Chapter 51
ROMAN
I let Jarrid drive me back to Lanton House, unable to focus on anything but Hana’s admission. She worked for Preston. He was her stepfather.
The words rolled around my head, recalibrating all the memories I’d forged with her.
Every conversation, every intimate moment, every shared experience…
were any of them real? Did she know who I was this whole time?
Is that why we got this case… because she was in on it?
Trying to play us, play me? My thoughts didn’t make sense.
I knew they didn’t, but I couldn’t stop them exploding like grenades.
“Hana showed up before Preston and Larson were killed.”
I turned to Jarrid, wondering if he could read my thoughts.
“I know what you’re thinking, but Thomas brought her here, remember? I think this is all some sick twist of fate.” He offered me a look of pity, and I hated it.
“You believe that? She shows up, people start dying, and then we get asked to investigate it? What if she killed them, Jarrid? What if I’m in love with a serial killer?”
Jarrid rolled his hands over the steering wheel as we drove down the motorway. Thomas had insisted that Hana travel back with him and Sean. I was glad for the distance, but the space between us had just given me more room to fill with questions.
“Do you think she killed them?” he asked quietly, and I appreciated he was letting me reach my own decisions rather than jumping to his own conclusions.
“She tricked me, sent me a message telling me she’d been kidnapped. Held me at gunpoint.”
“So you think she killed them?” he asked again.
I turned my attention to the world blurring past the window.
Did I really think she’d killed them? Was she capable of putting a gun to someone’s head or carjacking?
Although until a couple of days ago, I wouldn’t have thought she even knew how to hold a gun, let alone break into one of the most secure buildings in the country.
“No,” I said, listening to my gut and ignoring all the evidence that I was probably wrong.
I’d watched Hana for six years, and she’d not done a thing wrong.
The Hana I knew wasn’t a killer… was she?
“I don’t think she killed them, but she admitted that she worked for Preston, and that can’t be a good thing.
We think we know what the man was doing, so hearing she was involved is fucking with my head. I have so many questions.”
“We won’t be long, and then you can ask away. I don’t think Sean and Thomas are going to let her go anywhere until she explains everything. Hang fire, and you’ll get the answers you need.”
When we got to the basement, Hana was already there, sitting in one of the meeting rooms. It looked like a badly set-up interview with Hana on one side of the large wooden table and Thomas and Sean on the other.
Jarrid went to sit to the side of Sean, while I didn’t want to add to the weird power dynamic, so I took the seat next to Hana, telling myself it was the right thing to do and not that I was desperate to still protect her.
She offered me a grateful half smile, and I let my eyes rake over her, noticing instantly that she had on a man’s hoodie that wasn’t mine, and seeing her in someone else's clothes made me a little feral.
“She was cold, Roman. Calm your horses,” Sean informed me, making me again wonder if the people in this building were all mind readers or if I just wore my emotions far too clearly.
Hana glanced over at me again, looking incredibly small and vulnerable in the too large for her garment. The second our eyes locked, she looked down, picking at the cuffs as if she’d been looking at them the whole time.
“Okay, Hana, you have our undivided attention and the next fifteen minutes to convince me you’re not a serial killer trying to wipe out your stepfather’s entire inner circle so I don’t phone the police and hand you in,” Thomas started.
Her head popped up, her mouth and eyes wide. “I didn’t kill them. I swear.”
Sean huffed. “Yet they’re all dead, you’re not, and you’ve been sneaking about, doing fuck knows what.”
Hana licked her lips as if she knew this would take a while and preparing for the onslaught of words, but it was a few minutes of uncomfortable silence before she began to explain.
“Mum died when I was eight. She’d been on her own with Tony and me for years and worked herself almost to death.
Then, she met Preston, who promised her the world, but he was a cold, sick fuck.
I don’t really remember what they were like together, and Tony—” she looked around at her audience, “—he was my brother, never liked to talk about it, but Preston came down one morning and said she’d died in her sleep and had left us in his custody. ”
Her eyes glazed over, and I wasn’t sure if she was reliving the memory or fighting to keep her emotions at bay.
“From that moment on, our lives were never the same. Tony started working for him that very day, joining a gang that robbed rich people’s houses.
Preston knew a lot of rich people, and this was a fast way for him to earn some money.
He’d give the gang the addresses for a cut of what they made.
My stepfather had very expensive tastes, and this was, as he called it, ‘a risk-free investment’.
He waited until I was ten to start my ‘training’.
Stealing, breaking and entering, anything where they needed someone small or wanted a crime committed that no one would ever accuse a child of doing, I was there. Turns out, I’m a bloody good thief.”
Thomas rolled his eyes, but I knew he’d be impressed she managed to break in here, even if it meant security measures would be getting a glow up.
“The jobs got bigger, my part in them riskier. Until being a petty thief wasn’t enough for him.
No, daddy-dearest decided he wanted to branch out into espionage, concealment, actually, I don’t know what to call it, but he began to deal in secrets—he collected them, hid them, planted them, made them up and destroyed lives with them.
He did that for the most fucked up people who paid him a lot of money to cover up their crimes or destroy the people who tried to take them down.
“He had people help him. High-powered people, rich people, people with connections, but he needed someone to do the grunt work. That’s where I came in.
” A tear escaped, rolling down her cheek, and I had to sit on my hands to stop myself reaching out to make this better.
No, I needed to hear it all before I trusted myself to react.
“He explained his plan. I’d be responsible for the secrets.
I was his fixer. I’d break in to find them, I’d hack computers to leave them behind, I’d listen and learn, I’d do anything I needed to do to make a crime vanish, and I’d get away with it because I was just a kid and no one would believe a kid would do anything so fucked up. I was fifteen.
“I remembered his face when he’d sat me down at the dining table to tell me how my life would look after I agreed to his fucked up plan.
No school, no friends, no social life. I owed him my life, and he’d take payment again and again until he deemed my debt paid.
If I tried to leave, tried to tell anyone what was going on, tried to ruin what he was building, he wouldn’t kill me, he’d do much, much worse. ”
Her face lost all its colour, and she shook her head as if she was trying to rid herself of the memories. Seeing her like this was killing me, but I needed to know who Hana really was because right now, she felt like a stranger, and that hurt more than any admission could.
“I tried to say no, and I really did find some man in my room watching me sleep,” she said, her attention turned to me as if she was reminding me of the story she’d told me, so I knew it was real.
“But what I didn’t tell you was that someone had stripped me naked.
I had no recollection, so I’m guessing they drugged me, and I found some strange man rubbing his erection while talking about all the things he wanted to do to a fifteen-year-old. ”
Tears dripped from her chin that she didn’t even try to wipe away, just as a noise that sounded like I was being tortured ripped from my throat, but Thomas interjected.
“Are you okay to continue? Do you want me to get you a glass of water?” Hana looked at him gratefully, like she needed that moment of humanity.
“He also set Tony up. Had him arrested for the job he sent him on. And made sure he got maximum jail time. He told me it was my fault. That if I’d just done as he said, none of it needed to happen.
” She dropped her head, whispering, “He went to jail because I wouldn’t do as I was told. He died because of me.”
I moved so fast, I didn’t know what was happening until she was wrapped in my arms, sobbing into my neck, letting me absorb her guilt where it formed an alliance with my own, making me wonder if it was now so large it would consume us both.