“Don’t hate her, Solana, just because she had a better life than you.” I’m crossing a line, but she’ struck a nerve with threatening Lola. “It’s not her fault what happened to you.”
“I know that.” She looks out the window at the trees blurring by. “But you’re forgetting that it’s in my nature to hunt and kill. And right now, I’m going against every instinct instilled in me. ”
“And why are you exactly?”
She remains silently for a while before looking at me. “Lets just say I’m doing you another favor.”
I’d press her for more details, but know it’ll be wasted breath. “So can I ask which one of the families sent you here to kill her?” I ask. “I’m guessing the Dellefontes since Frankie sent his own men.”
She shakes her head. “Nope. That’s not how I work.”
“You know you’re awfully committed to the people who hire you, which is weird since they’re the reason you’re like this in the first place.”
“Watch it Layton,” she warns. “Don’t forget for a second who I am and don’t forget what I’ve done for you.”
She’s right—Solana isn’t someone to be messed with. I should just take my gun out now and get rid of her, but I can’t bring myself to do so. She saved me, from death, from a life I loathed. I owe her more than I probably ever be able to pay back.
So where is this safehouse?” I change the subject. “You said it was nearby but we’ve driven for over fifty miles by now.”
She waves for me to keep going as she rest back in the seat and cross her arms over her chest, letting her head fall back against the headrest. “Just keep going. I promise it’s not too far.”
I sigh and keep driving down the road. Safehouses are always questionable. Either the people are genuinely good and have opened the house to help people like Lola and I who need to escape or they’ve done it hoping people like Lola stumble in and the can collected the reward. And the reward on Lola is huge. Three different mafia families after her, although I haven’t told her about the third, too terrified to tell her who the third one is.
After what seems like hours, Solana finally tells me to turn off the road that dips into the forest. I drive another twenty miles out into the backwoods, the car not taking to the bumpy road very well and I worry more than a few times that we’re going to get stuck. Finally, after I’m beginning to question if Solana knows where we’re going, we pull up to a log cabin secluded in the trees.
“There it is,” she announces, sitting up in her seat. “See, told you it was back here.”
I eye the house with skepticism. It’s late, the lights off, so it’s completely dark around us except for the headlights from the car and a moonlight trickling through the trees. “Are you sure this place is a safehouse?”
She reaches for the door handle. “Yep. Got the information from a very reliable source.”
I turn the engine off but keep the headlights on. “And that would be?”
“Your brother.” There’s a twinkle in her eyes. She’s fucking with my head right now and completely enjoying herself. She knows how I feel about my younger brother, Benton—that I love him to death but that he’s completely irresponsible.
“Are you being serious or not?” I check to make sure I have my gun tucked in the back of my jeans and then that the switchblade is in my boot.
“Of course I’m being serious—I’m always serious Layton.” She shakes her head and then rolls her eyes again. “Would you relax? Like you said, Lola’s my sister. I won’t let anything happen to her, something I think I proved when I didn’t kill her today like I was hired to do.” She opens the door. “Beside, I need her alive.”
“Yeah, but I don’t get why since you won’t explain it to me.”
“It’s better if you don’t know,” she says. “Now lets get her inside and you can tell her what’s going on and hopefully after the initial rage of wanting to kill you wears off, she’ll be smart enough to run away with you.”
“Wait a minute,” I say before she gets out of the car. “I thought she had to do this alone. That was the deal when you shot me. That I had to stay dead to everyone, including Lolita.”
She pauses, contemplating something. “Lets just say I’ve had a change of heart.”
“But what if I get caught?” I ask, grabbing the door handle. “It’ll fall back on you.”
“Then it falls back on me. Don’t pretend like you care, Layton. No one cares about me. That’s the whole point of being what I am. I’m dispensable so no one will miss me when I’m gone—No one will notice.” She steps out of the car and starts to shut the door, but pauses, lowering her head and looking at me. “Look, I’m giving you a get out of jail free card right now, which I never give. Take it or leave it. Your choice. But you need to tell Lola the truth first before you take off with her.” Then she shuts the door.
She’s never showed any signs of humanity since the day she let me off the hook for getting killed, something she proposed to me for reasons she’s never explained to me. She did seem to get some sort of weird satisfaction off shooting me to near death, though. I’m sure it has something to do with being sent to that God-awful place she went to… the one that my fucking family helps run.
I shake the thought from my mind, not wanting to think about the disgusting things I learned about my family over the last few years, and get out of the car. I open the back door to get Lola out, brush my fingers across her cheek, listen to the soft sound of her breathing. That night she killed one of the Dellefontes men, I saw a part of her die inside. And now… well, she looked so hollow, so numb, so broken when I first saw her. She doesn’t even know who she is anymore. But she’ll never admit it. No, her father made sure of that, telling her over and over again to never show weakness. It’s one of the many things we have in common—shitty parents who have zero parenting skills.
I scoop Lola up in my arms, kick the door shut, then hike up the shallow hill toward the cabin. I take my time, not just because I’m worried about going in, but because I know that this might be the last time I’ll ever get to touch Lola depending on how she reacts to what I have to tell her.
“Fuck, I hate my family,” I mutter under my breath as I open the cabin door.
When I step inside, my first instinct is to set Lola down and pull out my gun. The entire place is dark and empty. I can barely see anything, but then Solana appears in front of me with her knife drawn out.
“I checked it out and we’re safe,” she says, putting the knife away in the pouch attached to her belt. “There’s no one else here.”
“How long do we have to stay here?” I ask as we make our way to the back of the cabin.
“Honestly, I say you two should sleep the night, get some supplies from here and then hit the road. You’re not going to be able to go to an airport or bus station near here—they’ll be keeping an eye on that,” she says, glancing over her shoulder at me then at Lola. “That is if she’ll go with you after you tell her.”
“She will. But I’m unsure myself. “But what are you going to do? You can’t just go back empty handed. You were hired you to track her down and kill her and he’s going to want proof.”
“That’s for me to deal with,” she says indifferently as we reach the back of the house. “Don’t worry. I have a plan. Big, huge, plans.” The last part she says more to herself.
Saying nothing more, we make a turn down a hallway and then duck behind a curtain where we proceed down a set of steps toward a lighted area, going further and further into the house. At the bottom, it opens up into a massive room that looks like a shelter, which I guess is what it is—shelter from being hunted. I’ve been in a couple of them already, over the last couple of year while I was pretending to be dead. This one looks similar; cots, boxes of food, jugs of water, weapons, supplies, and the light is coming from a lantern in the middle of the room, which I’m assuming Solana lit. I set Lola in one of the cots while Solana strolls over and starts looking around at the cans of food on the shelf while slipping off her leather jacket.