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I can’t believe this is happening. My world is crumbling all around me, and I can’t do anything to stop it. Everything I’ve known all along—that I thought to be true—seems to be a lie. Turns out I didn’t know anything after all.
That was very clearly my dad’s voice, and although I find it difficult to accept, it didn’t seem faked. My dad had been speaking to them like he cared for them. Like they were friends.
I swallow the lump in my throat. All I want to do is curl up in a ball and cry. It’s the first time I’ve heard his voice in so long. I’ve missed him so much, and yet, I can’t shake the feeling that I don’t deserve to hear it.
He’d chosen to spend his last moments talking to them, which quite frankly, hurt.
Daddy had left me a text that he loved me, but he hadn’t called me. Maybe he didn’t want to have me distressed during his last moments and was trying to save me from even greater heartache, but he had chosen to speak with them instead of me.
I thought their names being in his journal meant they were his enemies. Thinking about it now, it was a conclusion I came to onmy own. I jumped to that conclusion and proceeded to spend the next three years of my life preparing to join the police because of it.
I wasted three years of my life thinking I was going to avenge my father, when I never even knew him at all.
My heart hurts and I can’t stop the jealousy and pain coursing through me. It feels like someone is sitting on my chest.
“Why did you think we killed your dad?” Rueben asks, reminding me of his presence in the room.
I sniffle, blinking away the hurt. “I saw your names in his journal, so I thought that you were the ones responsible for his death.”
I hate how small my voice suddenly is. This revelation has stumped me.
“He didn’t write about Flames of Hell?”
I frown in confusion. I had heard that a few times now. “Who is Flames of Hell?”
Rueben wears a blank expression as he explains. “It’s a bigger gang than ours, and the ones we were doing business with when we met your father. They’re the ones who had the connections and cash to make the deal we were involved in back then happen. They needed us to handle the legwork, because we were better at that sort of thing, and the whole thing was Tanner’s idea. We did have a part in the loot. We invested our money in it as well, so we had a sixty-forty split with Flames of Hell.”
He sits on the sofa, a little way off from me.
“The reason we met your dad was because he was the one in charge of the deal. He was the one who used to meet with us and do business with us. He was the middleman between us and Flames of Hell, basically. Your dad was our supervisor while we carried out the…missions that they needed us to do in order for the deal to be a successful one.”
Rueben chuckles disbelievingly. “He really had us all fooled. Even those bastards seem to have thought he was one of them. I mean, he did infiltrate their gang.”
I nod despite myself. This is a secret part of my dad’s life that I didn’t know about. I drink in all the details greedily.
“We didn’t go into the operation liking him or trusting him much. After all, he was one of them as far as we were concerned, and although we had business to do together, that was all it was. We had expected him to be abrasive and annoying sometimes since they were the bigger gang and often liked to remind us of it.”
I can’t help my watery smile. There was no way dad would have ever been that kind of person. Not even if he hadn’t been a cop.
Rueben continues. “We didn’t expect to become friends with him, but it wasn’t long before we did. He often asked us to join him for lunch to discuss business instead of in an office. Sometimes, we did discuss business. However, most of the time, he really only wanted us to eat with him.”
He is hard to read, but I feel like he is lost in memories as he says, “Soon, he wanted us to have a meeting place. Which we did. We moved into an apartment together, so that whenever we needed to talk about our operation or show him something we had picked up, he would be there. It was more convenient.”
His lips turn upwards and his face brightens as he continues. “He would make us breakfast and take care of us like we were his friends. Before we knew what was happening, we had all sort of become exactly that. Friends.”
It seems like despite Dad’s betrayal, they truly cared for him and saw him as a friend.
“We didn’t see what he did as a betrayal,” he says, as though he read my thoughts and wanted to clarify that. “He must have really seen us as friends, considering he was the one that called us. We didn’t find out about him being a cop from someone else. He’d made sure to tell us himself, no matter how long it’d taken him.”
Rueben regards me with a barely there smile. “He’d even tried to tell us where the stash was. We’ve been looking for the stash since then, but we couldn’t find it. Since those Flames of Hell bastards and the police killed your dad, we also couldn’t let them get their hands on it either. We’ve listened to the recording over and over again, trying to piece together what he meant by his treasure will bring us the treasure, but we simply couldn’t figure it out.”
He shakes his head. “We’d found out his real name, and yet we couldn’t figure it out. It came as a shock when Tanner’s spy told us that the police were bringing his daughter. We finally figured out that he must have told you about it.”
I tense up as he says those words, becoming guarded once again. Now that the word has gotten out that I know the location of the stash, everyone certainly wants me for it.
“I’m so glad we were able to get to you before they touched you,” Rueben says, his hand coming up to touch mine on the bed.
I slap his hand away immediately.
