8. Jude
8
JUDE
“I bartend at the Dive, a bar in Greenvale,” she said after taking a couple bites of her pancakes.
Nolan had pulled out all the stops with the breakfast: pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, fresh strawberries, the whole bit, and I wondered if he thought being nice to Lilah now would make up for what we’d done to her in high school.
Nolan was logical that way, but the Lilah thing didn’t have anything to do with logic.
“And?” Rafe demanded when she paused to take a drink from the fresh cup of coffee I’d just handed her.
I loved Rafe like a brother but the fucker really could be insufferable.
“ And that’s where the whole thing starts,” she said. “At the bar.”
I admired the bite in her voice. She’d been meek in high school, a walking doormat. I’d heard rumors that her mom was super religious, so maybe that was why, but she’d kept her head down, hair falling over her face like a shroud.
But she wasn’t meek now — that much was obvious — and she wasn’t going to take Rafe’s shit.
Good for her.
I sat down at the island as she continued.
“I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but it’s like every other dive bar up here, except every now and then this guy in a suit would come in with three big guys watching his back.”
I lifted my eyebrows. This was getting interesting. “Like bodyguards?”
“Maybe,” she said. “They definitely watched him like bodyguards. Anyway, every now and then this guy comes in with the… let’s call them bodyguards, and he asks to speak to Vic, the owner of the bar. They go into the backroom, have a conversation, and the guy in the suit leaves without even ordering a drink.”
“Is your boss laundering money?” Nolan asked.
“Worse,” she said. “I’m getting to that part.”
She wolfed down more of the pancakes and shoved an entire piece of bacon in her mouth, chewing like a savage, and I had to be honest, it was a fucking turn-on to watch her eat. Maybe it was just because she was starving, but she wasn’t shy about it and I kind of loved that.
She guzzled half her coffee in one go. “That’s really good coffee.”
“Thanks,” I said. I liked her more and more with every passing minute.
“So one night I go to take the trash out after closing, and I see Vic shoving some girl into a car,” she continued. “I only see the guy in the back seat for a second, but it’s definitely the guy in a suit, and one of his goons is standing there too.”
“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean ‘shove’? Are you saying they were kidnapping this girl?”
She hesitated. “I can’t say for sure, but she definitely didn’t seem happy about going and I’m pretty sure she’d been crying.”
Rafe swore. Missing girls weren’t a new thing around Blackwell Falls. First there was the scandal at the rich-fuck college, then the whole thing with Daisy Hammond and the fucking Blackwell Beasts. Except the people responsible in those cases were either dead or in jail.
So what the fuck was going on?
“Anyway,” Lilah said, “after that I decided to look around the office, see if I could find some kind of evidence that something shady was going on.”
“You didn’t call the police?” Nolan asked.
She moved her food around on her plate, finally slowing down. “I thought about it, but I didn’t have any proof the girl hadn’t gone willingly. I didn’t even know her name. I looked for her online, tried to see if anyone else had gone missing, but I couldn’t find anything.”
“Did you find anything in the office?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I didn’t have time. Vic caught me in there. I told him I was looking for an order we’d placed for something that was out of stock. I wasn’t sure if he believed me, but then some time passed and it seemed like everything was okay.”
“I’m guessing everything wasn’t okay?” Nolan asked.
She shook her head. “Last night I was taking out the trash after my shift and the car was there again. The guy in the suit was in the back seat, but this time his bodyguards came for me.”
“So you ran,” I said.
She nodded. “Into the woods behind the Dive."
“Where did the snowmobiles come from?” Rafe still didn’t look happy — when did he ever? — but his bad attitude had fallen to the wayside in the wake of Lilah’s story.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Vic maybe? He has a garage behind the bar. I’ve never been inside.”
I looked at Nolan and Rafe, a stream of unspoken communication running between us. I knew what they were thinking because I was thinking it too: would the assholes who’d chased Lilah be back?
They knew where she'd gone, knew she’d found harbor with us.
“Fuck,” Rafe said.
“I’m sorry I led them here,” Lilah said. “It wasn’t intentional. Honestly, I thought… I thought I was going to die out there.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” Nolan said. “We’re glad you found the house, glad we were able to help.” He looked from me to Rafe. “Right?”
“Hundred percent,” I said.
Nolan stared hard at Rafe. “Right?
He grunted and pushed off the counter, crossing the living room and disappearing into the hall.
“I’d go home if I could,” she said. There was a fierce light in her eyes.
“We know,” Nolan said. “Don’t mind him.”
I wanted to say the same, but the truth was, this was a bad situation. We’d all regretted what we’d done to Lilah in high school — it was pretty much the reason for everything we’d done since — but that didn’t mean she was safe here.
Because Lilah’s life was on fire, and we weren’t built to pull someone from the flames.
We were the fire.