“Oh, it gets better,” Callum said. “He personally knows deans at some of those schools, courtesy of daddy’s money and all those endowments his family used to throw around. Harvard. Yale. Princeton. A few others. He’s already making polite calls.”
“Polite,” I repeated.
“Rich people polite,” Callum said. “Which means smiling with a knife between his teeth.”
That did make me smile.
Only for a second.
Then I looked back at Destiny.
She had lowered herself into the pool. The water moved around her waist. She tipped her face toward the sun and closed her eyes.
Healing.
Hiding.
Both at once.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked.
“Keep her in Mexico.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
I exhaled slowly.
“The cops still want to question her,” Callum said. “But she’s seventeen, on vacation, out of the country, and represented by lawyers who told them to cool their heels. They can request. They can posture. They can leak. But they can’t put hands on her right now.”
“And when she comes back?”
“She can’t. Not yet.”
The words settled heavy.
“Not because she’s facing jail time,” Callum continued. “That’s not where this is headed if JD keeps doing what he’s doing. But because the town’s a powder keg. We trapped them in their own game and turned the tide against them. That makes people desperate.”
I rubbed a hand over my clean jaw.
Still hated it.
“She starts over here, they slash her tires,” Callum said. “They follow her. Film her. Bait her. Leak photos. Whisper in bathrooms. Pay people to watch her. You know how this goes.”
Yeah.
I did.
Girls like Destiny didn’t get left alone just because the truth came out. Sometimes truth made the mob angrier. Sometimes innocence made people crueler because admitting they were wrong meant admitting they had enjoyed the punishment.
“We’ll have to triple security,” Callum said. “This shit will take years to cool off from.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
I looked toward Regan again. She had stopped near the balcony doors, eyes on Destiny. Calm face. Sharp gaze. Nothing got past that woman.
