Page 99 of Creeping Beautiful

“Well… better a Rebel than a Gator, I guess.” We both laugh. “But seriously. That’s like a five-hour drive, McKay. She can’t move to Ole Miss.”

“I know.”

“She’s not OK. She will never be OK. They fucked her head up so good before she came to us, there’s no telling what could happen if we weren’t around to keep her in line. She doesn’t even understand it, ya know? Because she blacks out when it happens and then we… well, we just bring her out of it and pretend it didn’t happen. Seven times Donovan had to fly in and do an emergency brain un-fuck.”

“Preaching to the choir, brother. But what are we gonna do? She’s got her own money. And a truck. And in six months she’ll be eighteen and we’ll have no more say in anything.”

“Should we tell her? We could tell her. Try to make her understand.”

“She won’t believe us. I mean what are we gonna say? ‘Hey, Indie. I know you want to move out with your little baby daddy and be a normal grown-up like everyone else. But you can’t. Because you have a hidden evil killer lurking deep inside you. Except you don’t know about it because we’ve been keeping it secret for all these years so you don’t go insane.’ She would flip out and call us a bunch of liars.”

“We have the tapes.”

“Shit. That’s a fucking can of worms all its own. Why the hell you and Donovan felt the need to record all that shit, I’ll never understand. If anyone found them, we’d be heading for the fucking electric chair.”

“No one’s gonna find them. I’ve got them hidden.”

“Hidden where?”

“Here in the house.”

“Are you shitting me? Dude. If the FBI ever got wind of us—and let’s be clear, that black ops division that protected us all those years, they are not on our side anymore—if they ever got wind of us, they’d come tear this whole place down to find evidence.”

“They’re safe. Trust me.”

“You should burn those tapes. Like… tonight.”

“I did burn the tapes. The interviews are all in my safe on a hard drive now and it’s encrypted with a self-destruct firewall. I paid this hotshot kid genius from Oxford to do it for me and that dude. Trust me. He knows how to hide shit on a hard drive.”

“Some asshole kid from Ole Miss?”

I laugh. “No, you dipshit. Like the real Oxford. In the UK. He’s ex-Company. Or he would’ve been if it hadn’t gone down. Now he’s just a hacker with a pedigree, I guess. But I knew his older sister. I’m not worried about the tapes.”

“And Donovan’s copies?”

“I assume he took the same precautions. He is a genius, right?”

McKay does one of those head-shaking eyerolls. “Well… anyway. If she heard the shit that came out of her mouth during those post-blackout interviews, she’d lose her mind forever. We cannot play those tapes for her. And that’s the only proof we have that we’re not assholes.”

I think about this for a moment. Because he’s right. The only proof of what and who Indie Anna Accorsi really is can’t be used to change her mind. It will only make things worse.

McKay thinks for a while too because we’re both quiet. But then he gets up and looks down at me. “So what should we do? Just wait it out and see if she wants to stay here with us when Nathan goes off to college? Because that doesn’t sound… proactive enough for my tastes.”

“Nah. Mine either. But leave it to me. I got a plan.”

He narrows his eyes at me. “What plan?”

“Just… let me handle it.”

I spend the next several weeks doing a lot of thinking and a lot of spying. The thinking part… well, I feel bad for that. But not the spying part.

Because I start thinking back to that day of the auction and how different life would be if I walked away with no one.

Just… left. Empty-handed. Came back here, did whatever. And then the Company would fall five years later and I’d be free.

No little girl to worry about.

I mean, the fact is—Indie Anna Accorsi upended my entire fucking life. I haven’t really been looking for a girlfriend, but there’s no fucking chance of having one now. Not since Indie came along. How the fuck do I explain her? And I get it. If I could tell someone normal about this, they’d say, “Just call her your sister.”