Page 15 of A Cursed Heart
A Plan Half Formed
Ryan
“Whatthefuck?How?Who? What the hell, Ryan?” I thought she was going to come out of her skin. Her fear was palpable. “Why aren’t you more panicked about this?” Lydia’s face was the picture of horror.
It wasn’t funny, but somehow I started laughing. Lydia growled at me, making me laugh even harder. After a minute, I finally calmed down enough to speak.
“It’s okay, I’ve got it under control. I’ve got a way out of this.” Rather than feeling terrified, there was a sense of certainty.
“A way out of what?” Lydia came to sit next to me on the sofa. “Ryan, you’re freaking me out.”
Without drawing it out further, I explained being ambushed by Anders and taken to Sloane Salvatore’s offices, then the conversation we had. Her face paled when I told her what he wanted me to do.
“Fuck!”
“Yeah, that about sums it up.” Instead of feeling hopeless like I had earlier, a bunch of ideas swirled around my mind about how I could do this. Initially, my first instinct had been to run. I thought I could take Freya, and we could move. Out from under Salvatore’s influence, we could live a quiet life. With my knowledge of computers and the contacts I had, I could give us new identities. All I had to do was buy us some time.
I wondered if that was the right thing to do instead of the other plan I’d concocted. Then I looked at my sister, my best friend, my biggest support, who hadn’t even blinked when I’d admitted what I’d done. She was still by my side, ready to defend me. No, that wouldn’t have worked. If Salvatore hadn’t found me, she would have, and her revenge would’ve been worse than anything he could do to me.
“You can’t work for him. It’ll just get you deeper into whatever shit he wants you to be in,” she said anxiously, leaning into me. “He’s blackmailing you. That won’t end well.”
“No. It won’t. For him.” Another plan had already taken shape in my mind, I’d almost dismissed it when I was making dinner. My knee jerk reaction was always to fight fire with fire, and where had it gotten me? Except maybe I was the only person who could do this. I wouldn’t be freeing just myself, but the city, too.
“What’re you going to do?” She turned to face me. The determined set to her jaw told me all I needed. Not only did Lydia not blame me for her friend’s death, she was ready todefend me against the city’s biggest threat. Even better, I knew she’d watch my daughter while I enacted my plan. Freya’s room had a pull out bed for sleepovers with Auntie, and it was already getting late to be traveling back to her student housing. By the time I got back from my scouting mission, it could be the early hours of the morning.
“I’m going to destroy Sloane Salvatore.”
“Are you sure?” Lydia was pacing the floor in sock-covered feet while I put all I thought I would need into a backpack. She hadn’t even needed asking to stay overnight to watch Freya while I got the first part of my plan done.
“Absolutely. You’re right. He won’t let me go if I start working for him. I need to use the chance to get close to him to gain as much information as possible about what he does in the city, what he owns, who he controls, to take him down. All I need to do is build a solid enough case and take it to a couple of my contacts in the FBI.” A few of my college buddies took the FBI track and I was still in contact with them. “There’s no way outsider agencies don’t know about what Salvatore is doing here. They just need something ironclad to take him down. I can do that.”
Bag done, I set it at my feet and checked on my sister. Just from a glance, I could tell she was struggling with all of this.
“But breaking in? Isn’t that risky?” Her arms were wrapped around her body as if trying to hold herself together, or, more likely, to stop herself from pinning me down so I couldn’t leave.
She could do it, too. Dunno where she got her build from, but she was strong! Taller than my five-ten at six feet, and slightlywider than me, she wasn’t carrying anything extra, yet she was heavy from all the muscle she had. Lydia was working towards a sports science degree and loved weightlifting. If she wanted to stop me, then I’d be cooked.
Lydia would freak if I told her the truth about just how dangerous this was. Salvatore’s office was no cakewalk. I’d seen all the surveillance he had in there earlier on. Getting through it would be a nightmare, but I needed to do it before I started working there. Knowing the type of people involved, I’d be under close watch whenever I was there. I just wouldn’t get the same level of access unless I went in now. They had biometrics, cameras, and guards to get around. Not easy, but possible. I had the tools for the job.
“If I say I’ve done something like this before, will you judge me?” I winced at the look of horror on her face. Maybe I was pushing her too far.
“When? Why?”
I attempted a casual shrug, not really wanting to admit all my secrets in one go. This one I could give her. She would understand why I did it. “College with a couple of friends. We wanted to make sure a rapist got what was coming to him.”
“What the hell did you do?” While she sounded horrified, I could see a glimmer of pride in her brown eyes. The same eyes we shared from our mom.
“Just gathered some evidence from the professor’s office and left it with the right people. Can’t cover up what’s out in the open.”
“You were behind that professor… Stanley? Was it? Getting fired? He had tenure!” That, well, that was pride. She went to the same university I used to go to. She had to have heard the stories too.
“Turns out serious sexual assault of your students will get you fired, even if you’ve had tenure for years.”
“So he did it?”
Thinking back to the things I saw from the video footage he had from a hidden camera nearly made me vomit. “More than they said in the press. He deserved it, Liddy.”
She nodded, loosening her hold on her body and flexing her fingers. “Okay.” She sighed. “Just be careful, okay? We can’t lose you, and Scythe isn’t someone to fuck around with.”
