Page 69 of Ruthless Salvation

“No, but there’s always hope.” I smirked playfully. “Did he come to you looking for work or the other way around?” I asked, hoping to keep the conversation going. Instead, I hit a wall.

Torin’s lips thinned. “I went to him.”

Our eyes locked. My stare begged to know why he’d asked to work with the man who’d essentially been his prison guard. His unrelenting stare told me it was none of my business. Before I could think of another question that might unveil answers about the mysterious man, he turned the tables on me.

“You haven’t tried to reach out to any family or friends since last night. I haven’t seen you go near your phone since you got here.”

“I told you, my parents are dead.”

“How’d they die?” He was more direct than most. I should have expected that.

“Boating accident.” I took a bite of rolled-up pastrami, skipping the bread.

“Friends?” With a tilt of his head, he effectively had me under a microscope. “Seems strange that someone as outgoing as you doesn’t have a whole horde of people close to you—family or not.”

You have to let people in for them to be close.

Again, we engaged in a wordless contest of wills. This time, he was the interrogator demanding to know more, and I was as silent as the tombstone over my parents’ graves.

His phone buzzed in his pocket three times before he relented and answered.

“Yeah?”

The caller spoke for several minutes without a break, and with each second that passed, a shadow darkened Torin’s eyes. His unnervingly perceptive stare shifted from curious to downright accusatory, every ounce directed at me.

Present

“I pulledup anything and everything I could about Stormy like you asked,” Oran said after I picked up the phone. “I know you guys don’t do full background checks on new employees, but you must not have checked her out at all because there’s not shit on her anywhere.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I didn’t like where this was headed.

“She’s not just clean; she’s a ghost. Stormy Lawson doesn’t exist.”

My pulse pounded in my ears as I tried not to overreact. Oran couldn’t dig up anything on Storm, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. “Could it be a nickname issue?” Maybe she didn’t go by her legal name—loads of people didn’t.

“The social on her job application is a fake, Tor. There were no Lawsons in the graduating class for the high school she listed. She said she was born and raised in Atlanta, but there are no birth records for a female Lawson that year that could have been her. I tracked down each one. She’s lying to us, and we need to know why.”

Before you lose your shit, think this through.

So Stormy lied. It wasn’t a stretch to guess that she had history with an ex and was hiding from him. I was confident that was her reason, but why the hell hadn’t she come clean at this point? I wasn’t worried like Oran about Storm being dangerous to us. What bothered me was that she still trusted me so little.

“I have an idea of what’s going on,” I shot back at him. “It’s not a concern.”

“Considering the way Caitlin infiltrated our family, I think we have to investigate Stormy as a possible threat. For all we know, she could be working for a rival organization.”

My hand clutched the phone so tight I was in danger of needing to replace the damn thing again. I wanted to tell my cousin he was a paranoid asshole, but how could I? His theory about Storm was technically as plausible as any other.

“I hear you, but I’ll still be the one to handle it.” My tone grew perilously close to a growl.

“You’re too close, trust me. I know how easy it is to let your emotions fuck with your judgment when it comes to these sorts of things. Let me come over and talk to her.”

Oran’s interrogation of his now ex-wife had been ruthless. He’d been jaded toward women ever since, and I had no doubt he’d rip Stormy apart. She might have lied about her past, but everything about her trauma and the attack had been real. No one was that good an actor. She’d been genuinely scared for her life. I couldn’t subject her to my cousin on top of that.

“I said I can handle it, and I meant it.”

“It’s not just you she’s endangering, Tor.”

“Andyou’remaking assumptions, which is exactly why I’ll be doing the questioning.” I hung up before I said something I’d regret. My patience was already worn too thin.