Page 91 of His to Possess
I just pray I get the chance to tell her that.
* * *
I spenda sleepless night feeling sick with worry and longing. Jane doesn’t have anything new in the morning, though she did get an associate in Raleigh to put eyes on Lilah’s garbage stepfather, confirming my girl is nowhere near him. That’s a slight relief, but I know I’ll only truly feel better when I have her in my arms again.
If that ever happens.
The mere thought that it might not makes me feel dizzy so I push it away and try to concentrate on what I can control. It’s not much.
First I call Veronica and ask if she’s heard from Lilah. She must be somewhere busy because I can hear voices and cars in the background and my sister can barely make out my words. Then I scour Lilah’s Facebook page and make note of any friends who have interacted with her in the last year. It’s a short list—she must have really cut herself off from everyone when things turned to shit in her life.
I make my way down the short list, calling everyone I can get contact info for and emailing Jane the rest. I go to the bar where she was working last week, pissing myself off all over again when I set foot inside the dingy dive and imagine her waiting on the degenerates clustered there even before noon. The staff say they haven’t seen her since last week and she was fired when she missed her shifts.
“Good riddance,” I mutter as I walk out. But I’m no closer to finding her.
I call Nate and Luke and even Jackson Dunn to see if any of their girls might know where she is. But I know it’s pointless. She isn’t going to go hide out with people she met days ago. Especially not people who are connected to me.
There’s only one other person I can think of, and I’m not sure I can manage to talk to him without throwing punches, now that I know what he did and why. But if there’s the slightest chance she would have gone to him for help, I need to try.
* * *
Lilah’s fatherstill lives in the same house where she grew up. An eight-bedroom mansion seems a strange choice for a single man who threw out his whole family, but nothing about him makes much sense to me.
I called ahead to make sure he was home before I stopped by, insinuating I had business from my father to discuss. But business is the last thing on my mind as his housekeeper leads me through an almost eerily quiet house to William Cartwright’s study.
“Philip Matthews,” he says, standing with a smile when I appear in his doorway. “Long time no see, my boy.”
His jovial nature remains the same from the last time I saw him, but it doesn’t ring quite as true today. He seems tired. Withdrawn. I’m pretty sure he’s lost weight, and there’s a shadow of stubble on his jaw.
I shake his outstretched hand, releasing it as soon as possible. Now that I’m standing here in front of him, my anger is starting to rise. This is the asshole who kicked Lilah out on the street. If it wasn’t for him, she never would have been subjected to her stepfather. She never would have dropped out of school or moved to that shithole apartment or worked that garbage job or spent months being scared and alone. She never would have been desperate enough to enter the auction.
“When’s the last time you heard from Lilah?” I demand.
He visibly startles at the name, his face seeming to pale even more. “Lilah?”
“Yes,” I growl. “Yourdaughter.”
He blanches, and the urge to punch him grows stronger. “Sheisyour daughter,” I bark. “No matter what DNA she has. You raised her for twenty years.”
He seems to crumple in on himself, a shadow of the once strong, vibrant man I remember talking shop at various social gatherings. “I know,” he mutters. “I know she’s my daughter. Of course she is.”
“Then how the hell could you do it?” I have to curl my hands into fists to keep from grabbing him. “How could you just kick her to the street? How could you throw out your disabled son? What kind of person does that?”
“A weak one,” he says softly, voice filled with shame. “I was so angry when I found out about the affairs. Finding out those kids weren’t biologically mine… My pride…” he trails off, sighing. “I’m not proud of what I did. However angry I might have been at their mother, throwing them out was a mistake. A selfish, stupid mistake, the worst one of my life. I gave up the only good things I’ve ever truly had because my pride was injured.”
His regret doesn’t do Lilah a single bit of good. I lean across the desk toward him. “Do you have any idea what her life has been like since that night?” I ask him. “Have you even checked in on her? Once, in all this time?”
He shakes his head, fear joining the shame in his eyes. “I didn’t think I had the right—”
I snort in derision. “You were afraid of what you’d find out.”
“Is she okay? What’s—”
“She’s not okay!” I shout, anger rising again. “You abandoned her and your son to a woman who couldn’t care for them. Her mother is a drunk, did you know that? Did you know about the pills?”
His face is even more pale. “Jocelyn was always a heavy drinker,” he mutters. “When I confronted her about the affairs, she said alcohol was a way to cope with her guilt over her dishonesty. I never thought—”
“I don’t give a shit about your wife’s affairs,” I snap. “I don’t give a shit that her children were a product of those affairs. It’s a shite thing she did to you, yes. But what you did is much, much worse.”
