“So let me make sure I’m tracking.” I press my palm to my forehead. “My dad works for the same people who run the cage fights.”
“Badon Hill.”
“Whatever.” I throw my hands up. “There’s an email in Art’s desk from their boss talking about getting me fired and moved here. Art knows my dad’s connected but maybe not how deep. There’s a man following me through the woods. And my dad just used our emergency code word to tell me he’s in danger and I shouldn’t move.”
Lance is quiet.
“Does that track?”
“Seems like it.”
“So I’m leverage.” The word tastes like bile. “Against my own father. They put me here so they’d have something to hold over him.”
“Potentially.”
“And my dad didn’t know. Not until I called him and said Brutus’s name and he…” I press my knuckles against my mouth. “He didn’t know I was a piece on their board. He thought I was safe here.”
“Art should have told you this.”
“What about Art?” My voice drops. “Artknewall of this?”
He sighs, gripping the back of his neck. “Art was concerned that your dad was feeding information to the Feds about Badon Hill, and that they’d use you to send a message.”
“And yet here I am,” I say, the betrayal splintering my throat. “Withyouas my protector instead of him.”
“Art’s in over his head. He inherited this from Freddy, and Freddy was in deep with Brutus before Art ever touched it. I don’t think he’s pulling strings. I think he’s trying to keep the whole thing from falling apart…and I think he’s trying to keep you.”
I scoff. “Why?”
“Because he loves you.”
My chest twists.
“That doesn’t make him innocent.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
The heavy truth settles between us.
“My dad said something else… He told me to stay with Art. To keep living my life and not show the cracks. But I think he was talking in code there, too.”
“You think he was telling you to pretend like everything’s normal?”
The weight of what’s happening drops on my shoulders and I slump. “Yeah. That’s what it felt like.”
The room goes quiet again, the refrigerator buzzing and the kitchen faucet dripping, and every second I sit here, the panic creeps up my back and notches into my lungs and kicks against my heart.
“I can’t stay here,” I say. “I have to go, I have to help him, I can’t pretend. How am I supposed to do this? I can’t—”
I can’t breathe.
My vision blurs, and I palm my face, rocking back and forth, and then a heavy hand lands on my back and centers me.
“Breathe, Half-Pint. Put your head between your legs.”
I listen, and I let him coach me. Breathe in for four seconds, hold for three, breathe out for six. He has me name things I can see, taste, hear. And slowly, I come back to myself.
And when I do, he’s sitting next to me on the linoleum floor, his strong hand rubbing circles on my back.
