callan
Fifteen minutes after Sakura left the parking lot, I still sat in my car and stared through the windshield with my gun sitting on my lap. She was never supposed to find this. I should’ve fucking hidden it better.
The note that Rick Santos had slipped me earlier lay on the passenger seat. After unfolding it, I dragged my hand over my face and grunted. One of these fucking days, when Georgina was out of my life, I’d fucking leave the mob. I hated working for them.
On the paper, there was a single name.
Cortez.
A cop.
They wanted me to kill a fucking cop, and I just wanted to teach.
My phone buzzed nonstop in my pocket. Without checking who it was, I yanked it out and hit Answer. I needed a distraction from Sakura tonight or else I’d figure out where she had gone off to and follow her.
It was a FaceTime call from my wife, who was in bed at the five-thousand-euro-a-night luxury hotel room in the heart of Paris. She had on nothing but a lacy navy push-up bra and panties, not even our wedding ring.
Not that I wore mine anytime she wasn’t with me.
“What’re you doing out so late?” she whined. “Where are you?”
“Out.”
She giggled incessantly. “I went out tonight too.”
“Great. Listen, I got to—”
When she rolled over in the bed and rested her head on someone’s bare chest, I gritted my teeth. Then, from behind her, another man draped his arm over her breasts and squeezed one.
I pressed my lips together and flared my nostrils. I hadn’t loved her in years, but the damn nerve of that woman irked me. I didn’t give a fuck if she cheated on me, but at least try to fucking hide it.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart? Don’t tell me that all you did was teach at that boring school of yours, come home, and grade papers. All you do is work, work, and work. You never have the chance to spend time with me, and I—”
Before she could get another word out of her whore mouth, I ended the call and turned off all notifications from her. I thought about blocking her number completely, but if she told her father that I had done that …
He had the money to pay off the entire mob, if he wanted. Get me killed.
Every time I even mentioned breaking it off with her and finalizing a divorce, she hung this over my head. Which was why I was even in this mess to begin with. If the mob trusted me enough to get shit done, they wouldn’t kill me.
Someone knocked on my window, jerking me back. I cursed to myself and glanced over to see Principal fucking Vaughn standing in the dark in the desolate parking lot. I turned off my phone and rolled down my window.
“Yes?” I asked.
He folded his hands. “You’re here late, Callan.”
“I had to come back to class. I forgot a couple of exams that I’m grading tonight.”
God, what the hell is he doing here this late?
He usually left Redwood Academy at four in the afternoon, not eight at night. As far as I knew, all the admin meetings were in the mornings anyway.
“Did you get them?” He rocked back on his heels, the wind blowing his suit pants against his skinny legs.
“Hmm?”
“Did you get the exams?” he asked again.
Fuck.
“Doors were locked,” I lied through my fucking teeth to my boss.
He nodded toward the doors and stuffed his hand into his pocket, pulling out a silver ring of keys. “Come on. I’ll let you in, and we can talk. I have much to ask you about, seeing as you ran out of our meeting yesterday pretty quickly.”
After turning off my car, I gritted my teeth and followed him through the empty parking lot toward the main building on the high school campus. Wind burned my face, the biting fall temps chillier than usual.
“Why’d you park so far away?” he asked.
He knows something.
And I didn’t have any answers for him. I could lie all I wanted about why I was here, but why had I parked in the back lot, where there were no cameras? I couldn’t get around that unless I was trying to hide something.
“Just felt like it,” I said, as it was the best fucking response I could fabricate.
“Hmm …”
When we reached the doors, he shoved the key into the lock and pushed the door opened. A single automatic light turned on in the hallway. The school looked so different at night. I stepped into the building and walked with him toward my room.
“As I was saying in our meeting, you have an astonishing student in your class,” Vaughn said, stopping when we reached my classroom. “I mean, Sakura Sato is amazing, even outside the classroom. Wouldn’t you say?”
I pressed my lips together, wanting to ignore him, but I couldn’t help but feel off. That same eerie feeling washed over me from the last time I had spoken to him about Sakura. And I couldn’t fucking shake that he was talking about more than just her studying and volunteering.
“Sakura is great,” I said in as monotone of a voice as I could. “Why?”
“Smart. Pretty. Caring. She’s got everything going for her, hmm?”
He wanted me to agree for some fucking reason. Had he caught us? Was this him trying to get me to admit to sleeping with one of my students and enjoying it? No, Vaughn wasn’t that much of a saint. His pockets were stuffed with dirty dollar bills from the rich.
“Why?” I asked with my back turned, walking toward my desk.
“Some of these seniors …”
I shuffled through some papers on my desk. “What about them?”
He chuckled. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“Do what?” I asked, not wanting him to actually find out that I didn’t have any exams.
After a couple of moments of complete silence, I glanced up to find him still by the door, shaking his head.
“Ah, that’s a story for another time, Callan. If you ever want to get a drink at Escape, I’ll tell you about it.”
Escape? One of the Redwood mob’s hangouts?
“Yeah, sure,” I said, stuffing some papers into a manila folder. “Sounds great.”
But I’d never take this asshole up on his offer. He was too interested in Sakura, had commented on her looks, and suspected me of something. I didn’t know what the fuck he was getting at, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to ever find out.