Billionaire For Ransom - Layla Valentine Page 0,34

Alice asked, her eyes darting from one end of the fractured driveway to the other. “You haven’t brought me here to kill me, have you? And if you haven’t, and you knew about this place, then why the hell isn’t this where you decided to do the handoff?”

I turned from her to the scene in front of us, and had to admit that she was right. Because this place… Well, it definitely did look like a place where bad things like kidnappings and murders would go down.

The house had to have been built in the fifties, or maybe the sixties. But it definitely hadn’t seen any love since the seventies. The walls were cracked and faded, several sections of the roof had fallen in, and what was left of the chimney was lying to the side of the house, completely detached from the wall that had once supported it.

Inside, we would find rooms empty of everything but dust, sand, and cobwebs. Some desert critters, probably. A few cacti that had tried and failed to grow in the space. And not one speck of furniture.

I knew, because this was the place where I’d spent a lot of time growing up. This was the place I’d run to whenever I was in so much trouble that I couldn’t stay in Reno.

“Just a house that the owners didn’t want badly enough to keep,” I told her. “Either that, or they got kicked out and no one else ever moved in. It’s been empty ever since I can remember. It’s always been a shelter. It’s always been a safe space.”

She turned to me, and I swiveled my head to see her staring at me in absolute shock.

“You grew up here?” she asked breathlessly. “You’re from Reno?”

I shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable with the conversation. With the memories it brought up. The deep-seated, bone-rotting feeling of loneliness and hopelessness.

“If I’m from anywhere, it’s Reno, I guess,” I told her simply. “This is where I was born, anyhow.”

She reached out and, to my absolute surprise, laid a gentle hand on my arm. “And Reno was where your parents lived,” she said. “This house is where… This is where you went when you got away from them.”

I swallowed heavily, not trusting my voice to answer her, and nodded instead. It was as good a way of saying it as any other, I supposed. This was the place where I’d escaped the house that I’d been born into.

This was where I’d escaped onto the streets, where my new family had taught me about crime. And I’d never escaped that.

Alice seemed to understand that I wasn’t going to say anything else, because she turned back to what was left of the house—even less now than the last time I’d seen it—and cleared her throat.

“And this was…”

“The place I came when I was in so much trouble that no place else was safe,” I told her, my voice gruff with suppressed emotion that I didn’t want to look at too closely. With the fear and adrenaline of the last hour or so. With the sudden realization that my clients might not know about the house, but that it also wasn’t all that well-hidden, and that if they happened onto this road and saw the van parked in front of it…

I jerked into action, threw the van back into drive, and sent the vehicle darting around the house and into what was left of the backyard. There, I came to a screeching stop—somewhat muted since what was left of the asphalt was covered with sand—and cut the ignition.

Alice, who had grabbed at the handle on her door when I put the van back in action, turned toward me, her head tipped and her eyebrow raised. “What, exactly, was that?”

“That,” I said, throwing my door open, “was me making sure no one happened to drive by on this road and see the van sitting out front. I want at least a few hours of sleep before I have to deal with them again. So are you coming with me or what?”

Chapter 18

Alice

I watched the man I was still only starting to get to know as he circled around the front of the van, his bag thrown over his shoulder, and headed for what passed as a door into the decrepit thing that had once been a ranch-style house. Built in the fifties, if I had to guess, given how simplistic the lines were and how small the actual house was.

Built in the fifties and