Chapter 4
DYLAN
By day four in Cabo, I had developed three new problems.
One, I was getting too comfortable drinking cold Mexican beer in the sun like I was actually on vacation.
Two, I had a burner phone pressed to my ear and enough bad news coming through it to prove none of us were on vacation.
And three, Regan had apparently bought Destiny a swimsuit with the sole intention of ruining my life.
I sat beneath the shade of a wide white umbrella with my boots replaced by sandals, my cut replaced by an open linen shirt, and a bottle of Pacífico Clara sweating in my hand.
It was cold, crisp, pale gold, and better than the watered-down tourist beer everyone back home thought of when they pictured Mexico.
Real enough to make me resent how good it tasted.
My sunglasses were dark polarized aviators, the kind that let me watch without making it obvious. That was the point. Security. Observation. Threat assessment.
That was what I told myself anyway.
Across the pool, Destiny bent to straighten the towel she’d laid over one of the loungers, her dark hair spilling over one shoulder, the sun catching the new warmth in her skin.
Four days of salt water had done what sleep and medicine hadn’t quite managed.
Her color was better. The bruises along her arms had started fading from ugly purple into greenish yellow.
The swelling around her cheek had gone down.
The ocean had put life back into her body in small pieces.
She looked healthier.
That was what I noticed.
That was all I let myself notice.
Then she shifted, tugging at the edge of the towel, and my hand tightened around the beer bottle hard enough to make the glass creak.
I turned my head toward the ocean.
“Regan bought that suit to torture me,” I muttered under my breath.
The worst part was Destiny knew it too.
Not the torture part. Not fully. But she knew I was trying not to look. She knew because Destiny had always been too sharp for her own good and too wounded to let any weakness in a man pass unstudied.
She adjusted her sunglasses, glanced my way, and smiled like trouble had learned to wear sunscreen.
Four days.
Four days until eighteen.
That number sat in my skull like a lit cigarette.
It didn’t change a damn thing today.
It didn’t erase what she had survived. Didn’t erase the fact that she was raw, hunted, healing, and surrounded by men making decisions over her head because every adult in her life was scared enough to become controlling.
It didn’t erase Edge.
It sure as hell didn’t erase me.
I looked down at the burner phone on the table when it buzzed.
Callum.
I answered and kept my voice low. “Yeah.”
“You alone?”
I glanced around.
Nate was at the outdoor bar flirting with a waitress for information and two extra limes. Regan was inside with Destiny’s lawyer on video. Destiny was still by the pool, pretending not to watch me pretend not to watch her.
“As alone as I get,” I said.
Callum grunted. “Give me the grave.”
My jaw tightened.
The ocean moved below the cliffside villa, blue and careless.
I took one drink of beer before answering. It went down cold and bitter.
“Defaced,” I said. “Red spray paint. Across Mandy’s name.”
Callum went silent.
I could feel his rage through the line.
“What did it say?”
I leaned back in the chair and looked at the sky because looking anywhere else pulled me back to that hill. To Destiny on her knees. To her hands turning red while she tried to scrub hate off a dead woman’s stone with the sleeve of my jacket.
“Whore,” I said. “And under that, like mother, like daughter.”
Callum cursed softly.
“Destiny saw it?” he asked.
“She was the one who found it.”
Another silence.
This one worse.
“She tried to clean it off,” I said.
My voice came out rougher than I liked.
Callum heard it.
Callum heard everything.
“That where your head is?” he asked.
“My head is here.”
“Didn’t ask where your body was.”
I took another pull from the bottle. “My head is on the job.”
“Good. Keep it there.”
I didn’t answer.
Callum let it sit for one second, then moved on because he was a good president and a better bastard when the situation called for it.
“JD’s pressing hard,” he said. “And I mean hard. He’s got the lawyers, the old money people, the school board contacts, the country club snakes, all of them moving.”
“What’s the angle?”
“Airtight bullying case. Hazing, harassment, stalking, drugging, defamation, desecration of a grave. You name it, they stepped in it.”
I sat forward.
“Tell me.”
“They got group chats. Snapchats. Deleted messages. Videos. Photos. Hackers dug up everything. And apparently, this wasn’t the first time Mandy’s grave got touched.”
My blood cooled.
“What?”
“Wasn’t the first time,” Callum repeated. “Someone had a camera up.”
“At the grave?”
“In a tree above it. Hidden. Motion-activated. Somebody got tired of that grave being messed with and set a trap.”
I looked toward Destiny.
She was sitting on the edge of the lounger now, one leg tucked beneath her, head tilted down while she pretended to read something on her phone. Sunlight ran along her shoulders. A breeze lifted her hair. She looked like any other girl by a pool.
She wasn’t.
She had never gotten the luxury of being any other girl.
“Caught them?” I asked.
“All of them,” Callum said. “Rich girls. Boyfriends. A few hangers-on. Faces clear enough to ruin futures. One of them held the camera while the others sprayed the stone. Another laughed about Destiny. Another said if Destiny wanted to act like Mandy, she deserved Mandy’s ending.”
The beer in my hand was suddenly a bad idea.
Too breakable.
Too tempting.
I set it down carefully.
“Names?”
“JD has them.”
“Edge?”
“Not yet.”
I closed my eyes. “Smart.”
“Temporary,” Callum said. “Nobody’s stupid enough to keep that from him long.”
No.
They weren’t.
And when Edge found out exactly whose daughters had stood over Mandy’s grave and painted filth across his dead woman’s name and his living daughter’s bloodline, there wouldn’t be enough lawyers in New Mexico to keep bones inside bodies.
“Judge?” I asked.
“Pissed as shit,” Callum said. “Warrants were supposed to put pressure on us. Instead, JD flipped the table. They thought Destiny was going to hang, and now we’ve got their kids, their clubs, their college futures, and about thirty family reputations sitting under a lid JD can blow off whenever he wants. ”
I glanced toward the villa doors.
Regan moved past the glass, barefoot, phone in hand, looking calm enough to command an army.
“Crime for a crime,” I said.
“More like leverage for leverage,” Callum corrected. “They wanted to make Destiny the story. JD is about to make them the story. He said no Ivy League dean wants to touch a kid tied to hazing, drugging, bullying, and defacing a grave.”
I almost smiled.
Almost.
“That sounds like JD.”
“Oh, it gets better,” Callum said. “He personally knows deans at some of those schools, courtesy of daddy’s money and all those endowments his family used to throw around. Harvard. Yale. Princeton. A few others. He’s already making polite calls.”
“Polite,” I repeated.
“Rich people polite,” Callum said. “Which means smiling with a knife between his teeth.”
That did make me smile.
Only for a second.
Then I looked back at Destiny.
She had lowered herself into the pool. The water moved around her waist. She tipped her face toward the sun and closed her eyes.
Healing.
Hiding.
Both at once.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked.
“Keep her in Mexico.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
I exhaled slowly.
“The cops still want to question her,” Callum said. “But she’s seventeen, on vacation, out of the country, and represented by lawyers who told them to cool their heels. They can request. They can posture. They can leak. But they can’t put hands on her right now.”
“And when she comes back?”
“She can’t. Not yet.”
The words settled heavy.
“Not because she’s facing jail time,” Callum continued. “That’s not where this is headed if JD keeps doing what he’s doing. But because the town’s a powder keg. We trapped them in their own game and turned the tide against them. That makes people desperate.”
I rubbed a hand over my clean jaw.
Still hated it.
“She starts over here, they slash her tires,” Callum said. “They follow her. Film her. Bait her. Leak photos. Whisper in bathrooms. Pay people to watch her. You know how this goes.”
Yeah.
I did.
Girls like Destiny didn’t get left alone just because the truth came out. Sometimes truth made the mob angrier. Sometimes innocence made people crueler because admitting they were wrong meant admitting they had enjoyed the punishment.
“We’ll have to triple security,” Callum said. “This shit will take years to cool off from.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
I looked toward Regan again. She had stopped near the balcony doors, eyes on Destiny. Calm face. Sharp gaze. Nothing got past that woman.
“Does Regan know?”
Callum huffed. “Regan knows everything.”
“She know about the camera?”
“She knew before I did.”
Of course she did.
“The men are calling her the general,” Callum added.
“They should.”
“Keep an eye on Dylan too,” Callum said.
I stilled.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“I am Dylan.”
“No shit. I’m saying keep an eye on yourself.”
My jaw flexed.
Callum’s voice softened by half an inch, which for him meant he might as well have reached through the phone and put a hand on my shoulder.
“She’s been through hell. You were there. That makes things feel bigger than they are.”
I looked at Destiny again.
She had opened her eyes.
Even behind her sunglasses, I knew she was looking at me.
“No,” I said quietly. “It makes things exactly as big as they are.”
Callum said nothing.
“I won’t cross lines,” I added.
“I know.”
“Then why say it?”
“Because sometimes the line isn’t what a man does. It’s what he lets himself want.”
That hit too close.
I didn’t answer.
Callum let it sit.
Then he said, “Stay sharp.”
“I am.”