Win (Windsor Horne Lockwood III #1)(101)

“Are you okay?”

“I’m groovy,” I say.

“Win?”

Ema buries her face in my chest. I let her.

“What?”

“Don’t ever use the word ‘groovy’ again, okay?”

“Okay.”

I look over her shoulder and see her mother watching us. Angelica is not happy to see me. I meet her eye and try to give her a reassuring smile, but that does little to placate her. She does not want me here. I understand.

Angelica spins away and heads inside.

Ema pulls back and looks at me. “You’ll tell me everything?”

“Everything,” I reply.

But I’m not sure that’s true.

As I look at my daughter’s face, I flash back to the night before.

I’m in bed with Username Helena. My phone rings. It’s Kabir.

“We have a big problem.”

“What is it?”

“We lost Trey Lyons.”

I snap up fast, startling Helena. “Details,” I say.

But you don’t need the details. You don’t need the details of how my men lost Trey Lyons’s SUV on Eisenhower Parkway. You don’t need the details of how I surmised that Trey Lyons had eyes on the Dakota, how those eyes must have spotted Ema, how they followed her back, how stupid I felt not to have realized that earlier. You don’t need the details on my call to Angelica at two a.m., how I told her to hide in the basement with Ema. You don’t need the details on how fast I rushed out here, how I parked on Hickory Place, how I ran up the drive wearing night goggles with a Desert Eagle .50 cal semiautomatic in my hand. You don’t need to know how I spotted Trey Lyons breaking in through a back window. You don’t need to know that I didn’t call out to him, didn’t tell him to put his hands up, didn’t give him a chance to surrender.

This one may seem to be another gray to you. But it is not.

This one was easy. This one was black and white.

He came for my daughter. My. Daughter.

“Come on,” Ema says. “Let’s go inside.”

I nod. It’s a warm, sun-kissed day. The sky is the kind of blue only something celestial could have painted. Ema leads the way. She is wearing a top with spaghetti straps, so I can see her upper back. As we get closer to the door, I spot what looks like a familiar tattoo peeking out from between her shoulder blades…

A Tisiphone abeona perhaps?

I almost stop, almost ask, but when my daughter turns and looks at me, all those grays suddenly vanish in the bright of her smile. For perhaps the first time in my life, I only see the white.

Am I being hackneyed? Perhaps.

But since when have I cared what you thought?