that?
“Everyone else who loves her, huh? And yet you say I can’t be there? Wow.”
“Mia, that’s not what I meant…” she says, but immediately trails off.
“Yeah whatever,” I mutter. “You send me away, but you don’t give me answers as to why,” I grit out. “And now this?”
“You have to trust me,” she whispers, this time the voices in the background growing louder.
“You have never given me any reason to trust you, Nicky!” I cry, looking around the hotel room, as a crippling sense of anxiety starts blooming in my chest.
No, not again.
“I know we haven’t talked about the fact that I’m your mother before. There’s so much we haven’t talked about, but…”
No. I’m not doing this with her.
“How’s everything over there?” I quickly question, cutting her off.
I completely ignore the harsh breath she blows. I’m not even sorry if I just inconvenienced her shitty explanation, she’s not the one who doesn’t have a home or anywhere to go.
Closing my eyes, I come face to face with the tortured look on Julian’s beautiful face, his dark green eyes peering into my soul, making me sigh.
“How…are they?” I whisper. I know she knows show I’m talking about. She has to know.
“Mia…”
“Please.”
Silence.
“The boys are out of their minds with worry. They’ve been out looking for you. At the rate they’re going, I worry that it’s only a matter of time until they find you.”
Why does my heart skip a few beats when I hear that?
“You can’t let them,” Nicky presses.
“Why?”
“Because their father and yours are brothers.”
Holy motherfucker!
11
Present day
It’s been four days since dad dropped the bomb on me.
Four days since I found out just how rotten my mother truly is.
Four days of not knowing where the hell Mia is and three days of Liam being gone like the fucking wind.
But that didn’t mean I accepted that shit.
“Someone knows where she is,” I snap, running a hand through my hair. Someone has to have some information. “People don’t just disappear. Something happens to them or they hide.”
“Dude, she doesn’t have any friends, so there’s no point looking there,” Cole mutters, looking tired, running a hand down his face.
We’ve been out each day, practically combing the streets of Palos Verdes, checking out popular hangout spots for both my fucking prodigal brother and Mia. It’s stupid but fuck we have to try.
“Mia is a solo rebel at best. Even if she had ‘friends’ she would never go to them.”
“Yeah, but Lilo has friends,” I mutter. Just saying Liam’s nickname given to him by Aiden makes my chest constrict all over again. Lately, it’s been hard to breathe, hard to move on, hard to fucking exist.
Cole deadpans, staring at me like I’m out of my fucking mind. “You and I both know Lilo would never go to anyone when he’s in a… mood.”
A mood.
I wouldn’t describe the look on my baby brother’s face when he found out that his mother was nothing more than a well-dressed, Cabo-loving child abuser, as a mood.
He was devasted. He was angry and most of all, he was fucking sad.
And even with all that, he still has no idea what else I discovered when he stormed out. Fuck!
Where would he go with that shit pressing heavily on his mind like it’s destroying me.
I can barely sleep. I’ve been up for almost seventy-two hours.
Tension and a particularly unhealthy dose of anger have been my constant best friend, spurring me on, and that was perfectly all right with me.
Anger was better. Anger didn’t make me feel like shit inside. It didn’t ask the hard questions, the ones where the only one to blame would be me. No, anger was reliable, ready whenever I needed it.
And right now, I was angry at Mia.
Four days ago, I was worried about her driving away like that, thinking that I hurt her so much that she finally snapped, but now, now this is just ridiculous.
She left her phone in her room, that was deliberate.
I used dad’s resources to check the passenger lists from LAX for the past three days, her name didn’t pop up. I knew she was broke. Her personal account was still sitting at the same five dollars and ten cents from eight months ago.
Then there’s her asshole father, Nathan. His days are numbered. He’s a douchebag, a pathetic excuse of a man and I can barely control this raging need in me to end him for what he did to my girl.
Before I read that damn medical file, I never respected him as father