Page 6 of Deceptive Lies

After twenty-one years, that night was still as vivid in her mind as it had been when it played out in front of her.

It didn't hurt any less either.

That was something no child should ever have to witness even if it was true that her father was a child killer.

And it wasn't.

Her dad was no killer.

An overly eager journalist wanting to build a name for themselves bybreaking the story first had named him as the cop’s number one suspect and the parents of the murdered children had acted on what they believed to be correct intel.

Only it wasn't.

And her dad had paid the price.

“I'm not like them,” Willow said aloud as she shoved to her feet, ignoring the pain from the litany of bruises covering her body.

Even though she had watched what happened to her father as he was beaten to death, it was only in these last two weeks that she’d had firsthand experience of what it was like for him that night. The pain he’d suffered, the fear as blows came from all directions and he was powerless to do anything about it.

“I came here to do good. I wasn't lying or making anything up, I just wanted facts.” Tears tumbled down her cheeks as she hobbled around the small underground cell. “I want to go home. I don’t deserve to be here.”

There had been no real justice for her wrongly accused father. The men who had beaten him to death that night had all got slaps on the wrists, as had the journalist who started it all and the paper who had published unsubstantiated claims.

Nobody cared that an innocent man had died for crimes he had not committed. Crimes that only a month later the real culprit had been identified, only after he’d taken another young life.

Would anyone care if she never came home?

Would anyone try to find out what happened to her?

Would there be any justice for what was happening to her?

Or would she simply become another statistic, another death in a country that could be unsafe for a woman to travel to alone?

Chapter

Two

July 10th

8:49 A.M.

He was a little early for his nine o’clock meeting, but Cooper was happy to have this time to survey the house in question, and the area of the city in which it sat.

The house was on the outskirts of the nicer side of Cairo. By most American standards, the house was nothing fancy, a simple two-story brick house set on about an acre of land. There was a vegetable garden, a few crops planted, and a couple of farm animals. At this hour of the morning, the building appeared quiet, there was no movement he could detect, and he had no idea how many people were inside.

Knowing he could be walking into a trap had him on high alert, but trap or not, there was no way he wasn't coming here to gather whatever intel he could to prove his mother and stepfather’s innocence.

Eighteen years he and his siblings had known something wasn't right, and they had yet to find a single shred of evidence to prove it.

It didn't matter that the night his mom and stepdad had been takeninto custody, all of the kids had made a discovery that shook up the core of their world.

While Jake and Jax had lost their mom when they were small, so the idea of their dad moving on with someone else hadn't been a big deal to him and his siblings, their mom remarrying just a couple of months after their dad’s death had led to a whole lot of anger.

It was only after he realized there was more going on than he had known at the time that he regretted those last few months of his mom’s life. The anger he’d taken out on her, the belligerence that came from confusion, and the way he’d spoken to her when he was talking to her at all. At thirteen, he’d known his parents loved each other, and it made no sense to him or his brothers that their mom would remarry so quickly.

No sense at all.

But after his mom had been hauled away in handcuffs and someone from child protective services had shown up and ordered them all to pack bags, they’d found something that changed what they thought they knew. A sofa bed was in his mom’s bedroom, one that someone had been sleeping in before their house was stormed by cops.

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