rest. She didn’t need a dark stain on her soul like me. “But I promise he’ll never hurt you. I won’t let that happen.”
Laikyn’s soft “okay” was warm with trust. It was something.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on you ever since then. My whole team has,” I clarified. “It was an invasion of your privacy on many levels, but I won’t apologize. I needed to know you were safe, so we dug into your entire life. I knew who you were dating and where you went. I knew about your high school boyfriend and the guys you dated after you graduated.”
“You mean the guys I fucked,” she said, her tone snippy.
I wasn’t going to respond. She was angry and had every right to be.
“Our digging led to learning who your father was.”
Laikyn stepped back. “Was? You mean…? He’s…?”
I nodded. “Yeah. He’s dead.”
She put her hand on her throat. “What? Why?”
“Natural causes.”
“Oh.” Her eyebrow quirked in curiosity. “How old was he?”
“Eighty-eight.”
Laikyn’s head jerked as though that knowledge didn’t quite fit into the spot in her brain where she wanted to store it.
“Eighty-eight? My father?” Her tone was skeptical. “The man who got my mother pregnant?”
“Yes.”
