Slow Burn (17 page)

I sighed heavily. “I’m sorry.” I studied my fingernails. “I guess I’m just angry.”

“At me?” he asked. “At your father?”

“At everything,” I mumbled. I closed my eyes. Stacey was staring at me again. Her expression didn’t look blank anymore. It looked accusing.

“Anger’s good,” said Griffin. “It keeps you sharp. Fear, sadness, guilt? They’re paralyzing. So stay angry, doll.”

Without warning, I was crying.

“Doll?” He reached for me with one hand, the other still on the steering wheel.

I pushed him away. “I’m angry at myself.”

“There’s no reason for that.”

“I made friends with her!” Talking while crying made me sound like a whiny six-year-old, and the fact that my stupid body couldn’t muster something more appropriate, given the gravity of the situation, made me sob even harder. “I knew there were people after me. I knew that I was in danger. But I did it anyway.”

Griffin was quiet.

“If I’d left her alone, she’d still be alive.”

The car was completely silent, except for my sobs.

When he finally did speak, his voice was hesitant. “It’s hard to know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. I killed my best friend. The only best friend I’ve had since I was a little girl. The sweetest, nicest, most outgoing girl in the entire world. And I killed her.”

He reached for me again and grabbed my hand this time despite how I struggled against him. “That isn’t true.”

“It is. I made friends with her. And when I did that, I marked her for death. I can’t have friends anymore.”

Griffin’s grasp on my hand was a vice grip. “No, no, doll, that’s not the way.”

“It’s the only way.”

“No, it’s not,” he said. “When I was in Operation Wraith, I was trained to kill people. And you know what they taught us? They taught us to disengage. Trust no one, befriend no one. Because you never know who you’re going to have to kill. See, the higher-ups used us assassins to keep each other in line. Someone became a liability? The word would come down that he was supposed to die. And that could be the guy who was your buddy, who you’d been working with for weeks. You’d be assigned to kill him.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was. But you learned pretty quick not to form bonds. Not to make friends. And you know what? It made all of it easier. Because you started to forget what it was even like to have friends. And you killed people all the time, so you started to forget why it was that people were even important.”

I wasn’t sure I understood how this was connected, but I let him finish.

“You have to have friends, doll, and you have to lose them,” he said. “Because, if you don’t, you forget why life is precious, and why it’s important for people to be protected. Caring about people makes them matter. If you don’t care about anyone, then
nothing
matters.”

Chapter Eleven

The thing about Boston is that it was cold. Even in April. I mean, it wasn’t Canada cold or Alaska cold or the North Pole cold. But compared to West Virginia, in which April meant seventy-degree weather, descending to the mid-fifties was a bit of a shock.

I was prepared for it. I’d gone to school in Boston for two years before my car accident with Eric. I used to joke that forty degrees was balmy. But I wasn’t used to it anymore. The mid-Atlantic had spoiled me. I was shivering in the north.

When Griffin told me we were going to Boston, I asked him if that wasn’t actually a really, really bad idea. After all, I was familiar with Boston. Wasn’t it stupid to hide someplace where you actually had ties to people? Weren’t you supposed to run someplace out of the way and foreign?

He said that was why Boston was perfect. Because it was so obvious, they’d never look here. It was also right under their noses, since Op Wraith was located outside of Boston. Furthermore, Griffin had a friend here, someone who could hide us, and who’d been hiding in plain sight from Op Wraith successfully for some time.

I figured Griffin knew what he was doing.

He didn’t want anyone to be able to trace us by the stolen car, so we switched a few times, taking different cars from various shopping centers off the interstate. Finally, we ditched cars altogether and picked up a bus outside of New York City that took us straight to Boston. Once there, we could take the T, the Boston subway, to Griffin’s friend’s apartment.

I wasn’t sure what to expect of this friend. Griffin didn’t tell me much about him, and I didn’t bother to ask. I knew that this guy was also someone who’d run from Op Wraith and that he was hiding out in Boston. I didn’t know anything else. I guess I simply wasn’t curious. I was too exhausted to care, and I was still a wreck over what had happened to Stacey and Jack.

Whether I blamed myself for it or not, it still hurt. I’d lost my father and my best friend within months of each other. I’d been chased, had my life threatened, and been forced out of my home. I guess that thinking about Griffin’s friend wasn’t high on my priority list.

If there was a place where we could stop traveling and lay low for a while, I was all about it.

I should have asked some more questions.

Because when we arrived at the apartment, five floors up in South Boston, the person who greeted us at the door was not a guy.

She was a woman. A very pretty woman. She had blonde hair, like mine, only hers hung in perfect, floating waves that reached halfway down her back. She had sparkling blue eyes, and when she saw Griffin, she started glowing, like some kind of perfect angelic being. I swear, the woman was basically the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“Griffin!” She threw her arms around him. “You could give a girl a heads-up that you were in the neighborhood.”

Griffin wrapped his burly arms tightly around her, grinning wider than I’d ever seen him grin. He planted a kiss on top of her head. “It’s so good to see you, Beth.”

Beth. Wait a second, I had heard that name. That Matt guy had said something about a woman named Beth when he and Griffin had been fighting with knives in the gas station parking lot at the intersection of 29 and 92. What had Griffin said about her?

Leave her out of this.

I swallowed. But Griffin had said they were friends, hadn’t he? Just friends?

I looked at the way they were clinging to each other.

I bit my lip.

Griffin pulled back. “Sorry I couldn’t call ahead, doll. We were in a bad spot. Didn’t know where else to go.”

Doll? Had he just called her
doll
? But... that was what he called me. I’d told Stacey that it was his slang word for women, but I had thought... I bit down harder on my lip.

“We?” said Beth, peering around Griffin to see me. Her smile immediately faded as she looked me over. “You brought someone.” She folded her arms over her chest. Her voice had gotten very bright and cheery. I could tell it was false, though. She wasn’t happy I was here.

Great.

Griffin tugged me forward. “This is Leigh. She’s Frank’s daughter.”

I offered Beth my hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Beth blinked at my hand for several seconds. Then she shook it, smiling tightly. “Likewise.” She dropped my hand and turned to Griffin. “So you’re looking out for her. That’s why you’re on the run?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Because you still think you owe Frank,” she said, and I could tell that she didn’t think Griffin owed anyone.

I clasped my hands in front of myself. I wanted to disappear. This woman did not want me here. At all. I’d just lost my best friend, left everything I owned behind, driven across the country, and now this woman hated me on sight. Could things get worse?

From within the apartment, I heard the sound of a baby crying.

Oh, yeah. Worse.

Griffin was sitting at the kitchen table, holding the baby, who was gurgling in his arms, grabbing for his fingers as Griffin tickled her tummy. The baby didn’t have blonde hair like her mother. Instead, she had dark curls wreathing her face. Dark curls the color of the stubble on Griffin’s head.

I stood in the corner of the room, my hands in my pockets, just watching. I was at a complete loss. That baby couldn’t be...

Did she
look
like Griffin?

Dear God, she kind of did.

But he would have told me, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he?

“Are you hungry, Griff?” said Beth. Her kitchen was small, but there was just enough room around the round table where Griffin sat that she could open the refrigerator.

Griff, huh? He had a nickname. But that didn’t mean that he and Beth had... what? Been in a relationship? Had a baby together? I couldn’t... He would have told me, wouldn’t he?

I was hungry, but I didn’t dare say anything.

“Don’t go to any trouble, doll,” said Griffin, making silly faces at the baby.

“No trouble,” she said. “I’ve got leftover mac and cheese.” She laughed a little. “Sorry. That’s about as gourmet as I get these days. Little Dixie runs me ragged.”

Ugh. She’d named her baby Dixie? What kind of name was Dixie?

“She sure is beautiful,” said Griffin. “You’re doing an amazing job.” He touched Dixie’s nose. “You’re getting huge, aren’t you? I keep missing everything. I’m very, very bad, yes I am.”

He was talking in that tiny little voice people use to talk to babies. He was... I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream.

No. I wanted to kill him.

I needed to talk to him. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions. Maybe I wasn’t in an apartment with Griffin’s ex and their child. Maybe there was an explanation.

But why did he say he was bad?

“Well,” said Beth, “we’re glad you’re here now. We would love to see more of you.”

Was she even his ex? She wanted to see more of him? What the hell was going on?

He sighed, standing up and shifting the baby. “I really am sorry. But Frank—”

“It’s always Frank,” she said. She laughed a little, like it was a joke, but I could tell she was annoyed.

I would be too. Who did he think he was? How dare he leave this woman here with this baby? How dare he share my bed for the past week? How dare he make me think that he—

I was going to cry. I sucked in my breath and forced myself to stop thinking about it. He’d explain everything. I had to give him a chance.

Beth got a casserole dish out of the refrigerator. “I’ll heat up some macaroni for you.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I insist.” She opened a cabinet and took out a bowl.

“Uh, maybe Leigh wants some too.”

Griffin and Beth both turned to look at me.

I opened my mouth to speak, but I knew suddenly, that if I did, I would lose it. I nodded.

“Sure,” said Beth briskly. She got out another bowl.

Griffin beckoned to me. “Why don’t you come sit down at the table, doll?”

Beth stiffened.

Oh. She wouldn’t have reacted that way if there wasn’t something between them. It was true. It had to be true. I swallowed. I walked across the room and sat down. It was easier than trying to say something.

“You okay?” he asked me.

“Fine,” I managed. My voice was a croak.

Beth popped the bowls into the microwave. She turned to me. “So, um, what are your plans?”

“My plans?” I said, still sounding like a frog.

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, you can’t expect Griffin to watch out for you forever.”

“No. I guess I can’t.” I couldn’t look at him.

Griffin raised his eyebrows at Beth. “Why can’t she?”

Beth pressed her lips together in a firm line. “Well, it’s not a life, is it? Eventually, you’ve got to stop running. You’ve got to... settle down.”

“Maybe eventually,” said Griffin.

Beth put the casserole dish back in the refrigerator, banging it. She slammed the fridge door.

He went to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey. I know it’s tough for you. I know that having Dixie means you can’t run all the time.”

She gazed up into his eyes.

“But you’re alive,” he said. “You’re alive, and that’s what’s important.”

“Is it?” she said. She sounded bitter. She reached for the baby, and Dixie practically crawled out of Griffin’s arms into Beth’s.

He looked out of sorts suddenly, as if he didn’t know what to do with himself now that his arms were empty.

The microwave beeped.

He looked at Beth, her arms full, and then he opened the cabinet and took out two bowls. He set them on the table, one in front of me, the other on the opposite side of the table. “Where are the forks?”

She pointed at a drawer.

He opened it. He handed me one. He faced her. “Look, if you don’t want us here, we’ll go somewhere else.”

“I didn’t say that,” she said. “Of course you’re welcome to stay. You’re always welcome here.” She touched his cheek. “You’re the reason I got free from that place.” She rounded on me. “Did he tell you that? Did he tell you that I was the reason he left Op Wraith?”

I shook my head slowly. “He really didn’t mention you.”

Her features hardened. She sat down next to me at the table. “When Op Wraith found out I was pregnant, they told me I had to terminate the pregnancy. I didn’t want to. So, I refused. They decided I wasn’t much use to them, and they ordered Griffin to kill me.”

I recoiled. “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I wouldn’t do it,” said Griffin, sitting down. He took a bite of his mac and cheese. “I helped her get out. I got out too.” He turned to her. “And we never would have made it without Frank.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Thanks for this.” He gestured with his fork. “It’s really good.”

“No problem,” she said.

I took a bite myself. He was right. It
was
good. I’d almost wanted her to be a terrible cook or something.

No. That was awful. I didn’t wish her pain. Obviously, she had enough of that. But I was devastated, and it was hard not to want to blame her instead of Griffin.

When he was clearly the bastard here. How could he have abandoned her like this? No wonder she was so angry.

It was quiet except for the sound of Griffin’s and my chewing. I ate the macaroni greedily. It was delicious, and I was hungry.