Page 12 of Corrupted Deception

“If you’re selling something, sweetheart, I’m not buying,” he says in a lazy drawl, eyeing me warily.

“I’m not selling anything,” I reply, looking him over—his V-neck tee, faded jeans, and the tats on his arms—assessing him the same way he’s assessing me.

“Then what is it you want?” he asks as he leans his shoulder against the doorframe, arms crossed over his broad chest.

I squared my shoulders.Don’t chicken out, I scolded myself.

“You’re my father,” I spit out, “so ideally, I’d like you to step up, but I’d settle for a place to crash for a few nights.”

“Your father?” he repeats, his eyebrows reaching for his hairline.

I shrug. “Hey, you’ve been a ghost for the past seventeen years, so I’m not exactly thrilled about my parentage either.”

He looks at me, silent, his wolflike eyes appraising. “Who did you say your mother is?”

I scoff. “I didn’t say, but her name’s Elizabeth Santoro. You gave her this.” I hold out an old scrap piece of paper with a phone number scrawled on it, the phone number for this warehouse. “She said the two of you hooked up in Buffalo at Harborview Tavern, and I was the result. So, congratulations, it’s a girl,” I say dryly.

He keeps looking at me, but I haven’t the foggiest clue what he’s thinking.

Please, don’t make me live on the streets, I silently plead. I have no idea how long a paternity test would take. And there’s also the small issue of “What if Mom lied?”

My heart pounds, and my palms feel sweaty.

He keeps looking.

Eventually, he nods. Just once. “All right, if you say so.”

“That’s it?”

I mean, I’d been hoping for smooth sailing but I wasn’t holding my breath or anything.

“Well, if you didn’t get those eyes from me, I’d say they’re a damn good facsimile.”

It isn’t until he says it that I realize it’s true.

I’d never really thought of my eyes as anything before, much less wolflike. They were just eyes—they were good for seeing, and I was simply glad they worked.

But now, staring back at the thirty-something dark-haired man in front of me, something came undone inside me. His silver-gray eyes are a mirror reflection of my own.

He steps back and lets me in. Into what looks like an old, run-down building on the outside but is maybe the coolest place I’ve ever seen on the inside—industrial-chic. And with security shit I’m pretty sure could rival Fort Knox.

I parked in the warehouse’s gravel lot and walked up to the same door now, slipping my fingers beneath a loose piece of the corrugated metal siding and onto the fingerprint scanner that was hidden there.

The moment the lock clicked open, a sudden bark resonated with power, a commanding burst that vibrated in the air around me.

I opened the door and stepped inside as a one-hundred-and-eighty-pound black Boerboel barreled toward me, barely skidding to a stop a foot away, then running in circles around me, his short tail wagging happily.

Despite his enthusiasm, a wave of emptiness enveloped me, an absence that echoed in the silence.

There was no burned meatloaf scent wafting from the oven. No rhythmic clicking of keys on my dad’s computer or The Rolling Stones playing on low volume in the background. The world he had carefully crafted in our home was unraveling before my eyes.

“I missed you too, Ray,” I said, swallowing back the lump in my throat and giving my enormous teddy bear a two-handed scratch behind the ears, which, next to food, was pretty much his favorite thing.

And while I was hungry enough to eat a horse—okay, maybe not a horse because meat was murder and all that—Ray was not in the mood to be patient. As soon as I’d finished with the obligatory scratch, he started nudging the door with his big nose.

“All right, you win.” Because nose-nudging was just the start. Whining, door-scratching, and the dreaded puppy dog eyes were sure to follow. “Give me one minute,” I said, sidestepping him because I was so done with wandering around outside in lingerie.

I ran up the open staircase to my loft bedroom, threw on the first clothes I could find from the messy stack on my king-size bed, tucked a Glock 19 into the back waist of my pants—I wasn’t convinced my shadow had vanished—and headed back to the front door.

---