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She gave me the same stare Ray had given me before returning her attention to her niece. They were too much alike. They both always seemed to be on high alert. Hazards of their profession, I suppose.
After the party ended and the guests had departed, I retreated to our bedroom to shuck my clothes and shower before climbing into bed, feeling ridiculously tired. Once Ray was done putting Blaze to bed, he did the same, pulling my body into his after joining me in the bed. We were both silent, recovering from the day’s events, when my phone rang.
“Ignore it,” Ray groaned.
“You ain’t gotta tell me twice,” I replied.
“Hello?” I said into my phone as I handed Blaze to Valentina, our part-time nanny. The name that’d popped up on the screen had me in shock just as it did when I looked at my phone earlier and saw that last night’s missed call was from this same person.
“Hey, Lilith. Been a while, huh?” Marlon replied.
I rushed into our bedroom, thankful that Ray was in the panic room talking to the twins. Closing the door behind me, I said, “Um, yes…it has.”
“How’ve you been?”
“Great. You?”
“I don’t know. I just…I was thinking about you. I heard you got married and had a baby. I’m sorry you never had any of that with me.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. For a second, I thought he was calling to tell me he remembered what happened, that my husband had kidnapped him and beat his ass.
“Well, I think it just wasn’t meant to be. It’s all good,” I said.
“Yeah. I reconciled with Felice for a while, but then…she committed suicide. That was several months ago. I…I just got around to packing up the things she’d brought to my place, and I found something strange.”
I caught myself holding my breath again, unable to respond.
He continued, “It was a whole bunch of stuff about you. Information. Notes. I’m not sure what she had going on, but it looks like she might’ve been obsessed with you. Her handwriting looks crazy on those papers. Felice had issues. She was sick, but she swore she’d healed.”
I could’ve pointed out how he never told me the whole truth about her illness but said fuck it. Did it really matter now?
“Maybe she gathered up all that stuff before we got back together? I don’t know,” he added.
Finding my voice, I said, “And you found this information with her things? In a closet or something?”
“No, in the freezer.”
“In the freezer? Why would it be in the freezer?”
“That’s where she kept important documents like her social security card, her emergency cash. She’d put that stuff in Ziplock bags and stuff them in the back of the freezer. She always had a fear of someone breaking in and robbing her. She was like that back when we first got together, so I knew to check the freezer.”
“Oh. Marlon, can I look at that stuff? I’d be interested to see what information she was able to gather. It might help me be better able to protect my privacy.”
“Yeah, sure. You can have it. I don’t need it.”
Ray removed the spy app from my phone shortly after he discovered Felice’s body. So, I deleted Marlon’s number from my call log and didn’t tell my husband about our conversation. I also didn’t tell him Marlon was mailing the information to my boutique. Things were good, he was deep in his real estate work, and I didn’t want anything to set him off. He was working hard to put the business of killing behind him, having left The Agency months earlier. I didn’t want the mention of Marlon’s name to make him relapse and decide to kill him.
When I told him I was going to do some work at the boutique the next week, his only request was that I not work long due to my current condition. Of course, Lore accompanied me, standing guard outside my office as I rifled through the papers Marlon sent. Much of it was nonsense. There were several sheets of paper covered from top to bottom with my name. Then, there was tons of information about me—my old business address, my primary physician’s name, my favorite stores and restaurants. How the fuck would Felice have known all this? Did Marlon tell her, and why would he? Wait, if he’d given her all this information, why would he send it to me?
Because the nigga has drug-induced amnesia, I reminded myself.
Everything was handwritten, and Marlon was right about the writing being all over the place. The penmanship of the gibberish and my repeated name was a horrible, slanted mess. While the details about me were written in an almost elegant cursive. I stared at those pages, thinking that the nice handwriting almost looked familiar to me. By the time I left my office and my boutique, I realized it was familiar. I also realized why.
37
Ican’t lie; I missed killing motherfuckers, but at the same time, having a family forced me to make the decision to retire. I just couldn’t do the shit anymore. So, I’d become a damn real estate demon—buying, flipping, selling, building, and on and on. I had three new construction projects going on at once. I liked staying busy and was able to keep the twins on my payroll by having them scout potential properties for me and manage some of my commercial sites and construction projects. When I wasn’t working, I was taking care of home. There was nothing better than being with my wife and daughter, especially since I didn’t have to worry about someone trying to harm them. Still, I was upset when I woke up this morning to find Lilith’s side of the bed empty. My worry only increased when I didn’t find her in the en-suite or Blaze’s bedroom.
By the time I finally located her sitting in the cold-ass backyard staring at nothing, I was totally pissed off because what the fuck?!
