“Almost where? We’re nowhere! What are you doing; you’re getting off the road.” She braces herself with her hands on thedashboard as the SUV bounces, driving over small logs and debris.
“It will smooth out in a moment.” I assure her, keeping my focus on finding where the path picks up again.
“You’re crazy. Do you know that?”
I grin. “Says the woman who scaled down the side of her friend’s apartment building in order to shake loose her security detail.”
“That wasn’t crazy; that was smart.”
“Or when you used a garbage can to climb up to the small window in the bathroom so you could squeeze through and get out to the alley behind that club you had no business being at. Again, to get rid of your security.”
“You’re just sore because I was able to get away from you so easily,” she boasts, her voice full of pride.
The terrain finally smooths, and I turn onto a beaten down path, taking us further into the woods.
“You really believe you were able to shake me every time?” I take note of the camouflaged cameras pointed at us from the treetops. I slow down as we pass the next to give him time to see our faces. The last thing I need is him racing out of the cabin with guns pointed at us.
“I did, though.”
“We’re here.” I stop the SUV.
“Wait.” She grabs my thigh. “You can’t just say something like that then end the conversation.”
“Not once did you evade me successfully. Not a single time. Even when you were able to break away from the men I put on your detail, I knew where you were. Every time.” The car jostles as I turn to face her. “I knew about you and Tony.”
She pulls back. “What? How?”
“Your brothers have a tracker on your phone.”
“Then they would have known?—”
“Kaz put the tracker on right after Tony and his brothers were killed. He knew you’d take off, and he wanted to be sure he could find you. What he didn’t know was I had already installed one when you moved out of your apartment at school.”
“No, you didn’t.” She digs around her coat pocket until she finds her phone and yanks it out, swiping through the applications. “There’s nothing here.”
I pluck the device from her hands and scroll through the screens, tapping on an icon that looks to be for a pre-loaded game. Inside the app, which looks like a factory set gaming app, I tap the settings and show her the actual purpose of the software.
Her mouth drops open, and she snatches the phone back.
“You knew? The whole time you knew I was seeing Tony?” When she raises her eyes back to mine, confusion swims in them.
She twists to look behind her when she notices I’ve moved my attention to what’s outside the car.
“Who is that?” She whispers her question as though the old bastard can hear her from this distance.
Seamus stands on the porch of his cabin. He’s aged since I’ve last seen him. It’s been ten years, but the man looks like it’s been twenty. It’s probably the damn beard. He’s let it get too long, and it’s turned gray.
“That,” I sigh, “is Seamus Kelly.”
“He’s Irish?” She swings back to me. “Like Irish-Irish?”
I drape my arm over the steering wheel and peer at him through the windshield. He knows it’s me. I can tell because he looks ready to peel my skin off. Don’t really blame him.
The last time I saw him, he’d been nursing a black eye and broken nose I’d given him.
“We can trust him.”
“How do you know him?”