Page 99 of The Complete Truth Duet
“Jesus. A million dollars. Seriously?”
My stomach pitched as I added, “And ninety-nine cents.”
She sighed. “Okay. I love you. One in. One out. Remember?”
“Always,” I breathed before hanging up.
I finished up at the machine, getting River a Mountain Dew that I hoped would serve as some sort of treat/peace offering. As I walked back to the room, I called Brittany and asked her to get up to the hotel as soon as possible.
If I wanted to keep Drew in the dark, I was going to have to be a little more convincing.
Penn
My hands ached at my sides as I watched him exit the courthouse.
He was smiling, carefree and oblivious, while chatting it up with the herd of well-dressed men hanging on his every word. From his tailored, navy-pinstriped suit down to his perfectly styled dark-brown hair, the man looked every bit the successful prosecutor the city knew him to be.
But I knew he was so much more than that.
Thomas Lyons was a soulless bastard who I would make damn sure followed his old friends Marcos and Dante into an early grave.
The hot summer wind wrapped around me, fanning the fire in my soul. There wasn’t much I could do right then. Not in such a public place. And not without the time or the space to make him properly suffer. A quick and painless death was not at all what I had planned for him.
Twenty-nine minutes had destroyed me.
Twenty-nine minutes of her screams of agony.
Twenty-nine minutes he had arranged.
No. Thomas Lyons would pay tenfold for each and every one of those minutes.
But waiting for the right moment to make a move wasn’t proving to be easy, either.
His every breath taunted me, knowing that his heart was still pumping blood through his worthless veins while hers was rotting on a stained piece of carpet in a garbage pile somewhere.
She was dead.
And he was smiling.
My vision flashed red as he stopped at the bottom of the concrete steps to talk to a younger woman. She too was in a suit, though hers was punctuated with a pair of heels and a black leather briefcase at her side. A colleague perhaps.
But all I saw was Lisa.
She’d been fearless the day I’d met her. Knowing that crazy woman, she’d probably marched right up to Thomas, her Louboutins I’d worked my ass off to provide for her clicking the sidewalk, and dropped the bomb about all the dirt she’d dug up on him. She would have wanted to witness firsthand the shock contorting his face. She’d have reveled in the glint of fear appearing in his eyes.
Lisa was a good person with a wicked addiction to justice. There was no standing in her way. God knew, I’d tried, but I’d never been able to argue her out of anything. She hadn’t cared what it cost or how much she had to go through to make it happen.
Her heart had been set on making the world a better place.
Even as it beat for the very last time.
Pain from the graze of Dante’s bullet at my calf made me wince as I moved to stay out of Thomas’s line of sight. Not that he would have recognized me. Our worlds had collided, but he and I had never crossed paths.
At least not yet.
I casually propped my back against the brick wall outside the local coffee shop, my stomach churning as he grinned down at the woman and his hand cradled her at the elbow as he bent to touch his lips to her cheek. It was chaste enough to be friendly, but the way she swayed into him was anything but.
This fucking piece of shit. Murder aside, he had a wife who was so terrified of him that she’d taken their daughter and run. And he was making moves—or, at the very least, eyes—at a woman who had to be twenty years his junior.
My hands began to ache all over again.
“Is that him?” Savannah whispered in my ear.
“Shit!” I growled, wheeling around and nearly knocking the cup of coffee out of her hand.
“Shit,” she parroted, teetering to the side.
I snaked a hand out, catching her before she toppled over. “Jesus, kid.”
“Don’t Jesus me. You were the one who randomly turned into the bumbling Hulk. Here.” She extended a paper cup of coffee my way, keeping the iced-fru fru-chocolate-whatever for herself.
I turned back around in time to see Thomas and the woman walking away together.
“He’s not attractive,” Savannah announced around the straw of her drink.
Curling my lip, I shot her a glare over my shoulder. “Are you kidding me right now?”
Her red, penciled eyebrows shot up. “What? I was just making an observation.”
Starting toward the car, I gave her my back. “Well, keep your observations to yourself. That man is a piece of shit masquerading as salt of the Earth. I don’t give the first damn what he looks like. All I care about is how fast I can take him down.”
