Page 66 of Hunt

“Yeah, I mean, like she knew the camera was there the entire time,” I could hear my own voice, and the words weren’t coming out clearly enough to be convincing, which only irritated me more. “Everything with her is fucking act. We need to be straight up and ask her if she’s Annika. ‘Cos I’m dying here, man. Being around her, knowing who she is and also knowing that she’s lying every step of the fucking way is killing me.”

“Steady on, Gunner,” he proclaimed in that tone, reminding me of my father. “Just cool it for a sec. We can’t ask her if she is Annika, if she’s doing the spying for us. It’ll ruin everything. On top of that she’s colluding with the fucking police. Did you forget that part?”

“I’m one hundred percent sure she’s Annika,” I stressed.

“Okay, I believe you, but we can do nothing about it now.” He gritted his teeth and blurted what I wanted to hear which pissed me off even more. “I mean…it wasn’t long ago that you said you were eighty percent sure it was her.”

I cringed in frustration. “I knew you’d say that. But think about it. Add it all up. The Larsson police, the fake glasses, the bugged phone-”

“Your attraction to your foster sister,” he added, cutting in. “Your foster sister always made you hard. That was obvious even to me. Not that I looked at her that much.”

“What?” I snapped at him, annoyed, even though he was right.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Instincts. Animalistic instincts. No matter how thick her costume, you’ll find something that intrigues you or looks familiar.”

“Okay, whatever,” I waved my hand dismissively as he smirked, then jumped up to attend to the coffee machine. “It’s your turn. You have to give me some dirt on Dad.”

Even under the influence of alcohol and dope, I sensed his vibe darken, shoulders tense, jaw clench. His back was turned, yet I could almost see his inner conflict.

He returned with two white cups of coffee, which gave him time to shuffle through my father’s secrets. There was nothing he could say that would shock me. I might’ve been a kid, but I noticed the many times the police came to our Larsson house to question my father over some uptown incident. I knew he conducted illegal activities, like I know now. Illicit activities were our norm.

Mikky sipped the coffee and encouraged me to do the same, as the milky coffee flavor washed over my tongue, I thought of Riley in the pool. Naked. Beautiful. Eager to slide over my cock, until I stopped her. When I looked into her eyes, I saw Annika tonight. It had happened before, but not like this. Not in the same way. It was her. Undeniably her.

I wasn’t looking at someone I suspected was Annika, or a girl with similar features that I hoped was Annika. No. It was Annika. She was Annika. I saw the vulnerability mixed with that pretty little smirk as if she knew that all she had to do was smile, I’d crumble into a pathetic ball of dog waste. She knew my weaknesses, strengths, and likes and dislikes because she knew me. I could see it.

Riley Laws is Annika, my foster sister.

“Your father had an affair,” Mikky stated flatly, and I wondered if I had heard correctly. My brain was fixated on Annika, so maybe the words entered my ears wrong.

“Had an affair?” I needed him to clarify.

Mikky took another of his coffees, swallowed, and affirmed. “That’s what I said.”

“And he’s still alive?” I joked, then it dawned on me what I just said, and I backtracked. “Wait. Forget it. Fuck, did she kill him?”

“I don’t think she knew about it. Or at least, she hadn’t let on that she knew about it. It was when you were quite small, two or three, I think,” he filled me in. “I didn’t know about it until he confessed one day years later over a whiskey at the end of the day, as we often did.”

“Wow,” I declared, struggling to find the words. I thought it was impossible to shock me with anything Dad did, but an affair was something that I didn’t see coming, because he seemed so in love with my mom. Also, Mom was hardly someone you wanted to piss off – hell hath no fury…and all that.

“Yep,” he nodded and sipped his coffee again.

“Was it with one of the girls in the club?” I asked him. Dad had the same rules as Mikky: we must stay away from the staff, including the dance girls and the girls in the back rooms.

Again, he hesitated as if deciphering what pieces of information to tell me, then dryly said, “No.”

“Do you know who it was?” I pushed because he couldn’t let it drop without giving me more details.

“One of the reasons he spoke to me about it is because she wanted money from him to keep quiet after the affair ended, so he hired her up in an apartment and gave her all the material things she needed,” he explained evenly.

“She was bribing him?” I found it hard to believe Mom didn’t know about large sums of money being transferred.

“No.”

“Really? So…” I was confused.

“She was young and her family cut her off when they found out she had an affair with an older, married man and a club owner,” he said carefully, giving me only tiny bits. “She was also pregnant, unwed, with his kid, but we’d never know.”

“Never know?” My head was so stuffed that it started to ache behind my eyes.

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