Page 41 of Shadows and Whispers

“Jona, you probably shouldn’t be traveling alone.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll be at six star hotels being pampered and catered to. I’ll be fine. Trust me.”

“Right but when you tell Christian don’t tell him it was my idea.”

“I’ll think about it.” She grinned as she slipped her feet back into her Hermes sandals before stopping at the door. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Reminding me that I matter.”

A few seconds after she left my room, I called her name. Something occurred to me and she might have the answers.

“Jona…”

“Yeah…” She was back, standing in my doorway.

“You remember when you said I didn’t know who Cole was?”

“Yes.”

“What did you mean?”

She frowned and folded her arms over her body. “I heard Chris and Dad talking that night…”

She was just a kid back then. Well sort of. She was just starting her senior year of high school and about to turn eighteen.

“And…”

“Dad kept saying he knew this was going to happen, that Cole had been begging for it for years.”

“How?”

“Did you know that Cole went to rehab years before the thing with Lucas Omari?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“It was the summer you were on tour with Las Scala.”

Summer before my junior year of college. I was gone the entire summer.

“Oh, I didn’t know. No one told me.”

“You never call much when you’re on tour.”

Ouch.

“No, I don’t.”

She frowned. “They fought a lot. Dad, Christian, and Cole. It got really bad sometimes. They accused Cole of doing a lot of things. Stealing, antagonizing people over business, a bunch of other stuff. I don’t think he ever got better even after he went to rehab. He was high that night. The night Ezekiel and Elias’s brother was killed.”

“How do you know that?”

“I heard them talking about it. You weren’t here….”

I had been in Europe, flew home for the funeral and caught the next flight out two days later. I asked questions, no one ever answered them. They just changed the subject. And when I returned, the rumors were circulating about Elias being the one that killed my brother. He’d never been questioned by the police but I wasn’t surprised. Much like our father, theirs had the ability to pull strings. I was guessing the same reason Elias had never been questioned was the same reason the cops never questioned Cole about what happened that night at the club. He killed Lucas Omari in a crowded club and not once had they looked into him.

“I never knew any of that,” I said quietly.

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