Chapter 12 Angel
By the time I got home, I was exhausted. The four tires were not only expensive, but they needed to be aligned, and it just took entirely too long.
It was almost midnight, and although I was hungry, I wasn’t in the mood to cook. I didn’t have bread to make a sandwich, and with a disgruntled sigh, I made my way to my bedroom, disrobing as I did so.
Passing through the bedroom, I entered my bathroom and turned the shower on as I took off the rest of my clothes, dropping them in the hamper. Wrapping the towel around me, I went back into my bedroom to grab a hair tie.
The lingerie on the bed caught my eye, and I stopped, stilling as my arms froze above me in the process of gathering my hair up.
Hesitantly, I took a step forward to study the bra and panties lying on my bed that weren’t mine. Nor had I put them there.
White lacy lingerie, so delicate and innocent looking. My mouth was dry as I looked around my bedroom.
Someone had been in my house.
Were they still here?
I couldn’t move. The fact that I may not be alone had glued me to the spot, and I couldn’t move. Fear clutched at my throat, making it impossible to swallow, and I felt the goose bumps break out all over my body.
Shit. What do I do?
Hearing a dog bark broke my paralysis, and turning on my heel, I ran out of my bedroom, my feet pounding on the floor as I ran to the kitchen, grabbed my purse, and then I was outside, on my lawn, in a towel as I scrambled for my cell.
My hands grabbed my car key, and that’s how the police found me thirty minutes later, locked in my SUV, in a towel and trembling.
“You okay to come out?” the officer asked me.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
He assessed me, and with a nod, he told me he was going to check the house and then come back and get me.
A female officer followed him, and then she came and got me roughly ten minutes later and accompanied me to my bedroom, waiting until I’d thrown on PJs, and then followed me to my living room.
“You okay?” the male officer asked me as I sat on my sofa.
“No,” I told him truthfully.
“Talk me through your evening,” he encouraged as he sat and took out his notebook.
Running through my night after I left work, I told them about the four slashed tires and then going to the garage to get the car fixed.
I gave him the name and the number of the garage I had called.
I told them the time I got home and that I had been heading for the shower when I saw the lingerie on my bed.
“I didn’t turn the shower off,” I said as I looked over my shoulder.
“I did,” the female officer reassured me.
“Thank you.”
“Has anything else happened recently?” the male officer asked me, and I told them about the dead flowers and the card. Crossing over the floor, I went to get the card from the drawer where I left it.
It was gone.
Icy fingers of fear traced down my back, and I grabbed my purse and searched my wallet. “It was here, I know it was,” I said as I searched again.
“Anyone else have a key?” the male officer asked me.
“No, just me.”
“Boyfriend maybe? Girlfriend?”
“No,” I told him with more force. “I’m the only one with a key to my home.”
He acknowledged my answer with a tight smile as he looked around the room, his attention on the kitchen cabinets. “You have workmen coming in?”
“No, officer, it’s a DIY project I’m doing myself; trust me, no one has a key to my house.”
“Okay, ma’am.” He gave me another look and then told his colleague he was going to check the house one more time.
“How many times does he need to ask the same question?” I grumbled as I searched my purse again for the card.
“You’d be amazed how many people tell us no one has a key and then remember the neighbor has the spare, the plumber has a copy in case of emergencies, their brother has one,” the female officer said gently to me. “You’re freaked out. It’s okay to be.”
I heard what she was saying, but I had three keys to my house, and they were all on the same keyring. Walking over to the door, I picked up my keys from the hook.
“I live alone, I don’t know my neighbors that well, I have no siblings that live near me, and I’ve never had a workman . . .”
“What is it?” the officer asked me as I stopped talking.
“I had three keys,” I told her as I held the keyring up. “One’s gone.” Looking at her, she came to stand beside me, and her hand reached out for my keys.
“You sure you haven’t—”
“Trust me,” I cut her off.
“Okay.” She gave me a smile of reassurance and turned to her partner, who had come back into the room. “We’re missing a copy,” she told him. “Taken off the bunch.”
He held his hand out and studied the keyring. “You leave your purse unattended often?”
Did I? No. “Only at work,” I answered. My foot started to tap off the floor, and he suggested I sit down.
“Where do you work, Ms. Balan?” and as he asked, he took a seat.
“Saints Sports Management,” I answered, and I saw his speculative look. “I’m a sports agent.”
“Yeah? Cool.” He flashed me a smile, and this one actually looked genuine. “Where’s your office? You have your own office or open plan?”
“Office is on Commerce, and no to open plan. Agents have their own offices. Client confidentiality.”
He made notes as I spoke, as I tried to remember every time I had been away from my purse over the last two weeks. Which was as exhausting as it was frustrating.
“I don’t know,” I ended up saying. “But you literally cannot walk anywhere in that building without a camera on you.”
“Sounds intense,” he commented.
“The owner’s got . . . issues.”
The officer looked at me and then glanced at his partner. “How’s your relationship with him? Her?”
“Him. Thorny,” I grunted. I saw his assumption and realized where he was going with this. “No, not that way. We have a working relationship, nothing more.”
“Saints Sports Management,” he mused before he smiled widely. “Onyx Santo?”
Of course, they would know who he was. “Yes,” I confirmed.
“His brothers are killing it for the Cardinal Saints. And the cousin, have you seen his stats?” he asked me.
“Yes, I’m aware of how talented they are.”
“Those boys are going to get drafted top three, I say,” he told me before his colleague cleared her throat.
“So, thorny? That’s an interesting word choice.
” When I said nothing, he pressed. “You work for him, you have a . . . fair to say tense?” When I nodded, he carried on, “Tense relationship. He has access to the camera system, the camera system that went down today when your tires were slashed, and he was in the parking lot when you found your car.”
“Onyx wouldn’t do this.” Would he? He did like to play games, but slashing tires didn’t fit him.
“You have a sexual relationship with him?”
I blinked. “No.”
“Have you had one?” he pressed again.
“Why?”
The officer looked to his colleague and then back at me.
“You’re an attractive woman. You tell me you have a tense relationship with a work colleague; usually, nine out of ten times, there’s history.
You work with him. He has access to your office, your purse.
He has access to the surveillance . . .”
“Are you implying he therefore has access to me?” I asked him incredulously.
“You have lingerie on your bed,” the female officer spoke softly, “in your size. It’s possible you know who came into your home, someone you have history with.”
“I can assure you that Onyx Santo is not creeping into my home and leaving underwear on my bed,” I told them as I stood. “What else do you need to do here tonight?”
The two of them looked at each other. “Well . . .”
“That’s it?” I asked in surprise. “Don’t you need to get fingerprints or anything?”
The fact that I knew he was trying not to laugh at me made me angrier. “Um, no.”
As the female officer talked me through the process of what would happen next, I watched the male officer look around my house.
“You think it’s Onyx?” I cut the other officer off. He opened his mouth, and I stopped him. “Trust me, this wasn’t him.”
“How can you be so sure?” he asked. “You said you got dead flowers. He was with you in the elevator when you got them. Did he see you open them?”
“No, I was in my car.” And then I thought about it. “He did see me after it. I was in my car, and he beeped his horn at me a little later.”
“So he saw you, or he wanted to see you?”
Clenching my fists, I nodded. “Yes, he saw me. I had been in the car for some time. He’d left and come back again.”
“Okay, tonight, the car — he was with you?”
“No, I was alone.”
“But he turned up?”
This was completely wrong, but I couldn’t deny it. “Yes.”
“Was he the one who told you the cameras were down?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
“And he left you?” He cocked his head to the side.
“I told him I could handle it.”
“So he knew your house was empty while you handled it?”
“I guess.”
“And that seems okay to you? For him to leave you when you have four tires slashed, which are done obviously with ill intent?”
“We’re not close. I told him I would handle it, and I did.”
“You work with him or for him?” He seemed to consider it. “Either way, he has access to your office. He has access to the parking garage. He has access to the cameras. You have a relationship with him as a co-worker if nothing else.”
“What are you saying?” I asked him. “There is no relationship,” I reminded him.
“I’m saying, Ms. Balan, if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, my hunch is that we need to talk to Onyx Santo and find out if he’s the duck.”
I closed my eyes in despair. When the officers finally left, it was two in the morning, and I had no idea how I was going to tell Onyx that Nashville PD were intent on treating him as a person of interest in my home break-in.
Or a duck of interest.
I snort-laughed. I was losing my mind because that really wasn’t funny.
Fuck, I needed to tell him before they did.
I knew with every bone in my body that Onyx Santo had not broken into my home. It was beneath him. Plus, I didn’t warrant that amount of attention from him. As he said, if he wanted to scare me, he would do it more permanently. Thank God I hadn’t told the officers that.
Turning my cell over in my hand, I wondered if I should call him now.
He’d be sleeping. My memory took me back to the night I slept with him.
He told me he was an insomniac. He had been so open and honest, and I had been so at ease with him, so much so that I had committed the cardinal sin of having sex with a guy I had just met.
I just hadn’t known then that everything he said was a lie, until the next morning when his friend had high-fived him for winning him three hundred bucks.
Familiar anger rose within me. Onyx Santo pissed me off, but if I was honest with myself, I was angrier with myself for letting my guard down and falling for his bullshit.
As I paced my kitchen floor, I kept looking at my phone.
Fuck it.
Grabbing it, I scrolled to his name and pressed his number. As the phone rang, I almost hung up twice, and then he answered.
“You better be dying to call me at this hour.”
“Hi.”
“Get to the point.”
“The police are going to come by the office tomorrow to ask you some questions.”
Silence.
“I, um, I had to call them—”
“You’re calling me at two-thirty to tell me the police are coming to talk to me about your tires?”
He was right to sound pissed, and I knew he was about to be a whole lot more than pissed. “Well,” clearing my throat, I plunged on, “it’s more than that.”
“Have I ever given you the impression that I’m patient?” he snapped at me. “Get to the point.”
I’d been about to tell him everything, but his tone, his complete assholeness was enough to make me swallow my words. “That was it, just that they may contact you about the tires.”
I heard the disconnect and knew he had hung up.
Asshole.
Standing in my kitchen in the early hours of the morning, I looked around, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel safe.
Someone had been in my house. Someone had been in my house and had been through my things.
The police had taken the lingerie, and thank Christ they had, because if it was still here, I may have just set fire to the bed.
I was so tired. Rational thought told me to lie on the couch and try to sleep, but all I could think about was that someone had been in my house. Someone had a key to my house.
Pulling on a cardigan, I opened the back door and crossed the yard quickly to the shed.
Trying not to disturb my neighbors, I found the tools I needed and the two deadbolts I had bought when I first bought my own home.
I hadn’t needed them, but now I was so glad I was one of those people who had “just in case” items in her storage shed.
Back in my house, I prayed I was quick as I drilled holes quickly in the door, and within fifteen minutes, I had a deadbolt attached to the front and back doors. Only then was I able to lie down on the makeshift bed on my couch with any chance of sleep.
The morning came too soon, but I was so happy to leave my house behind. It saddened me as much as it relieved me.