Page 52 of Phantom
How could I have been so blind?
Chapter Nineteen
Phantom
“Room 208. I’d take the staircase on the left. The right’s closer, but it’s busted.”
The keys scraped as I slid them across the dingy motel reception desk counter. “Thanks.”
“Hey, you seem pretty down. You need some company tonight? I can get you a girl. Fifty bucks for a nice one. Twenty-five if looks don’t matter.”
Tess’ pristine body, beautiful curves, auburn hair, and sparkling eyes cracked across my mind. “There’s not a single person you could offer that would satisfy me.”
“What? Like a guy? I got guys, too.”
I turned my back to the motel clerk, followed his instruction down the row of motel rooms and up the staircase on the left end, then walked down to my room. The lock let out a dull thud as I turned my key in it, and when I opened the door, I actually let out a groan at the state of the room. The bed was covered in a coat of dust, and the television was already sparking like trying to turn it on would get me electrocuted.
On the run again.
Tossing my bag onto the bed, I walked over to the bathroom nook near the back of the room and peered into the mirror. My facial hair had gotten longer, but I quickly noticed something else.
There was a darkened hickey on my neck.
My stomach turned as I touched it and did my best to remember the feeling of Tess’ soft lips on the spot. God, had I fucked up. I started to count my chickens before they hatched. All I had to do was come clean on my own, ease Tess into it, or say something to Nick before he started going haywire. Better yet, I shouldn’t have come to Hoppa at all. I’d selfishly dragged Tess, Nick, and all of the Steel Knights into my mess.
Tess would have to tell Nick the truth eventually. It killed me to think that he would believe I betrayed his trust. I made a sincere promise never to hurt his club or his daughter, and I did both. Maybe one day, once everything had blown over and I was safely within Munich, I could call him and explain everything. He may not believe me, regardless, but I’d sleep better at night if I knew that I’d at least apologized to the man. He was willing to trust me with everything and even risked isolating himself inside his own club.
Someone who would do that did not deserve what I had done to him.
What I couldn’t figure out was how Tess had come across the truth, to begin with. When I left her at Hoppa’s not ten minutes earlier, she was none the wiser. Had she just broken down the advice I gave and figured it stemmed from somewhere?
The sound of shrill ringing brought me back to attention with a jump. It’d been such a long time since I heard my phone ring. Well, it had been before I left Rumble. Tess and I would text when we weren’t together, but that wasn’t very often since we’d been attached at the hip for the most part. I walked over to my bag on the dusty old bed and pulled it out. My heart dropped into my stomach.
It was a foreign number.
“Hello?” My attempts to keep my tone even as I answered failed.
“Colin?”
Dust drifted up as I fell down to sit on the bed. “Caid.”
“Hey!”
Tears came to my eyes immediately. He sounded so healthy, so strong. “Hey. You…” I laughed. “You sound great.”
He chuckled from the other side of the phone, and I couldn’t stop myself from fishing out that old, burned picture of Caid in his hospital bed that I’d saved. The voice I was hearing sounded nothing like one that would go with the feeble body in the picture.
“The treatment is going really, really well. I feel the best I’ve felt in my entire life. I’ve been walking round the hospital all on my own. Well, my nurse walks with me, but I can keep myself up.”
All of the times that I had to brace Caid on my shoulder and carry him from place to place flashed across my mind. To hear that he was walking on his own two feet was nearly too much to bear. “That’s amazing.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner, but, well, I was kind of nervous. I knew that things weren’t great when I left, so I was afraid I might learn… bad news.”
As much as I tried to shield Caid from my life, eventually, he caught on. Though he was holed up in a hospital for most of his life, he could still read my mind like it was his own. Mix that with the fact that he worked on his brain for every day that he couldn’t work on his body, and one day he flat out asked me if I’d joined the mafia.
Close.
“Yeah. It was wild for a while, I’m not gonna lie to you, but…” I sighed. “I came back to Hoppa, and I reconnected with Tess. She’s kept me safe.”
