Indifference.

She was holding the hand of a boy who looked a little older than her, who was smiling from ear to ear.

I wanted to reach through the computer and break his fucking hand and then break every single one of his pearly white teeth.

Senator Westmore Bigelow Price, with daughter Ramie Elizabeth and long-time beau Tanner Preston Redmond at the Heart Ball Gala to raise money for pediatric cancer.

Even though it was my second time scanning the pictures, my blood boiled. I don’t know what made me madder. The boy who was touching my girl. Or the man they listed as her father.

A senator running for president. A man who would want to avoid scandal at all cost. That’s probably why they didn’t even try to find their missing daughter.

Fucking asshole.

I stood from the kitchen table and threw the laptop across the room. It smashed against a cabinet and fell to the floor in a million pieces.

Bear came storming into the kitchen. “What the fuck?” he asked, looked over at the broken laptop. “You on the rag man?”

“We have to take a trip,” I said, staring down at the now broken laptop as though the image of Doe or Ramie, or whatever the fuck her name was and her boyfriend were still up on the broken screen that was flashing from blue to black over and over again.

“Where we going?”

“Tell me something, Bear, and be honest. What are the chances of us getting the kind of money we need for the payoff to the senator for Max?”

My eyes met his for the first time since he came into the kitchen.

“Slim to fucking none, man” he answered honestly.

“Then, get the fucking truck. I’ll drive.”

“But you still haven’t said why I’m getting the truck.”

“Because, my friend, there is a deal with the devil that needs to be made.” I looked down the hall at the closed door of my bedroom, where the girl I’d fallen in love with slept peacefully in my bed. She was mine, and I would always think of her that way. But she deserved a better life than the one I could give her, which seemed to only hurt her at every turn.

After Preppy’s funeral I was thinking about giving her the truth.

Now, I was just going to give her away.

“And who is the devil in this scenario?” Bear asked, shrugging on his cut.

I was going to see the senator and offer Doe in exchange for him making sure that I had signed custody papers for Max.

The only family I had left.

I stared out the kitchen window, but couldn’t see a thing. It was like I was staring into a white abyss, a place I was about to go, that I wasn’t ever going to be able to come back from.

“Me.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

King

When you fall in love, you know it’s the real deal because you come to the realization you would take a bullet for that person. And when you become a parent, you realize that you would not only use your own body but the body of the person you love as a human shield to protect your child.

That is the place where I existed.

The Senator had a daughter who had a life, a boyfriend. I wasn’t doing Doe any favors by keeping her with me, involved in shit she shouldn’t be involved in. It got Preppy dead. I wasn’t doing my daughter any favors by leaving her hanging out there in the world without protection. She needed her father. She needed her family.

She needed me.

I was going to give it all up for her. I couldn’t manage the payoff, but if the senator accepted my offer of a trade, then I could keep what money I did have and that was enough to sell the house, and disappear of the radar to somewhere where nobody knew who we were.

Me and Max.

I was going be a good father to her. A good influence. A good role model. I would get us a house in a good neighborhood and send her to a good school. I would read to her at bedtime. I would make this fucking work because it had to fucking work. I was going to disappear because my life was going to reappear.

I lost my best friend, and that made me realize that sooner or later I was going to lose my girl, too. Because as soon as she learned that I’d known who she was from the very beginning, she would hate me forever.

I needed Max because she was all I had left, and I was bound and determine not to fuck that up. I prayed to any god who listened that if I could just be with her, I would make things right. I would give her my all.

My love.

My heart.

My daughter.

My everything.

I made a decision that broke my fucking heart and made it sing all at the same time. So what if I felt like a piece of me would always be missing? Fuck it. I would have my daughter.

And she was my heart.

In exchange for Max, I was going to give Doe, or Ramie, or Pup, or whatever you want to call her, back to her father.

By not telling Doe about what was going to happen, I wasn’t giving her an option. But there was no doubt in my mind that when she found out what I’d been hiding all along that she was going to look at me like the monster I am.

But then again, she might be grateful to me for giving her her life back.

Maybe, not.

I pretended not to care all the way to the senator’s office.

I was going to have to be prepared to pretend for the rest of my life.

“Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist with curly black hair and dark freckles across her nose asked, without looking up from her computer.

“My name is Brantley King, and I don’t need a fucking appointment. Let him know I’m waiting. Give him this. He’ll want to see me.”

I placed the folded up picture on his desk, one I took of Doe this morning while she was sleeping. I didn’t wait for her to answer. I took a seat in the waiting area in a plastic chair that faced her desk. When she finally looked up from her computer, her jaw dropped. She’d probably never seen someone who looked like me waiting to see the senator. I didn’t have the patience to be inconspicuous. I needed to make shit happen and make it happen before I changed my fucking mind.

The receptionist stood and walked down the hall. She emerged a few moments later and dialed a number on her phone. She held her hand up over her mouth as she whispered into the receiver.

“Senator Price will see you now,” she said, with a fake smile, setting the phone back on its cradle.

She stood, and I followed her down the hall until we came to an office with a double-door entry. She opened it and stood aside to let me through. When I stepped inside, she shut it behind me. There was another click, which I’m sure meant that she locked it as well.

“I know who you are, Mr. King, and the only reason I’m even letting you in this office is because I know you had to pass through the metal detectors. So, I know you’re not armed,” the Senator said, standing up from behind his oversized mahogany desk, holding the picture I’d given his receptionist in his hand. He was trying to even the playing field, but he didn’t seem to understand that I was the one holding all the cards.

“That’s where you would be wrong, Senator.” I lifted up the front of my shirt and removed the pistol from the front of my pants. I was wearing my big metal junior rodeo belt buckle trophy. The one I got for looping a sheep at the fair. “Crazy thing about those metal belt-buckles. They make the alarms go off every single fucking time.”

The senator sat back down and folded his hands on the desk, gesturing to the chair in front of him. “Let’s cut the shit then, shall we?”

A picture on a shelf beside his desk caught my eye. It was my Pup, several years younger than she was now, on some sort of beach, her smile bigger and brighter than I’d ever seen. She’d been happy once, and it was seeing that bit of happy that made it easier to propose my deal.