Page 26 of The Plunge

Chapter 12

Keane

My last name is Abbott.

She could not have found a better way to show me how fragile and distant the relationship with her family is. She phrased it in such a removed way, almost cold.

She barely shed a tear over the death of her aunt, and she doesn't seem to be concerned about her uncle at all even though it must be obvious to her that we're still after him.

This girl obviously doesn't have the best relationship with her family, which begins to explain why the Covey didn't know about her.

She looks sad and frightened, curling up on the sofa next to me as if to shield herself from pain. But there's no protecting herself as the pain comes within.

"Tell me," I push her. "What's your secret?"

She doesn't look at me but rounds her back even farther. The clothes I gave her are men's clothes and way too big for her small frame. The hoodie hangs loosely around her narrow shoulders, hiding the splint that stabilizes her shoulder.

Just as I'm beginning to think she has no intentions of responding to my inquiry, she lets out a deep sigh and straightens her back, a visible display of someone who's preparing herself to give voice to an ugly truth.

"I wasn't exactly what my family expected me to be," she starts vaguely. "I didn't fit in with the picture-perfect Abbott heritage, so they hid me, sent me off to boarding school when I'd just started high school."

Picture-perfect Abbott heritage?

Oh, naïve little Libby. She appears to be one of those poor souls who was kept in the dark about the Abbotts' true endeavors. I've often heard that they were so good at keeping their public image clean that even some of their own family members weren't aware of the criminal wheelings and dealings growing the family's wealth. Corruption, fraud, and even complicity to murder—the Abbotts have been involved in all this if there was financial gain.

Even Abbott Tower was a product of their dark handlings. The commission was given to a company that's known for their continuing tax fraud, but their CEO is good friends with Clyde Abbott, who, in return for getting them this commission from the city, not only got his name plastered on one of the most prestigious buildings in town but also took away a much-needed cash injection from a local hospital.

Of course, no one knows about this. And in line with all the other things the Abbott empire has been involved in for decades, this was just a minor deception that may have been morally wrong and partly illegal, but at least not as deadly as their association with the local mafia. People have been killed in the Abbott name because they were in the way of their business, and they didn't care who these people were. Men, women, criminal, innocent civilian—it never mattered to them.

The Covey may not be much better, but at least we fucking own our evil and don't pretend to be something we're not.

We don't get innocent people involved, we try not to kill innocent people, and we don't have young girls like Libby living in our midst. People who don't even know what kind of danger they're living in.

Here she sits, with gunshot wounds blemishing her perfect body, scared and confused, talking about a picture-perfect family that she wasn't good enough for.

It makes me furious.

"What made you the black sheep?" I wonder out loud. "What could a child possibly do to have its family turn their back on them?"

She lets out a dark chuckle, shaking her head.

"A child," she whispers. "I wasn't a child anymore. I was old enough to have my own children."

She stops, fixating me with a pleading look. But if she's hoping for me to know where she's going with this, she's not in luck.

I jut my chin forward, beckoning her to continue.

She sighs. "I got pregnant. At fifteen."

Shit.

"You have a child?" I blurt out, realizing that she may regret telling me about this already. If there's yet another little Abbott running around out there, that means...

"No," she says, cutting off my horrifying train of thought. "I lost it. At nine weeks."

I nod, trying not to let her see how relieved I am to hear that. As tragic as that miscarriage must have been for her, it does make life a lot easier for me at this point.

"I'm sorry," I say, knowing that it doesn't sound sincere in the slightest. "So that's it? You got pregnant at fifteen, and even though the child was never born, your family disowned you?"

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