sakura
After squealing into Callan’s driveway, I leaped out of my car. Something wasn’t right.
Callan had told me that he’d meet me at the library, and while we hadn’t been having the best time together, he wouldn’t ditch me. I had even stayed out front on the library steps two hours after it closed.
Gunther had told me that Callan had purposefully not come, but that wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. His text messages had sounded so serious, and I so desperately wanted to make up with him. Plus, he hadn’t responded to any of my messages or calls for basically the entire day.
I walked to his garage window and peered inside the room, only seeing his wife’s car.
He’s still not home? Where did he go today? Maybe his car broke down?
Fuck, I didn’t know. At this point, I was just making shit up and hoping that he hadn’t gotten into trouble with the mob for killing Jett. I wouldn’t put it past Jett to have been participating in mob business.
Glancing down at my phone, I messaged him again. “Callan, please answer,” I muttered.
Nothing. Not even Delivered.
Which meant his phone was off or dead.
My stomach twisted into tight knots. I paced in front of my car and ran a hand through my hair, tears welling up in my eyes.
Something isn’t right. Something isn’t right. Something isn’t freaking right.
But I had no way of getting in touch with Callan without his phone. I had waited at the library for almost all day, like I’d promised. I was standing at his home and staring into an empty garage. And he was gone.
“You deserve this,” a woman said from Callan’s backyard.
Fuck.
I plastered myself against the siding and peered around the corner of the house to the backyard. Georgina Harleen-Avery stood at the pool, staring down into it with a glass of wine in her hand. She brought it to her lips.
“Should’ve come with me to Paris,” she said, placing the glass down on a side table.
It sounded like she was talking to someone, but nobody was in the pool.
I really needed to find him, and this was my only hope.
“Excuse me,” I said, stepping into the backyard.
She snapped her head in my direction. “Who are you?”
I walked toward her and swallowed hard, my heart racing. It might’ve been the stupidest thing I had ever done, but I needed to find Callan. I couldn’t run around anymore and worry about him. Georgina didn’t give a fuck about him. I did.
“Where is Cal—” I started, my gaze dropping to the tinted pink water.
Then, I saw his body, facedown, in the pool.
“Oh my God!” I screamed, rushing toward the edge and about to jump in to rescue him.
“Get off my property,” Georgina shouted, grabbing my arm and yanking me back.
I twirled around and hurled my fist at her face as hard as I could, sending her to the ground. She scrambled back to her feet and lunged at me, but I grabbed the small glass side table that she had placed her wineglass on and slammed it into the side of her head.
On collision, the glass shattered everywhere. Still, that didn’t stop her from leaping back up with shards of glass jutting out from her cheek, scattered in her hair, and hanging off her clothes. Blood dripped from her wounds.
Fury and pain rushed through me. I sprinted toward the outside bar and grill area that Callan hadn’t closed up yet for the fall and slammed open one of the metal cabinet doors, adrenaline pumping through my system.
I shoved my hand into the cabinet and grabbed the first thing I could use as a weapon against her—a meat tenderizer mallet. She rushed toward me, lips turned down into a scowl, screaming something about how she was going to sue me.
But Callan was possibly lying dead in the fucking pool.
Clasping the mallet with both hands, I swung at her head. She dropped to the ground, body twitching, so I struck it into the same spot again and again until she had a huge gash in her head and she wasn’t moving.