Page 24 of Twisted Empire

Not only had my mother run off on me and Dad, but she’d done it so she could go around fucking a criminal scumbag every which way.

More and more, I found I couldn’t even really think of her as my mom now. My real mom had died eleven years ago.

This woman—this monster who fawned over murderous crime lords and kidnapped innocent people—wasn’t any part of my family.

Somehow she’d managed to keep anything business-related, at least when it came to her new lover’s business, out of her phone. None of the service providers and shops I’d looked up had any connection to him even with extra digging to confirm. And when I’d scrolled back through their direct conversations, skimming the worst bits with a wince, I hadn’t come across anything but the vaguest mentions of his illicit activities.

Comments like, “I’ve got a few things to deal with before I make it back to the apartment” weren’t going to justify a warrant, let alone convict the prick for his crimes.

Even though I’d tried it already, I ran his number through my various tracking methods. All of them made it clear that the digits belonged to a burner phone with no specific information tied to it other than the basic provider.

If he called Mom’s phone, I’d have had the chance to trace his immediate location with the right equipment, but otherwise the information was useless. And the chances of him calling when Mom would have told him about the stolen purse by now were pretty much nil.

I scrolled farther back through her message history, searching for any numbers not in her Contacts. I’d gone back to almost a year ago when the ringtone pealed out, sudden and loud enough that I nearly dropped the phone.

Closing my fingers around it, I stared at the screen.Unknown caller, the notification said. The ringtone sounded again.

My heart was thudding. I had no idea who this was—but shouldn’t I make use of the best piece of evidence we’d gotten in every possible way? Maybe the caller would give away something we could work with.

Not that anyone could possibly mistake my voice for my mom’s. But what the hell.

Just as the third ring sounded, I hit the answer button and brought the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

On the other end, the caller sucked in a startled breath. Then a far-too-familiar voice slipped from the speaker into my ear. “Hello, Logan.”

It was Mom, calling her own phone. Probably trying to find out what had happened to it. Her greeting sounded as hesitant as I felt, not the coolly confident persona she’d put on when she’d spoken to me outside the medical facility.

Maybe that should have reassured me. I should have played it cool and calm like she had before. But at the sound of my name from her deceitful mouth, a surge of rage flared inside me. I couldn’t contain myself.

“What the hell, Mom?” I burst out.

The question encompassed so much of my anger and hurt—that she’d left, that she’d let us believe she was dead, that she’d made me party to a crime without me even realizing it. That she’d kidnapped the woman I loved and brought her to where the vilest man in existence might have killed her.

None if it made sense. All of it made me want to scream into the phone, but I managed to containthatimpulse.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she said, in exactly the voice I remembered from when I’d been a kid. “I didn’t want any of this to happen this way.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded. “None of it happened by accident. You didn’t just stumble and end up running off with a criminal overlord or faking your own death.”

Her tone hardened a little in response to mine. “There’s a lot you don’t know or understand. How could you? You were only a child.”

A scoffing sound burst out of me. “Yeah, exactly. I was a child—I was yourson—and you left me. You let me believe that you’d died. So you could live it up with some rich asshole?”

“He’s a lot more than that,” Mom said sternly. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. I did what I needed to for my own sanity.”

Was she even hearing herself? She thought abandoning her normal family to hook up with a psychotic crime boss was thesaneoption?

“If you were that unhappy, you could have just asked for a divorce,” I retorted. “Then at least I’d still have been able to see you. I wouldn’t have mourned you and gone to visit a grave that didn’t really mean anything.”

“It wasn’t that simple.”

I knew that, actually. My stomach churned before I forced out the words. “Right. Because as long as you were with me and known to be alive, you could be prosecuted for your crime. You didn’t get the liver for my transplant by any method the police would approve of, did you, Mom?”

Even as the question spilled bitterly from my lips, some tiny part of me held on to a shred of hope that she’d tell me I was wrong about that one thing, that her shitty decisions hadn’t tainted even me.

Her resigned sigh snuffed out that hope in an instant.

“I’m not going to apologize forthat,” she said stiffly. “I did what I needed to do to keep you alive. That’s what a mothershoulddo.”

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