Page 53

I dropped my phone as if it had just caught fire.

TWENTY-TWO

MINA

He seemed so natural up there on stage in his impeccably tailored Armani tux. I had been fearful ever since the graffiti on my car, and watching him still made me feel safe. Despite everything. He let me shave his face with a straight razor two hours before we came. He stared at me with the most wicked eyes as I drew the blade carefully across his neck. I was the only one he trusted to do it. We only made it halfway through before he gathered me in his arms and took me in the shower. Even now, he stared across the room and found me. The sinful glint in his eyes held our secret and sent heat spearing through me.

Lock was my drug. Even as I felt my world tilting on its axis. Even as I looked for secrets and lies in every look, every word, when I was with him… when it was just us, everything always melted away. “Thank you,” he said, concluding his speech. It had been a poignant one, marking the tenth anniversary of the day he broke ground on Bennett’s Place. But tonight, he unveiled the plans for a statue that would stand outside the entrance to the new health and wellness center he planned to build. He wanted it to be a surprise even to me. As the shimmering silk tarp came down, I felt like I was the statue. He had commissioned a twelve-foot-tall bronze replica of Frères Célestes. Those two fish in abstract, forever intertwined and surrounded by the Pisces constellation. Lock and Bennett. The brothers whose story made everything tonight possible. And all I could see was cobwebs on a wall in the bedroom of a killer.

As Lock finished, the large screen behind him faded into a portrait of Bennett Manning at five years old. He was laughing, holding up a smallmouth bass. Bennett only looked like Lock around the eyes. But you could see he would have grown into his own brand of handsome.

“He’s pouring it on tonight.” Eli Shepherd stood beside me, clapping. “Every guy in here is about to open their wallets. And half the women will want to open their legs.”

“Eli!” On Eli’s other side, his wife Piper snapped at him.

“Ignore him,” she told me. “No more wine for you, Eli.”

It took Lock a while to make his way back to our table. Everyone in the room wanted to shake his hand and congratulate him.

“I’m surprised you’re not up there with him,” Piper said. “I thought he wanted to show you off.”

Eli smiled. “Don’t embarrass her, Piper.” Eli was being extra attentive to me tonight. I didn’t know if it was his own guilt over what I’d walked in on, or worry that I’d tell Piper if he didn’t stay close, or something else. Had Lock asked him to keep an eye on me out of fear for my safety?

“I’m not embarrassed,” I said. “But this is about Bennett’s Place. And Bennett.”

Piper shook her head. “It’s still hard for me to fathom it. It’s just so sad the way Lock carries that boy’s ghost around with him.”

“He’s not carrying a ghost,” I said. “He’s honoring his memory. There’s a difference.”

“I thought he was nuts when he told me how much money he was going to divert from the foundation to start this side project,” Eli said. “His father would have hated it.”

“I think that was part of the point.” I smiled.

“You had to know his father,” Piper said, never missing the chance to remind me how long they’d been in Lock’s life before me. “I think he was even more handsome than Lock. I had the biggest crush on him when I first met him.”

Eli raised a brow. “Be glad you didn’t, Mina. He would have made your life hell.”

One of the servers walked by with a tray of champagne. I eagerly took a glass and sipped.

“He wanted his son to marry a woman befitting his station,” Piper said, taking on a cartoonish British accent. “He would have viewed you as a filthy commoner.”

Eli laughed. “Don’t pay her any mind. Lock’s father felt the same way about us. He was appalled when Lock decided to live in the dorms and have a pedestrian college experience.”

Lock was making his way back toward us, but it would take him some time. I tried to catch his eye through the crowd, but he was too far away from me.

“I hate these things,” Piper said. She finished her own flute of champagne and snapped her fingers above her head, calling the server back to take her empty glass.

“You can just set it on the table,” I said. “They’ll get it when they come back this way.”

Piper gave me a scathing look, then instantly covered, finding her plastic smile. She turned on her heel and stormed off.

“Ignore her,” Eli said. “She’s in a snit because somebody else showed up wearing the same dress she’s got on.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Just don’t mention it, whatever you do,” he said. “You look great, by the way.”

“I hope you told Piper that too.”