Chapter 5

Tell me not to do something, and I’ll do it twice and take pictures.

-Ghost’s secret thoughts

Ghost

I’d heard through the grapevine that Mina was seeing somebody, and like always, I came right out and did something about it because I couldn’t not do it.

I had to make sure that whomever she was seeing was a decent person—but this guy wasn’t any good. Not even a little bit. I knew after my inside man who handled my rentals for all the houses I owned in that area had given me the information on the guy. He filled out the rental agreement for him, so finding the information out was really quite easy to come by. And I didn’t like the guy. At all.

So I’d driven all the way to where my wife lived, a long six-hour drive away from where I now lived.

It wasn’t the man’s rental agreement that had me scared, though. It was the fact that he didn’t have a history. Not a parking ticket or credit cards. There was nothing about him at all for me to find, and that wasn’t a good thing. Everyone had some sort of paper trail of their life – a warning ticket for speeding or a bank balance that fell into the negative at least once or twice.

“I hate you!”

My head turned back to the scene before me.

I was staring into my daughter’s window, about ten feet away from the house, and I had a listening device pointing at the two of them behind the glass.

I stared at the crying little girl, with the tears pouring down her cheeks as she glared at her mother like she’d just betrayed her. The little girl with the two French braids that started at the top of her head and fell to nearly mid-back…hair that was the exact same color as mine. Her eyes were the same color, too. Deep green, almost the color of an olive, with whiskey colored striations that broke that green up beautifully.

“I hate you!” the little girl screamed again when my wife still didn’t move away from her.

My wife was beautiful. She had brown hair that fell just between her shoulder blades, and the most soulful brown eyes that looked like they’d literally been poured from melted chocolate. She was skinny—too skinny. Much skinnier than the last time I’d seen her, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on here.

She wasn’t eating, and that was because something was bothering her enough that she couldn’t.

“Sweetheart,” my wife whispered to our daughter. “Please.”

“It’s not okay. It’ll never be okay. He’s not my father. I’m not ever going to call him daddy. I only ever had one and he’s gone. You don’t get to decide that for me!”

My heart shredded into a million pieces, and murderous rage started to fill my veins at hearing those words come from her mouth.

“He didn’t ask you to call him …”

Bullshit.

“Let’s go.”

My soft command had Sean at my side turning and following in my direction, but that didn’t stop him from looking over his shoulders periodically to get one last glimpse of the nightmare going on inside.

I stalked around the house and headed next door, stopping at the home that was only a mere house length away from my family’s, and knocked on the door.

The man who we’d seen leaving my house just five minutes before opened his own door and stared at me. “Who’re you?”

“You’re going to move.”

The man’s eyebrows rose. He was tall, just under six feet, with dishwater blonde hair and blue eyes that looked way too light to be real. His teeth were perfectly straight and so fucking white, it was obvious that they were fake. To top it all off, his voice was too high, and he sounded like a woman.

“Yeah?”

His smile was slick and oily, though, and I wanted to knock the grin right off of his pretty-boy face.

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I don’t care where you go or what you do, but you’re no longer going to be doing it here.”

“Oh yeah? What makes you think so?” the man crossed his arms over his chest.

I pulled out some papers from my pocket.

“You’re being evicted.”

I handed the papers to the man, and the man took them.

“You can’t kick me out. You’re not my landlord.”

My smile was scary.

“Yes, I am,” I interjected. “And you have exactly twenty-four hours, per your rental agreement, to pack your shit and get the fuck out before I seize the property. Whatever is still left inside will be burned.”

The man’s smile looked a little brittle.

“There’s a house across the street,” the man countered. “I’ll just move in there.”

My smile likely got even scarier.

“I own every goddamn house on this block, and trust me, you won’t be renting any of them.”

The man stiffened.

“You have no right.”

I took a step forward, pressed my face forward until only a few inches were between us, and I said something so softly that Sean likely didn’t hear it. “You did the wrong thing tonight. I’ll let you figure out what that was.”

Then we were leaving, walking back down the street to where we’d left the bikes.

“Ghost, what the hell is going on?”

I took one final look at the house where my whole heart resided and turned my back.

I made a gesture for him to follow, and he did. He got on his bike and rode with me. We rode for about fifteen minutes, but the moment we arrived at our destination, I knew he was finally catching on.

“I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to promise me that it’ll never, ever get out. If you tell anyone, even your woman, it could mean their death.”

He stayed silent and waited as I told him everything.

And I did.

“When I was a young kid, barely out of high school, I met my wife,” I started. “The first day I saw her, her mother was cleaning our house.”

He didn’t say anything, and I gestured for him to follow me.

I stopped in front of the familiar grave, and wasn’t surprised to find my partner in crime there waiting for me.

“When she was eighteen, I knocked her up, and we got married.” I nodded to the man that was leaning on my empty grave. “We lived happily for almost two years. Then my mother and father decided that I was needed, and I wasn’t allowed to leave the family until they said so.”

“And what did they do?” Sean asked.

“They threatened my family,” I told him bluntly.

“Tunnel’s parents kidnapped their child, took pictures of her with her clothes off, and then sold them to the highest bidder…as a warning for what they could do. The baby had no clue that anything was wrong. They delivered her back safely to her home with no one the wiser—at least until he got the pictures,” Silas butted in.

Silas. My old president. The man I’d tried to murder because it would’ve helped keep my parents off my back, and give Mina and Sienna a little more time.

My stomach churned.

“My parents run one of the biggest distribution rings in the whole goddamn state.”

“And what do they distribute?”

That was Sean, again.

I swallowed thickly.

“Children.”

Sean stiffened.

He knew what I was saying.

“They what? Kidnap the kids? Sell them?”

I nodded.

“Those are the good cases.”

“And why haven’t they been caught yet?” Sean asked forcefully.

He looked pissed.

Hell, he had no clue. He had nothing on me.

My kid had been stolen. There were still pictures of her out there on the hard drives of filthy men who got off on child porn.

Sure, we thought that most of them had been found and destroyed, but there was no guarantee that Jack and his wife—a couple who did illegal computer hacking—had gotten everything. They’d tried, yes, but some bastards were sneaky, and there was one man in particular that I knew of who still had access to the photos. Not that he had accessed them, though. But the second he did, I would be on him. If he ever gets on the Internet with those pictures of my baby, I will know. I monitored everything that my father did, and had been since the fucking second he decided to play a game that I wasn’t initially willing to participate in.

But once he decided to use my daughter in his disgusting games, I became a willing participant.

One day, my father would go down. He’d ruined my life by forcing me to do things that I didn’t want to do, and above all else, he used my child in his sick games.

My child.

Biggest. Fuck up. Ever.

Now, it was a waiting game. I was gathering information on my parents. I was funded by the government. I had a team, a leader of that team who made sure that I had access to anything and everything I needed. I was a rogue who did what I had to do when I had to do it. I had the power and the resources to do whatever I had to do to get the information the government sought. Once I had all the information they needed, I’d hand it over to my contact and watch as my parents went up in a puff of smoke.

And I’d be the one to pull that silver handle that watched them fry.

That was a promise.

“Because I haven’t gotten enough information on them to issue warrants for their arrests,” I finally answered. “I got close once, and my father tried to have me killed. Started to go after my family.”

“And what happened then?” Sean continued questioning. Always so curious.

I looked at him.

“I faked my own death.”

His eyes went wide.

“And you left them,” he guessed.

I nodded once.

“And Silas is protecting them?” Sean’s voice sounded strangled.

Silas finally spoke up.

“Been doing that for a while now, but once I realized how deep this ran, I pulled in a few old buddies.”

“Who?” Sean was beginning to sound impatient. “Not to sound like a dick here, but I need some more information. If you’re not watching over them well enough…”

“Joker.”

All his words stopped completely. I could hear the fucking leaves swaying and blowing each time the wind blew.

“Well…” Sean said. “That’ll get the job done.”

Silas snorted.

I grinned.

“And the boy that was living next to your wife?”

I gritted my teeth.

“A serial widower,” I answered. “Been married four times, and each wife has died of a heart attack well before they should’ve ever had to worry about that shit.”

“Just fuckin’ kill him and get it over with,” Sean grunted. “We aren’t stupid. We know he had something to do with it, and I haven’t even seen the file yet.”

I chuckled, and then that chuckle vanished just as quickly as it came when Sean’s next question pierced the quiet night air.

“When you get everything you need on your parents…what then?” he asked. “Are you getting your family back?”

I looked up at the night sky.

There wasn’t a star in sight.

God damn city, always fucking up the stars.

“It’s not that easy,” I sighed. “I’ve been gone for a really long time now. She may not want me back.”