Chapter 52
ROMAN
“I’ve fucked up so much,” she mumbled before easing out of my hold, glancing up at me, her guilt-filled eyes red-rimmed. “I was their pawn.”
“What sorts of things did you do, Hana?” Sean asked in a much kinder voice, as if the men in this room were softening after hearing her story.
“Everything. I mean, obviously, the breaking and entering, I learned how to do some basic hacking, I’m pretty amazing at knowing where CCTV is and how to avoid it.
Preston used to call me his ghost.” Her face twisted at the sound of his name, like it was poisoning her to say it.
“Planting drugs, evidence, compromising crime scenes, setting up alibies for people.” She pushed her hair back from her face.
“That was my first job. Larson. You know about him, right?”
Sean nodded.
“Well, he was drunk and ran someone over. Preston arranged for the whole thing to go away. I had to create a narrative so he had an alibi. If you search, you’d find him out for dinner with his wife, even though his wife wasn’t even in the city that night.”
Thomas shifted in his seat, placing his locked hands on the table. “You were fifteen,” he said as a statement of fact rather than a question. “That’s a pretty impressive set of skills you have.”
Hana scoffed, her tear-stained face hardening. “It’s amazing what you learn to do to survive, Mr Lanton. You forget that Preston probably killed my mum and sent my brother to prison on a whim. I learned what I had to in order to survive, and I did it well.”
She sniffed, wiping her fingers under her nose before she spoke again.
“I hate what I did. What I did helped bad people do more bad things—they brought down businesses, put innocent people in prison and kept guilty ones out. I’ve discredited witnesses, bribed people to change their story, shared secrets that ruined people.
” Her voice wavered as if the weight of her past was too heavy to carry any longer.
I winced, wondering if we’d ever recover from the lies that formed the foundation of our relationship.
Biting the inside of my cheek, I let her continue.
“About six years ago, I started to pay attention. I was desperate to find a way, and I knew Preston’s team was his weakness.
I asked my stepfather if I could stop working for him, and he laughed in my face…
like me having a choice in it was hysterical.
I think that day broke me… or at least highlighted how broken I’d been all those years.
He’d blackmailed me to make me do what he wanted, and I refused to do it a moment longer.
“I offered him another chance to let me go, but he ignored me. Two days later, one of his key contacts was arrested for trafficking guns and drugs because of evidence I planted. I mean, this bloke was absolutely trafficking and so much more, but I made sure the police found out, and there was no way for anyone to help him get off on a technicality. Daddy wasn’t impressed, but I think I scared him enough for him to realise he couldn’t control me anymore.
I wasn’t the fifteen-year-old he dragged into a life of crime; I was a grown-arse woman who was taking her life back. ”
Thomas pushed up from the chair and walked across the room to stand next to the floor-to-ceiling windows, staring out as he crossed his arms over his chest.
“He agreed to let me go and never contact me again if I left that night. I walked away with just the clothes on my back, and I found a crappy apartment and an even crappier job. I’d like to say that him letting me walk away made me feel good, but it didn’t; the guilt of what I did ate me alive, and for a long time, I wondered if I should be locked up.
I punished myself until I came to this place…
to the diner. It was like the universe offered me a second chance.
But I should have known it wouldn’t last because a few weeks ago, I had a call from my stepfather.
He needed one last job and threatened to release the receipts he’d kept on the things I’d done for him over the years and put me away for life. ”
“That’s why you vanished?” I asked, everything suddenly making sense.
“Larson had been killed, and Preston was shitting himself. He wanted me to break into Larson’s office and make sure there was nothing incriminating in there.
Of course, there was, so I had to remove all traces that he had any links to Preston.
” She paused. “I didn’t kill any of them.
I’d walked away from that life, and I never wanted to go back to it.
” Her eyes locked on mine, silently begging me to believe her, and deep down, I did. Her pain was palpable.
“Then the others started dying. All the main players who were in Preston’s inner circle.
I mean, with all those men in his pocket, he could do just about anything.
He thought he was above the law. But with each story that hit the news, I began to get more and more scared until I realised one thing: I’m the last one left. ”