Gone (Deadly Secrets #2)(12)

“Then I don’t understand. Why are you here?”

The light dimmed, and her unsure gaze skipped over his features.

“Alec.” Hannah placed a hand on his arm. “I invited her.”

He looked toward his mother. “You what?”

“She’s family. Of course I invited her.” Shooting Alec a scathing look, Hannah laced her arm with Raegan’s and pulled her away. “Come on. I want you to meet Ethan’s girl. She’s really sweet.”

Raegan flicked a wary look Alec’s way, but Alec was too stunned to react. His mother had invited her? Knowing it would throw him for a loop? Knowing—even without being clued in to what had happened today—that just seeing her could send him spinning toward a bottle?

His father sighed at his side as the two women moved away. “Women. Never can tell what they’re thinking.”

“Or doing,” Alec muttered, watching his mother and Raegan now chatting and laughing with Sam and Ethan. There was no awkwardness on Raegan’s part. No worried smiles or cautious embraces. She still fit with this family like a missing puzzle piece sliding back into place. He was the one who didn’t fit. An outsider on the edge looking in. The same outsider he’d been as a kid, watching families in the park when he’d pause from John Gilbert’s “errands” and fantasize about a different kind of life.

“You okay?” his father asked quietly.

A hollow ache spread through Alec’s chest. One that was wider than it had been earlier in the day at the hospital. He swallowed hard. Tried to tell himself this was no big deal. Failed miserably.

“Yeah,” he managed. But all he wanted to do was run. Away from this party. Away from his family. Away from all the reminders of every way he’d fucked up in life.

Except he couldn’t. Not now that Raegan was here. If he did, his parents would just get suspicious, and the last thing he needed was them hovering like he was an invalid again, just as they’d done three years before.

He glanced around for the waiter. “I need a drink.”

His father’s eyebrows shot up.

“Caffeine,” Alec clarified, seeing the look. “I can still have caffeine, can’t I?”

Michael McClane sighed.

Alec ignored him and went in search of as much caffeine as it would take to get through the rest of the night.



John Gilbert stood in a darkened section of the yard he’d never been to before and tried like hell not to shake. He’d been pulled out of his cell, handcuffed, and marched out here by the guards, then left alone to shiver in the frigid night air without so much as a fucking coat.

If he weren’t ready to shit for fear a guard in one of those towers high above was about to send a slug right through his chest, he’d be spitting mad.

Footsteps sounded somewhere to his right. Heart pounding, he turned in that direction and tried to see through shadows and darkness. “Who’s there?”

“Someone who can make your life heaven or hell, Mr. Gilbert.”

His pulse shot up even higher. He didn’t recognize the voice. It was male, deep, cultured. There was no twang to it. No accent. No bite. Whoever this was didn’t reside at SCI, and he definitely wasn’t one of the guards.

Puffing his chest out as much as he could, Gilbert shoved his hands into his pockets and squinted to see better. All he could make out was a shape. He didn’t know how big the guy was, but he knew he could take him. He could take anyone. “What ya want with me?”

Cigarette smoke drifted his way. Fancy smoke. The kind rich people sucked in. The shape moved in the dark, and he couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if the man snuffed out a cigarette with his boot and ground it into the blacktop. “You placed a call this morning to the FBI. One we found—how can I say this so you’ll understand?—fucking stupid.”

Nerves bounced all around Gilbert’s stomach. He shouldn’t have made the call, but he’d known it’d get to his damn kid. Just as he’d hoped, Alec had shown up here today hot as a chili pepper and ready to take him on—something Gilbert couldn’t wait for so he could finally show the fucker who was really in charge. “I didn’t tell ’em where that girl was. I had nuthin’ to do with that. I mean”—he tried to laugh, but even to him it came off sounding scared and pathetic—“I’m locked up in here. I can’t do nothin’ from behind bars.”

“Nothing except cause trouble we don’t need. The package got away from its handler. Had you stayed out of it, the package would have been picked up, the transaction would have continued smoothly, and the FBI—and the police—would never have been involved. Because of your simpleminded need for revenge, Mr. Gilbert, you managed to fuck up an entire operation.”

“Hold on.” Gilbert’s heart beat hard and fast because he saw where this was going. “I didn’t know nothin’ about the kid being there—I mean, package. That was a coincidence. All I done was give the name of a park to screw with the Feds.”

“The name of a park you yourself have used for similar transactions. And don’t lie to me about not knowing there was a transaction taking place. We know where you got your information.”

A spotlight flicked on from somewhere above, but Gilbert didn’t turn to see where. All he could focus on was the lifeless body lying facedown in the grass, illuminated by the light.