Page 23 of Defiant
“You want me to look into Oliver Fitzpatrick.” The diner around us was mostly empty; an old-timer sat on one of the stools near the register, reading the paper—the paper, an actual newspaper—but that was it. It was too odd of a time, which was good. The story I was about to tell was not one I wanted everyone to hear. “We…we have a history.”
Her dark brows furrowed, and even with the quizzical expression on her face, she was gorgeous. “What? A history? Why didn’t you mention it before?”
“I didn’t want to,” I said, biting back my initial response, which would’ve been: because my past is none of your business. “But, I think you should know, in case we run into anything going forward.”
Jaz waited a moment before muttering, “Now you’re kind of scaring me.”
I chuckled at that, even though I shouldn’t. This wasn’t a chuckling matter. “How much do you know about Celeste Chambers?”
“Enough,” she said, her expression changing. “This is about Celeste, not Oliver?”
“This is about the entire Fitzpatrick family, not one of them in particular,” I told her. The waitress came back with our drinks, but neither one of us touched our glasses. “Three years ago, I was a cop. Pretty much fresh out of the academy. It wasn’t long before Celeste Chambers came back and threw this whole town—and the entire fucking country—in disarray.”
A rich white girl, stumbling back home, after being assumed dead? Yeah, that was something the whole nation threw a party for. News documentaries and newspaper articles, so many celebrated her return, and yet, not soon after that, it was like she fell off the face of the earth.
“By the time she came back, her mother had split with her father and married Oliver,” I said. “Celeste inherited two stepbrothers, along with a new house. I was put on her case, mostly because the MPD knew this was the biggest case they’d get in years, that the whole country’s eyes were on us. I was stationed to follow her, inside Midpark High, just in case her kidnapper tried to nab her again.”
Jaz’s lips turned downward. Not a full frown, but the start of one. “But…”
“I didn’t follow her for long. Her…stepbrothers came after me. Not physically, but…” I scratched the back of my neck. “They threatened me, told me I was getting too close to her, even though I was never unprofessional with her. Somehow, they got pictures of Celeste, before she turned eighteen. I ignored their threats, because, at the time, I thought those rich twins couldn’t do shit against me—but I was wrong. My supervisor got word that I might have some unsavory pictures of Celeste, and what do you know—somehow they’d been uploaded to my Cloud.”
“Her stepbrothers did that? Oliver’s kids?” Jaz sounded as if she was having the toughest time believing a single word I said, and I couldn’t blame her. But after what happened to her at that party, she had to realize how fucked up everyone in this town was. The darkness knew no age limits.
Nodding, I added, “I lost my job because of them, but I didn’t stop following them. Unsurprisingly—and shortly after Celeste’s father was found brutally dismembered—I found Zane, Thorne, and Celeste on the run.”
“Wow.”
“I cornered Celeste in a bathroom. My intent was to drag her back to Midpark and force her to clear my name, but…” I closed my eyes, remembering that encounter. “She told me things that…that made me change my mind.”
“So, you let them go?” She sounded horrified.
“I did.”
“What did she tell you?”
My shoulders rose and fell with a sigh. “Something deeply personal. She never had a good life, even before she was kidnapped. The general consensus was that her father had kidnapped her, though that theory flew out of the window when he was found butchered. The blood on Celeste’s clothes when she came back matched her father’s, but she claimed to not remember any of it.”
Jaz’s stare narrowed. “You think she was lying?”
“I think she was protecting someone—maybe two people—who helped her out of a terrible situation the only way they knew how,” I chose my words carefully, not wanting to defend either Fitzpatrick boy. “Things got quiet after that. I assumed Astrid and Oliver tried to go about their lives, that they chose to let their kids go.”
It was a long time before Jaz muttered, “But Astrid isn’t there.”
“And she didn’t leave with her daughter and the twins,” I said.
“Meaning…”
“She either left, or something happened to her that Oliver is covering up. With how his sons were, I can’t imagine that’d be the first crime he’s had to cover up.”
Jaz opened her mouth to ask something else, but the waitress came with my food, setting the plate down with a smile and a quick glance at Jaz. She waited until she was gone before saying, “You don’t think…”
I grabbed a fry, studying it before shoving it in my mouth. “Let’s just say, I don’t think Astrid was the kind of woman who’d ever leave a man with money on her own. I think Nathaniel Chambers left her, and when she was introduced to Oliver, she latched onto him like a leech. Do I think she went off on some long vacation without her husband? No.”
“Shit” was what Jaz chose to mutter next, and I hid my smile behind my burger.
Shit was right.
“I’ve looked her up, and it’s like, according to everything I’ve found, she’s still living in that house, still married to Oliver.” I paused to take a bite of the burger. “Oliver hasn’t said anything about her at all?”
