In For the Kill (McClouds & Friends #11)(68)

“What happened to your mother, Sam?” she asked softly.

“Lymphoma,” he said. “I was fifteen.”

She was quiet for a moment. “I’m so sorry.”

He nodded. “It was bad. My dad’s been under constant attack ever since her funeral, being one of the richest eligible widowers on the planet. But he stays true to her memory. He was so angry when she got sick. Her cancer didn’t care how much money he had, or who he knew. It made him frantic. It was the first time in his life that he ran into something that he couldn’t control.”

“Not the last time, though,” Sveti said. “He can’t control you.”

“Yeah, right,” he snorted. “Me and cancer. We’re par.”

“You and your father are very similar,” she said. “So intense.”

He laughed, harsh and mirthless. “Not. I could have been the high king of world finance, they like to say. Like him, only more so. Bet they told you that when I stepped out of the dining room, right?”

“Yes, actually,” she admitted. “They said something like that.”

“They’ve got this family myth about my tragic lost potential. Carrying on about my wasted prospects makes them feel better. But it’s all crap. I’m not like him. Not at all.”

“No? Then why did you change your major? Why not become the high king of finance? Did you hate it?”

Sam closed his eyes, groping for buried memories. It felt as if he were talking about another person, not himself. “No,” he said. “I didn’t hate it. It was kind of great, actually. So was the attention I got for it. Pull a bunch of money out of your ass, and the whole world wants to suck your dick. It was hard to resist, particularly after Mom died. It was a hell of a distraction. And we were all so f*cking miserable at home.”

“But you did resist, in the end,” she said. “Why?”

He lay there, pondering the question. He’d never actually analyzed the motives for his choices before. He preferred action to reflection, at least when it came to his own life. But he didn’t want to bat Sveti away.

She deserved better than that, whether he had it to give or not.

“It was the summer before senior year,” he said. “I went to a party off-campus. There was a girl, Elaine. A friend of mine. Funny, smart. She got drunk, or someone slipped something into her beer, which is more likely, because she claimed she only drank one beer. Some guys carried her upstairs and raped her while she was unconscious.”

Sveti made a pained, wordless sound.

“They wrote demeaning comments on her body with felt-tip pens. Insert breast implants here, do liposuction there. That kind of thing.”

“Oh, God,” Sveti whispered. “How awful.”

“Yeah, she had to leave school. Spent some time in the psych ward. Tried to kill herself. It was bad. The police did what they could, but she’d been out cold, so no witnesses.” He paused as he pulled it from his memory. “I was so angry. I couldn’t go to class, or work on my thesis. I just obsessed about who could have done it. I went around talking to everyone who’d been at that party, their roommates and friends. I recorded what they said, what they didn’t say. Spent my nights staring at the ceiling, hashing it over, until it started organizing itself. I targeted the likeliest *s. Got them to my apartment. We weren’t friends, but I spoke their language. I got them drunk and stoned. Led them on. One of them started boasting. I caught it all on my recorder. He named the other two.”

“Wow,” she said softly. “Your very first criminal investigation.”

“Didn’t help Elaine much. She appreciated the effort, but she still lives at home with her folks. No love life, no job. But it sure helped me.”

She dug her fingers into his shoulders and tugged until he finally turned around to face her. The look in her eyes made his face go warm.

“That was a great thing to have done,” she said.

He was abashed. “It felt real. More real than money games, or economic theory. For the first time in my life, I really gave a shit. It was a whole new level of being connected. I saw my future self, stuck inside my own swelled head, in a penthouse apartment. Fancy cars, expensive girlfriends, getting my ass kissed. I compared that to how I felt when I watched the police cuff those dickheads in front of their own frat house. There was just no comparison. At all.”

“Did you ever tell your father this?” she asked.

“I think I tried, but he never made it to the punch line. He just saw it as rebellion. But it was more like . . . redemption.”

The space Sveti opened up with her smiling, radiant silence felt safe, protected, giving rise to thoughts he usually would not let himself think, and then to even deeper ones, spiraling up and surprising him.

“I heard this old song once,” he said. “How you’ve got to serve somebody. Good or evil, you have to choose. Whatever you do is always in the service of something. I didn’t know whose service I was in when I played with money, but I knew who I served when I nailed the *s who hurt Elaine. It felt more right than anything ever had. Until now.”

Her eyes went wide and wary. “What’s now?”

“You,” he said.

She jerked up onto her elbow, looking vaguely alarmed. “What does that mean? That’s what this is all about for you? Serving a cause?”