Page 32 of Deep (Chicago Underground 8)
“Maybe,” I managed, my voice rough.
“What makes you think there’s anything underneath?”
Oh, there was plenty beneath his hard, sculpted surface—layers of rock formations, granite and marble, maybe molten lava in the middle. He would take a lifetime to explore. My pulse raced.
“Your first time?” I asked again.
He studied me with calculating eyes, taking my measure. It was almost as if he saw me as a threat, only I knew that couldn’t be true. A girl like me could never threaten a man like him.
“Murder,” he said softly.
I didn’t flinch. I had seen enough in those dark weeks that he couldn’t shock me. “Who was it?”
He shook his head on a rough laugh, darkly rueful. “Why? So you can justify it? So I give you all my excuses? Should I tell you about the way my daddy beat me?”
I did flinch then. He mocked me, but he exposed himself too. There was truth in that statement. He had been hurt, abused—a rock turned to diamond. Did that excuse that first crime? Did it excuse all the crimes that had come after? I doubted it would, but an explanation wasn’t an excuse.
Gravity didn’t excuse or apologize for what it did, didn’t make excuses for rocks falling down a mountain, trampling whatever was in their path. It simply existed, following the equations it always had.
A force of nature. That was Philip.
“Do you think you were justified?” I asked instead of answering.
“No,” he said flatly. “It wasn’t my father that I killed. It was a fifteen-year-old kid. He wanted my turf. So I defended it with the only weapon I had at the time. A steel pipe.”
Gruesome images flashed through my mind. Death by steel pipe wouldn’t have been pretty. Death was never pretty. A fifteen-year-old boy, crushed in long, painful minutes.
“How old were you at the time?”
“Twelve.”
God. Fifteen had been young. Twelve was a baby. I managed not to show my shock, my sympathy. He wouldn’t want either of them.
Twelve years old and he’d already been working on the streets, fighting to defend himself, to survive. He didn’t want me to justify what he’d done, but the situation unfolded in front of me—as gritty and dark and terrifying now as it had been then.
Shelly had told me how he had taken care of his younger sister and brother, already knew how protective he was of them. It wasn’t only himself he’d been protecting with that steel pipe, wasn’t only his business. It was his brother and sister, saved with every dark, soul-crushing blow. It was the food they would eat and the safety in their beds.
No matter the reason, killing made him a murderer. And to some people, a monster.
No matter how I’d ended up in the situation, being sold to a man for money made me a whore. And to some people, not worth saving. Philip had never given up on me. He’d started protecting me the second he saw me, and no matter what explanations he claimed, whether it was for sex or selfish reasons, I instinctively knew he would continue protecting me in his own twisted way.
Chapter Eighteen
I KNEW I needed to contact my adoptive parents. Even if we hadn’t been close, even if I doubted they would care. So it was just a matter of finding a phone. Shelly had teased Philip about his aversion to technology, but he would put business first. If this was where he came when he needed to hide out from the cops—or worse—then he would have already had this place fully stocked.
The search took me through a tour of Philip that I wasn’t expecting.
In an otherwise empty kitchen drawer I found a glossy, corner-bent photograph of him and his sister. I had seen them in pictures before, austere half-smiles after one of her ballet performances.
This one showed them around a table, with Rose reaching over to smear something on Philip—cake maybe. Her smile lit up the picture, but Philip’s smile, a smaller version, more reserved even in the midst of revelry, was like a rare, precious jewel.
In the background I could see Colin, mouth open in the middle of some word. Probably encouraging Rose. The two younger siblings liked to team up against their older brother, but only for pretend. They worshipped him.
My heart twisted at both Ph
ilip’s happiness in the photograph and the strange reserve that had led him to stow this picture in a drawer instead of framing it on the wall. As if happiness was a weakness he couldn’t expose, even to the select few who visited this place—even to himself.
In a library I found wall-to-wall books. There were many on business, which I’d expected. The Art of War wasn’t a surprise. The many books on engineering, on physics, however, were a surprise. As were the array of tiny figures lined up on the shelves in front of books, a small army defending their country.
