Say Goodbye (Romantic Suspense #25) - Karen Rose Page 0,68

professor.”

Tom smiled. “Max Hunter is my stepfather, and yeah, that’s him. But my biological father was . . . well, he was a murdering bastard. My mother finally escaped after he tossed her down the stairs and broke her back.”

“Oh my God,” Rafe whispered. “Is she all right now?”

“Yeah. Mom is amazing. She knew he’d kill her if she stayed and that I’d be left alone with him. She had to go to rehab for her back, and made friends with one of the nurses there. The woman slipped her the name of a shelter in Chicago that helped women start over, find new identities. So Mom did that. She became Caroline Stewart and I became Tom.”

“What was your name before?”

Tom’s smile faded. “Robbie Winters. Mom was Mary Grace and the sonofabitch we lived with was Rob Winters.” Old hatred rose to burn in his gut, and he had to draw a deep breath before burying it back down where it never seemed to die. “My mother got her name off a gravestone in St. Louis. The shelter where we hid got us the necessary documents.”

“So you used fake social security numbers?”

“We did—until Rob Winters went to prison. Then we legally changed our names and took our old socials back.”

“Rob Winters,” Rafe said hesitantly. “Is he still in prison?”

“No.” And the single word gave him immense satisfaction. “He was killed soon after he was incarcerated. Got shanked in the shower. News got around that he’d been a very dirty cop.”

“Good,” Rafe said simply. “I’m glad.”

“Me too.”

“Does Liza know?”

Tom nodded. “My mom’s best friend is a woman named Dana Buchanan. Dana ran the shelter where we hunkered down for quite a while. She got us IDs and helped us start a new life.”

“You have good people in your life,” Rafe said.

“Yeah. I think your mother would love my mom and Dana. Anyway, Liza . . . You know about her background, right? How her sister was murdered?”

Rafe nodded sheepishly. “My mom and I looked her up.”

“Somehow, I’m not surprised. Well, after Liza’s sister’s killer was caught, she was all alone and still only seventeen. Dana and my mom took her in. Dana and her husband Ethan have been her primary family all these years. But then she joined the army to pay for school.”

Which still annoyed the hell out of him.

“And you went on to the NBA.”

“I did,” Tom said.

“So . . . I’ve been wondering. How did you get from the NBA to the FBI?”

“I was recruited during college. Do you know what DEF CON is? The hacker conference?”

“I’ve heard of it. It’s in Vegas, right? I read that they’re super paranoid about attendance. No registration. You just show up with cash, so there are no records. The FBI recruited you there?”

“They did. The FBI would try to infiltrate the con so that they could either arrest the criminal hackers or recruit the ‘good’ ones. They wanted me to work for them then, but I was already on the watch list for the NBA draft. I told them to give me a few years. That I wanted to play for a while, but I’d join when I was ready.” He’d done some contract work for the FBI in the off-season to keep his hand in, but that wasn’t something he could talk about with Rafe.

“What prompted you to be ready?”

The sorrow returned, and with it all the guilt that still plagued him. “I was at the end of my contract with the league. Tory and I talked about me retiring at the end of the season.”

“Then you could go public and she could keep her job.”

“Exactly. We wanted to go public. I still wasn’t sure if I was ready to make the leap, though. I had a few good years left in me. But then she was taken and . . .” He shrugged. “I couldn’t focus.”

“You’d been a secret, so you couldn’t grieve openly.”

Tom nodded, grateful that Rafe understood. “I got hurt again, this time worse. It was kind of like a sign, I guess. I called my Bureau recruiter, asked if there was room in the next training class at Quantico. He said if I got my knee in shape, then yes. So I opted out of my contract, took an early retirement, then did what I had to for my knee. I made it to Quantico for the August class and graduated in December, right before Christmas, then started here in January.”

“Liza was discharged from the army