Where the Sun Hides (Seasons of Betrayal #1)(53)

She grew quiet again, and he could almost hear her father’s muffled voice on the other end.

“No, no. An hour is fine … right, I’ll see you soon … bye.”

The second she ended the call, she turned her panicked eyes on Kaz. “My dad is sending a driver to my place in an hour. We need to go.” She spun around, rushing back to his bathroom where he had thrown her clothes all over the floor.

Fuck.

It was already hell trying to get through Manhattan traffic on a good day, and that was on top of the hour and a half drive that it took to get there from Little Odessa. To get her there in less than an hour?

Kaz grabbed the first pair of pants he could find, then a shirt, and finally shoes before he had his keys in hand and was ushering Violet out the door. Down in the parking garage, he unlocked the doors to his Porsche with a press of the button, but as he walked toward it, Violet hesitated.

“What?”

She bit her lip. “Everyone knows this car …”

True enough. “But if you want to get back to Manhattan anytime soon, it’s the Porsche—the Rover will be too slow.”

He didn’t have to say anything further before she was sliding into the passenger seat. He barely gave her a chance to buckle in before his foot was on the gas and he was shooting out of the garage and onto the street, ignoring the blaring horns he left in his wake.

Shifting into second gear, he bypassed another set of cars, barely making it through a yellow light before it turned red.

“You know, if I die in a car wreck,” Violet started, her fingers white-knuckled around the center console. “That’s not going to help us.”

Kaz merely said, “I got this,” before concentrating on the road again, the speedometer already approaching ninety miles an hour.

He hardly paid attention to anything else besides the cars surrounding him, and the time ticking by on his dash. Doing well over forty above the speed limit, he knew if he passed any police, he was definitely getting stopped, but that was the last thing on his mind.

Just sitting beside her, he could feel the waves of anxiety pouring off her, the fear that she wasn’t going to make it in time, or worse … that she would be caught with him.

But he couldn’t—wouldn’t—let that happen.

“You know,” Kaz said, a sudden thought popping into his head. “I don’t have your number.”

Violet looked at him as though he’d grown a second head. “Are you serious?”

“About needing your number? Absolutely. The next time I show up to your place uninvited might not work out as well for me.”

With one hand still on the wheel, he dug into his pocket for his phone, typing in the four-digit code before passing her the device. “Plug it in.”

She didn’t question his command, merely did what he asked, then went on to call her own phone so that she would have his number as well.

The hour mark had just passed when he made it into the city. The traffic was far worse there than it was outside of it.

Worse, he knew better than to pull up directly outside of her building. There was no guarantee that her father didn’t have people watching the place, or even just in the neighborhood doing business. So instead, he turned on a side street, parking on the opposite side of the back of her building.

He didn’t get a chance to say a word before she was whipping her seatbelt off and opening the door, but before she got out, she leaned across and gave him a quick kiss, surprising the hell out of him for a moment.

“See you later.”

Violet was gone seconds later, dashing across the street in a flurry of blonde hair. Even with the circumstance being so dire, and the fact that he still had to make it back out of Manhattan yet, Kaz still smiled.





Violet had just come up to the back of her building when the phone in her purse started to ring. The sound was as insistent as it was dooming. Answering the call, she put the phone to her ear and hoped the background noise of the city went unnoticed.

“Hello?”

“Gee will be there in fifteen minutes,” Alberto said, not even offering her a greeting. “Apparently, traffic is terrible in Manhattan this morning and he’s stuck behind an accident that just happened two minutes ago.”

Violet felt her heart finally rise back up from her stomach into her chest. “That’s okay, Daddy.”

“Are you already outside? I hear cars.”

Shit.

“Yeah, just waiting on him out front. You said an hour, right?”

“I did,” Alberto agreed. “You’ll be a little late for breakfast because of the traffic, but it was semantics anyway.”

Violet’s brow furrowed as she dug for the access key that would let her in through the back emergency door of her building. She needed the front desk people to at least see her walk by them in case her father asked after her at some point.

“Semantics?” she asked.

“Your friends are here,” was all he said.

She knew then what was happening. The events of the night before involving Ruslan and Franco had not gone unnoticed by her father. Amelia’s lies had probably been exposed.

Alberto Gallucci was not the type of man to beat around the bush. She had told her father the truth of what happened, and there was no doubt in her mind that he would not have sent Franco after Kaz’s brother, based on her side of the story.