Page 31 of The Ruthless Guardian

Spinning in his chair, he holds his arms out to me, and I go into them. My legs straddle his hips and his arms go around my back. “If I told you what happened to the people that raised me, it wouldn’t make you feel any better. So just sit with me. Breathe with me.”

I take a deep breath when he does, our bellies rising and falling in unison. “Are you going to find him?” I whisper, tightening my arms around his neck and watching the video on his screen of Tony walking into a supermarket on loop.

“I am, kitten,” he says. His voice is eerily calm as always and his hands draw circles on my back. “I’m going to find him, and I’ll bring him to you, tied up and at your mercy. I’ll let you torture him until you feel better.”

The words coming out of Josiah’s mouth should scare me. I’m aware of how itshouldfeel, but that’s not what I’m feeling. I feelloved. It won’t make up for the fear I went through or the pain he caused to Rose, but Josiah is offering me a way to deal with some of the trauma.

“You’re going to kill him?”

Josiah nods his head against mine, placing a soft kiss on my cheek. “I was always going to kill him. Knowing he put his hands on you too means his death is going to be slower.”

“Can I ask you for something?”

Josiah hasn’t left his desk for days, and I’ve tried to leave him to his research. He’s able to do such amazing things on the computer. It’s hard for me to believe he didn’t know everything about me two seconds after we met because he’s been able to find out so much about Tony since he got out of prison. “Yeah. What’s up?”

“I know you’re busy on the computer and everything, but I thought maybe you could help me find something on there? I never got much information so I really don’t know how you would even look it up. I tried before but I couldn’t-”

Josiah turns to face me, pulling his glasses down lower on his nose. “Phoebe. Tell me what I’m looking for.”

“I want to know about the fire,” I admit. “I want to know how it started and why it got so bad. Do you think you can find anything about it? Maybe if you search old newspaper archives or something? I was born here- in Albuquerque.”

His thoughtful face turns serious, his jaw clenching and brows creasing together. “I need to know your real last name. I can’t find anything without that.”

“My parents were Simon and Monica Newman.” I haven’t spoken their names in years, or my other name, so I have to clear my throat before I can get the words out. “I was born Phoebe Newman.”

He spins around in his chair and his fingers tap on the keyboard. “You were emancipated,” he mumbles, clicking around with his mouse. “Why?”

“I needed a new last name and the ability to make an escape. The advocate swore that he would never come after me, but I knew he would. So I fought like hell and convinced everyone to let me be emancipated, and when I was, they let me change my last name.”

“And then you ran,” he says quietly, finishing the story for me. “You’ve spent most of your life running.”

“It didn’t seem strange to me. Other than with my parents, I never had anything constant, so it made sense to run forever. I’ve always felt instinctively uncomfortable staying in one place for too long.” Even before I had a reason to hide myself away and make a habit out of changing my address, being anywhere for an extended period of time made me nervous.

After a few more clicks, he says, “It looks like you went to every school in the state at one point or another.”

“I caused a lot of trouble. I didn’t get to stay at any for very long.” Every time I got in trouble at one school I got shipped to a different one, and sometimes a different home to go with it.

“Were you able to graduate?”

“I finished high school online, but I did graduate.” It was much easier to just do my schooling with a tablet in my hotel rooms than it was to try to enroll in a new school every time I moved. “Did you find my parents?”

“I’m finding everything I couldn’t find before. Why don’t you make us something for lunch while I check over all this information?So I can get you exactly what you’re looking for.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Skids

The reports about Phoebe’s parents are brutal and graphic, and I need her to be distracted by something else while I sort through the descriptions and images to get down to what she actually needs to know. Nobody needs to see a picture of the ashen remains of their own parents.

DoctorSimon Newman looked happy when he was alive. Her mother did too. They looked like the kind of parents that would want the best for their daughter, or at the very least better than what she got. I’m certain they weren’t expecting to tuck her into bed at night with her favorite stuffed elephant and not survive to make her breakfast in the morning.

The best guess of the inspector was that the fire started in the kitchen just after midnight. A pot of food had been left on a running gas stove overnight and it heated up until it caught fire, and the flames spread unencumbered, because the family had disabled their smoke detectors.

Simon and Monica were closer to the fire, and their bedroom door was open to the hallway. The inspector assumed the open window in their room also added fuel to the fire that spread there quickly. Phoebe was safe in her bed, sleeping peacefully with her little elephant, when a firefighter broke through the window to save her.

And a six year-old kid dealing with survivor’s guilt while their parents are suddenly gone and everything in their life changes is a recipe for disaster. It’s no surprise she lost her shit and couldn’t figure out how to get it back together. No one would have.

Thrown into a world of pain and grief without a single consistent person or routine in her life, it’s a miracle she made it to this age. She did a lot of it all by herself- too much of it. She shouldn’t have ever been so alone.

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