26. — birds fly. #2
As he hadn’t come from the estate’s security staff, she didn’t know where Larkin found him or how he got the job of protecting and escorting them all over hell’s creation.
Another thing not to ask.
The other man, currently showering, she did know from the estate. Dannik. He spoke very little English, but understood it well enough, the Frenchman, but he’d sure mastered how to tell Frankie no without a hint of accent.
Could she go outside for a walk? No.
Could she change the movie to the news? No.
Could she order her own food from a hotel she didn’t even know the name of? No.
She couldn’t remember a time, ever, in her life when she had been told that word as much as she heard it in the last three weeks.
“If they all come to an agreement at the table today,” Larkin said outside, “then we’ll be back home soon enough.”
“Good,” Carina murmured. “He’ll do it. Sal can do—”
“Stop eavesdropping,” Gabe said louder.
Spinning to glare at the man, she replied, “The door is open, they left it that way.”
“Go find something else to do,” Gabe told her.
“Like what, watch paint peel?”
“There’s no paint peeling going on here. This suite is six grand a night.”
Fascinating. Frankie wished she cared. “I’m bored as shit.”
“Yeah, well—”
“Are you arguing with him again, Frankie?” came Larkin’s voice behind her. Now, she spun back around to the glass doors. Larkin smirked where he leaned against the side tracks. “For the record, he’s not paid to listen to you complain, either.”
Apparently, they weren’t paid to do a lot of things. Just annoy her. “I wasn’t complaining, I’m bored.”
“And eavesdropping,” Gabe added. “Can’t forget that.”
“Rat,” Frankie hissed back at him.
Gabe didn’t look concerned or offended. He probably was paid to rat her out.
Larkin shook his head, eyeing Gabe and then Frankie like he didn’t know what to do between the two of them. The guy didn’t like to talk that much, but Frankie made it her mission to argue with him at least five times a day lately. She had to do something.
“All right,” Larkin muttered, tipping his head back toward the balcony, “come sit out here with us, Frankie.”
“Oh, do I finally get to be a part of the big secret, too?”
“It’s no secret. It’s business.”
She didn’t understand, but...didn’t that sum up her whole life?
“And no,” Larkin added, tossing it over his shoulder as an afterthought. “No, you can’t be part of the secret. It’s a club, you’re not invited.”
His joke stunned her momentarily. “You know,” she said, finding a place to sit in the heated, glass balcony next to Carina and her words at the same time, “I wouldn’t have thought you were so funny.”
Larkin kicked back to relax in the lounge chair, grinning. “My first love was comedy.”
“Really?”
“No, I’m bullshitting you. My first love was a woman named Beth. Now I pay her twenty thousand a month in alimony to fund her vacations with her flavor of the year. At least, I don’t have to pay child support anymore for kids I’m not allowed to see.”
Carina pressed her lips together at the comment, silent otherwise.
Frankie gaped. “You have kids?”
“Five, actually. They’re all grown up now.”
“Why couldn’t you see them?”
“The court decided my PTSD, my job, and the man I work for, were not appropriate for children. That’s what I got for splitting my first paycheck from your father with my ex-wife.
I thought I was doing the right thing, making sure she was taken care of even if we weren’t together.
She just took that money and ran with it as fast as she could to the most expensive divorce and child custody lawyers she could hire.
I barely got to see my kids at that point anyway, and when I did... ”
His words trailed off as he sighed. “When I did see them, they acted like entirely different children than the ones I helped raise. Although, if you asked my ex-wife, I didn’t help raise them at all because six to eight months out of the year saw me on missions with the team.
She sure loved asking for another one every time I came home, though. ”
Frankie chewed on her inner cheek, looking to Carina to see her pressing the heel of her palm into the top of her rounded stomach as she made a strange face. “You okay?”
Carina nodded. “Oh, yeah...just normal discomfort today.”
The way Carina’s face contorted slightly, brows pinching together like she felt pain, made Frankie concerned.
“You’re sure that you are all right?” she asked her stepmother.
Carina just waved a hand. “Fine, really. You should tell her that story, Larkin.”
“Hmm? Which one?”
“How you met Sal, and how he got you to work for him.”
“Ah.” Larkin’s gaze darted to Frankie. “Do you want to hear it?”
“Tell me,” Frankie said, needing the distraction.
Sinking into the chair, she felt swallowed in Nico’s sweater. She only took it off to send it to get washed by the hotel’s laundry staff, but that had its downsides, too. It didn’t smell like him anymore.
“It was what,” Larkin posed, not really asking a question, “something like seven years after he’d married his first wife. Right, Carina?”
“About that,” she agreed. Legs up on the coffee table in front of them, she continued pushing against the top of her stomach and shifting slightly in her chair.
Frankie kept one eye on her while Larkin talked.
“Anyway,” Larkin said while stretching his neck back and forth, “his in-laws, your mother’s parents, were dead by then because he and Delilah had control of the Dove money at that point.
I was speaking at an event for veterans with PTSD.
After I got up there and talked about how I didn’t believe PTSD was a thing until I lost three quarters of my team in a five-minute span on a mission that should have been cut and dry, and walked away with every symptom known to man, your father came to speak to me. ”
“At the event?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Why was he there?” Frankie asked.
“A friend thought he needed to accept some things about himself that he hadn’t been ready to deal with and figured getting him to sit through a bunch of war vet speakers would make him just enough removed from his own experiences to see what he was dealing with.”
“PTSD,” Frankie said quietly. “That’s what you mean.”
Larkin shrugged. “It’s harder to accept things about yourself when you feel like the direct cause of it. From that, I speak with experience, which is why I think, your father came to find me after the event, specifically.”
“What’d he say to you?”
“Offered me a job.”
Frankie’s eyes widened, making Larkin laugh. “Just like that?”
“Well, no. First, he asked how much it would cost for me to build him a twenty-four-hour, year-round security team. I honestly didn’t know what I was dealing with, but given I’d taken my leave from the Seals, couldn’t go home to my wife because she wouldn’t have me, and I didn’t have anything to do... I just made up a number.”
“Which was?”
“Thirty million a year.”
Frankie’s mouth fell open again. “That’s a lot.”
“Not for your father. Well, at the time, the money was your mother’s. But that’s neither here nor there because mentally she wasn’t in any state to handle money, let alone herself.”
“What does that mean?”
Larkin passed a glance to Carina who sighed.
“Does it have to be me?” she asked him.
“Better than me, I think.”
Frankie gestured between them. “What am I missing?”
“They had a rough few years,” Carina eventually explained. “Your mother and father. It was...bad.”
Larkin scoffed. “More than a few.”
“How rough?” Frankie demanded.
Carina squinted into the view beyond the glass balcony where a blanket of snow glittered from the sunshine overhead. “Your mother stopped painting. Stopped eating. Slept her days away. I know he had her committed at least once. That was the second time she’d tried to kill herself.”
Frankie couldn’t breathe. “But...why?”
“Let Larkin finish his story and then maybe we’ll get back around to that.”
Carina looked to Larkin, who nodded.
“Anyway, on the spot, he wrote me a check. Four times what I’d asked for, and said it was the next four years of my life the moment I cashed it.”
“Huh.”
Larkin nodded like he understood her lack of suitable words.
“What’s crazier is in the next breath, he wrote me a second check, twice the size of the first one.
Told me it was spending money for the team and whatever else we needed to make his family and property safe.
I didn’t get the full story about just who I had to protect him from until around the time you were born, but it didn’t matter.
We’d become friends. Not saying I’d do it for free, but uh, I don’t spend a whole lot of money, either. ”
No, he didn’t.
Frankie noticed that, too.
And even the security team’s house wasn’t very big or anything to scoff at on the Gallo property. She had never been inside it, and the men rotated their shifts, coming and going from the property. Except for Larkin. He lived there.
Carina made another face in her seat, eyes closing as if to wait out whatever feeling currently passing through her body. Frankie tried to take note of how long it had been since she did it the last time, but she didn’t even have a watch to keep time.
“True loyalty speaks for itself,” Larkin said, suddenly standing from the chair. “I’ll be right back, ladies.”
“Carina?” Frankie asked when her stepmother’s eyes stayed closed.
Blowing out a slow, steady breath, Carina eventually replied, “Yes?”
“I’m starting to think you’re not okay.”
“Right now, I’m fine.”
“Yeah, but—”
Carina’s eyes popped open without warning. “What did you take from that story of Larkin’s?”
“Um, I don’t know. A couple of things.”
“Like...?”
Frankie toyed with a strand of hair, wrapping it and unwrapping it around her finger. “My mother wasn’t doing okay for a long time. Neither was Daddy.”
“Mmhmm.”
“Are you going to tell me why?”
Carina nodded. “I am, and then I’m going to tell you something else as well.”
“Okay. Can I ask a question first?”
“Sure.”
“When did Sissy get hired? I can’t remember, it just felt like she was always there.”