Deep (Chicago Underground #8)(22)

All he knew how to do was destroy things. I wouldn’t let him destroy me.





Chapter Seventeen

PHILIP LEFT ALMOST immediately, shutting himself away in a dark paneled study—on the phone again. The door shut with a click. Maybe he’d stop speaking in riddles. He had used vague words in the car: ask and push. He really meant bribe and threaten.

Adrian fussed over me, showing me the guest room that would be mine. Beautiful and dusty. How many of these safe houses did Philip keep stashed around the city?

“Hungry?” he asked.

“No, but I could use the company,” I admitted.

“Come on. I’ll make hot chocolate,” he said before leading me back down to the kitchen.

I had spent the last few years trying to distance myself from those dark weeks, fighting the memories and the illicit desire to see Philip again. I had thought I’d succeeded. But here I was, all over again. Déjà vu lay thick in the air. It was like I’d defied my fate—and destiny required that I return to the same place until I succumbed.

Adrian pulled out two mugs, sympathy on his face, though he couldn’t hide the curiosity.

He was a good-looking guy, always quick with a smile. Lean body and sandy hair. So different from Philip’s sinister power and looming height. A man like Adrian would probably be better suited to someone short like me—assuming he swung my way, which he didn’t. But I’d never felt an ounce of attraction to clean-cut, safe men like him and Sloan. Nothing like the raw yearning I felt for Philip.

“Go ahead,” I said drily. “Ask your questions before you bite your tongue clean off.”

He adopted a wounded expression. “Forgive me for caring about you. You go off to college. You don’t call; you don’t write.”

I shook my head, a smile tugging at my lips. I’d had no contact with him since those weeks, which was part of what made this so strange. It was as if nothing had changed, as if no time had passed—even though I was a woman now, no longer a lost and scared teenager. Everything had changed, but not him. He still worked for Philip, still loved him in secret desperation.

“You could have written me, you know.” I’d had no contact with Adrian—and no contact with Philip. Except for the postcards.

He pushed a steaming mug across the granite countertop. “And corrupt an innocent? I don’t think so.”

I laughed. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been innocent.”

He cast me a doubtful look. “Okay, we’ll start with an easy question. Why the sociology major?”

I’d struggled with what my major would be—and still did. “If that’s an easy question, I’m a little scared of the hard ones.”

“You want to help people, et cetera.”

That did it; I burst out a laugh. “Only you could make helping people sound boring.”

He grinned, unrepentant. “I used to be innocent too. Philip corrupted me.”

I suspected that was truer than he wanted to admit, although not in the way that he meant. Philip’s corruption wasn’t about guns and drugs. It was about his pure physicality, his magnetism that reached deep inside and left its mark. Adrian had given up the chance at a normal life, at a normal relationship, to be near the man he wanted, even knowing it would never come to anything.

But he’d started me off with an easy question, so I wasn’t going to ask him about years of unrequited love. At least, not yet.

“Helping people is nice. I took a sip of the hot liquid, relishing that rich-man’s hot chocolate I’d tasted here and nowhere else. “That’s more for when I graduate, though. The application of what I’m learning now. But the classes are what drew me, the study. I like knowing how people work. What makes them tick.”

How did you explain mob violence from people who weren’t normally cruel? How did you explain a captive teenage girl held down by a group of average-looking businessmen with families waiting at home? What explained my endless fascination with a man who was the antithesis of what I wanted—safety, family?

“Hmm,” he said. “So what would your textbooks say about Philip?”

I snorted. “He’s one of a kind.”

“That he is,” Adrian muttered.

Of course my mind was already working through every study, every book, every class, trying to put a label on him. I had tried to do this since the first day—and had never been able to. I had read the sociological factors of criminal behavior, but he defied the vital parts of the structure. He could be classified but never predicted. But I also didn’t know enough about him—his history, his childhood. More study was required.

I took a sip, letting the creamy liquid soothe the burn of curiosity, of longing. “There’s a common theory called the structural strain theory. A way to describe people with deviant behavior.”

Adrian snickered. “I know something about deviant behavior.”

“Conformists are those who believe in society’s rules and follow them to try and achieve their goals. Ritualists don’t believe in society’s rules but follow them anyway.” I fell into the second category. My experience as both an adopted child and at the hands of those men had crushed any belief of true acceptance. But still I went to college, like my parents expected me to do. I followed the rules because it was the only chance I had at a normal life. The only chance to have a family.