Page 63 of Toxic Things I Love About You

Once upon a time that might have been entertaining. Today? I was desperate, and I didn’t like that. I didn’t like feeling like I was being backed into a corner and that’s what had happened. I was losing precious time. She could be being beaten, or worse. Darkness had enveloped me hours ago and the idea that anyone would touch her? The devil himself would be kinder.

“I need nothing from him. Make him disappear.”

“Sure thing.”

I hung up and paced a bit more. If I were a sick fuck, where would I have gone?

“Parks, there is no family here? No business connections, nothing. Right?”

He shook his head.

There was surveillance footage and a lot of good that did me, other than setting me on a dangerous roller coaster of murder.

“How the fuck did no one question a woman drugged in a wheelchair?”

The guard who was now my babysitter, I supposed, shrugged.

“There’s a lot of money here. You wouldn’t be surprised about the amount of shit we see. Nothing about him seemed odd, except the fact we’d never seen him. And even that isn’t odd when people charter flights for skiing.”

“And there is no way to hear what she was saying in that video, right?”

He wasn’t even answering me anymore.

I picked up my phone and dialed one of my club managers, one that I was still certain was loyal.

“Boss,” he answered.

“Anything moving?”

One thing I had gotten out of my brother before he’d even been touched was that Club Sin was still the hotspot for meetings. I’d had to shuffle shifts and employees in a single day while trying to keep an eye on Emilee. A lot of good that did.

“Parks, she is going to do whatever it is she wants. Maybe he’ll just be dropping her off soon enough?”

That had him cracking a smile at least. It didn’t have the same effect on me. I don’t know why I thought trying to lighten the mood would make me less of an asshole. Less of a love-sick puppy was more like it. Parks hung up on whoever he’d called a moment earlier and then he turned the computer my way.

“There’s a car on its way now, and this is where we are heading.”

I looked at an image on a real estate listing.

“We’re house shopping?”

Parks clicked to another tab.

“The house is owned by a shell company that was owned by the sister of the elder Rossi and the late wife of good old Vincent Falco.”

My pacing had slowed, but I traded it in for a fucking incessant tapping of my foot. Fuck, I was annoying myself.

The airport had long since closed and the only thing keeping us here were deep pockets and a security guard that had no life.

“Look, I’m hungry. Nothing stays open around here. We don’t have any more flights chartered, so at this point I’m really begging you guys to leave. We’re a small airport. I don’t need any trouble.”

He was right. He didn’t need trouble.

“Tell me, do you know anything about this house?”

He’d been walking the one and only terminal over and over and had missed a good part of the conversation. It was a good thing. But that being said, maybe we just needed a local perspective.

“There isn’t much to know,” he said.

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