Keeley's Fight (The Protectors Series) (15 page)

Once she had a better idea of what they did, Keeley realized it wasn’t often they left the country, which settled her nerves more. Julia showed her how to handle a new case and how to open the file for it, which was much easier than she thought it would be. After learning about the filing system, which was color coded by most urgent cases, they broke for lunch. Not realizing it was nearly one in the afternoon, meaning they’d been at it for nearly three hours already, she was starving. “Let’s get you to those boys, now. I’m sure they’ve had to hold themselves back from coming and checking on you,” Julia said while getting up and grabbing her purse and coat off the rack.

Leaving Julia’s office and heading to Nathaniel and Tyler’s, Keeley realized how excited she was to tell them about the things her and Julia did, and that even though she had been nervous about not having experience on a computer she found it easy to maneuver on.

“Here you are dear, I’ll see you in a bit,” Julia remarked leaving her standing outside their closed office door.

Knocking on the door she waited for them to answer. When Tyler opened the door looking angry and had a huge scowl on his face, she immediately backed up. Not wanting to anger him further, she meekly walked in when he gestured for her to. That is when she noticed the same anger reflected on Nathaniel’s face, and she started to really get scared.

“Wh—What’s going on?” she asked nervously, shifting from foot to foot, unconsciously getting closer and closer to the corner of the right wall.

“You tell us, Butterfly,” Nathaniel snarled the nickname he’d given her like a curse, shattering any illusion she had that what they shared was real. With a lump the size of a baseball settling in her chest, Keeley started to shake her head in the negative not understanding what was happening.

“It’s like this darlin’, we’ve been investigating your family all morning, only to stumble across a list of charges against you as long as my arm. Care to explain?” Tyler asked with malice in his voice.

Hanging her head in shame she didn’t want to answer, they already assumed she was a horrible person. What they failed to realize was she had no choice; it was life or death. She choose to live and now she wished for death. She knew one day her offenses would come back to haunt her, but it was so long ago she refused to think about it. It was best to move past it all for her own sanity. “I’m sorry, I had n-n-no choice,” she stuttered out on a weak whisper.

“No choice?” Nathaniel asked her angrily. “You always have a choice, Keeley, with everything. You chose to steal from people. To con them. To make them believe you were something you’re not. Is that what you were going to do to our parents? Then later to us?” He practically yelled at her.

Keeley was shaking in not only fear, but also anger now. She didn’t know what to do, what to say. She had no way to defend herself against their accusations. With tears streaming down her face she railed at them, “I had no intention of doing anything to you or your family. It was you that burst into my life, Nathaniel, not the other way around. I had no choice in conning people, because it was either do it or suffer a beating to rival all others I’d had!” She yelled at them while shaking so hard her teeth were now chattering. “You have no idea what I was forced to do so my so-called parents could feed their habits. And you know what? The beatings never stopped no matter what I did. Everything I’ve ever done in my life, bad or good, has been with survival in mind.” Breathing heavy she took a break to stare at them. Their faces were still hard and jaded so she knew, just knew, her time in this life was over. “You know I never asked you for anything, never wanted to fall in love with one man let alone two, and you made me. Both of you. Now, I’m once again left with nothing. You act like what I did was so abhorrent, yet look at what you’re both doing now,” she admonished before walking out of their office door, and straight through the lobby and out the front door.

Standing in the parking lot, Keeley turned around and gave the building one last look of regret before walking away. With nowhere to go and no one to call, she was left with little option but to keep walking.

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“Fuck, fuck, fuck!!”
Nate exploded out of his chair chasing after Keeley, with Ty hot on his tail; running past a startled Julia on their way out the door. They both skidded to a stop as they saw her getting on a bus a block away. “Fuck, Keeley, wait!” He yelled hoping she’d hear him. Relief swamped him as she paused and turned half way. Looking right in his eyes, she shook her head and turned her back on them. “Get the truck, Ty!” He yelled while running back inside, stopping when he saw Julia standing by his office door looking very angry.

“You want to explain to me why I saw that girl with tears pouring down her face, and how when she saw me she ran into traffic to get on that bus?” Julia asked impatiently, tapping her foot.

“No,” Nate told her before grabbing his phone and calling Dane, then running back outside to Ty, who was waiting in the truck at the front door. Climbing in as Dane answered, he told Ty to go. “Yo man, look, I can’t explain, but Keeley’s gone. We’re following her on a bus right now, but I think we might need back up and I really don’t want to call my parents. Can you meet us? I’ll text you the address.”

“What the fuck did you guys do to cause her to run?” Dane asked sharply. “I only spent five minutes in that girl’s company, and I know that while she might be fragile as hell, she’s got a heart of gold and a spine of steel.”

“We were looking into her father. He’s a shitty guy who spent his life beating her, and we wanted to make him pay. But then we came across her juvie record. Its long man, all sorts of things but mostly theft and conning people.” Nate tried to defend his actions, even though he felt like shit for exploding on her. He knew she wasn’t doing that to them, nor had she planned to. She was just too innocent to pull something like that off. Which if he thought about it, made her perfect for it, except she was too honest. They had only just finished reading the information when she knocked on their door. It had barely sunk in, and the accusations flew out of his mouth before he could even filter them.

Silence on the other end of the line had him pulling it away from his ear and checking to see if the call disconnected. Seeing that it hadn’t, Nate waited for the explosion he was sure was coming. “Text me the address,” was all Dane said before hanging up.

“What the fuck are we going to do if she doesn’t let us apologize, Nate? We just got the info, but fuck! The look on her face when she got on the bus almost brought me to my knees.” Ty said evenly. “What did Dane say?” He asked as an afterthought.

“We’re fucked,” was all Nate said, while watching the bus like a hawk.

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Not wanting to
give voice to his fears Ty just drove, following the bus in the hopes that Keeley would get off soon. Seeing Nate texting out of the corner of his eyes, he figured he was telling Dane where they were at now. After following the bus for over an hour, it finally turned it’s out of service sign on. As it stopped at the bus station, Ty put the truck in park and they both hopped out going to the front door, waiting for her to get off.

Hearing another truck door slam shut, Ty turned to see Dane striding their way. Ty wasn’t scared of many men, if any at all, but Dane was in a league of his own. He was an extremely large man, standing at six feet nine inches tall and weighing just over three hundred pounds. He scared a lot of people with his size, but it wasn’t his size that put Ty on edge, it was his combat training that made him a deadly weapon.

Dane stopped in front of them. “You fuckers are lucky you’re my friends or I’d kill you both for this, I hope you fucking know that. Shit. I still might,” was all Dane said before knocking on the bus doors, waiting for the driver to open them and boarding it. They watched him walk all the way to the back, before bending down and trying to coax Keeley to get up and go with him. After about twenty minutes of back and forth between the two, they could see Dane clearly got exasperated and just picked her up in a fireman’s hold, before walking back off. Putting her down in front of them, he told them all, “You two fuckers fuck with this girl again, and you’re dead. She’s a hell of a lot more mule-headed than you two combined. And you, little lady…,” he quieted, grabbing the back of her head gently. “Listen to what they have to say. I’ll be in my truck waiting for whether you want to leave with them or me,” he said before doing just that.

“You are not leaving with him, Butte—”

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped, interrupting Nate and shocking them both.

“Oh Butterfly, I will never stop calling you that no matter how much we fuck up, or how mad you are at us. You are and always will be my Butterfly,” Nate told her. “I’m sorry we jumped on you like that Butterfly. I won’t offer any excuses because none would be good enough, but let us explain what happened, please?” At her nod, they started to tell her how and what they were doing. That they were shocked from the record they found on her. They didn’t have the time they needed to process the information, before she knocked on the door. When they finally finished with an apology, and promised to not jump to conclusions again and simply ask her what was going on, she still hadn’t said anything to them or even looked up at them. The wait was killer. To know whether she could forgive them or not was almost Ty’s undoing.

Watching her finally look up at them, she nodded her head and walked over to Dane. He couldn’t believe that they had screwed up so monumentally, and so soon. Ty felt a piece of his heart leave with her, when they saw her step up onto the driver’s side running board and talk to Dane for a moment, before she gave him a kiss on the cheek. As she stepped down and started walking back towards them, he felt a huge weight lifted off his shoulder. Stopping to turn and wave at Dane while he pulled away, Keeley faced them again, just staring. Scrutinizing them like one would a bug under a microscope. When she started walking forward again, they both held their breath.

“I don’t know if I can forgive you yet, you hurt me. I loved you and you both hurt me so bad. You just assumed I was nothing more than a common criminal. That what I did was because I wanted to, and it wasn’t. I live with the guilt of having taken that money from those people every day, when they did nothing but try to help a little girl in need of a safe place.” Taking a breath she continued on, with tears in her eyes and a trembling lip. “Please believe that if I could, I would pay back every cent taken, but the fact remains that I don’t even know who I stole from. My Mom chose my mark and it was completely random.”

Stepping forward Nate grabbed her up in a hug, wrapping her arms around his neck and legs around his waist. Ty then walked up to her back and pressed against her. With Nate kissing her on the left side of her neck and Ty kissing her on the right, they apologized again and just held her for a few minutes before Nate let her go, and they walked over to the truck climbing in and heading home.

A
fter such an
exhausting couple of days, all Keeley wanted to do was be left alone and curl up into a ball and sleep for about a week. She understood their anger to a point; she would have been shocked to learn that about someone, too, but the accusations stung. The fact that they didn’t even want to listen to what she had to say, and the way they both looked at her, it hurt a lot. She wasn’t lying when she said that it was easier to put it all behind her and forget about it, because if she thought about it too much the guilt overwhelmed her.

Before she was old enough to work, and even sometimes after, her parents used to make her steal and con people into believing she was homeless, so they’d give her money. It worked too, for the most part. There were times when they would offer her a place to stay, and sometimes she accepted, but if she did she knew she had to steal something valuable from them or her parents would retaliate by hitting her.