Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
Sometimes she was reminded how lucky she had it. Her parents were all kinds of awesome.
And weird. Not normal. Not normal did not mean bad.
She’d picked up another inner voice lately, but it was kind of at war with the others. With the ones that told her not normal wasn’t bad, but she was. Her sessions with Lena had concentrated on how useful she was to the Agency since she didn’t have much of a moral compass. Lena had even made some reference to her father Dextering her—putting her talents to good use since it would be so easy for someone like her to go bad.
It wasn’t anything she hadn’t heard before, but lately it bugged her.
She’d had all the love she could have gotten, so why was she still the way she was?
“What kind of trouble?” Cooper asked.
Joyce’s gaze moved back to Kala. “He likes to pretend, doesn’t he?”
See, now she liked the woman again. “It goes with being as hot as he is. He thinks he’s a good liar. Obviously, I’ve read a dossier on you. So has he. We wouldn’t be here without all the intel we could find.”
She nodded. “Good, then maybe you can explain what’s going on with Zach. He won’t say a damn thing beyond he’s on leave, but I don’t believe him. Something’s gone wrong. I have to wonder if his damn father ain’t back in the picture. Or if it’s… Well, the fact that he’s here tells me a lot.”
Oh, she was interested in all of those words. She wasn’t sure what Zach being here told Joyce since she’d asked Kala why he was here, but she’d become confused a couple of times already. Kala zeroed in on what seemed the most important thing. “Zach’s dad is in the picture? From what my father discovered, it was a boyfriend who got Shannon in trouble. She was a chemistry student, right?”
“She was the smartest person I ever met,” Joyce said with a sigh. “Sometimes I think her life would have been easier if she hadn’t been brilliant. It’s hard to know so much more than the people around you and to still be stuck in a dismal existence. Our mom put food on the table but not much else. I would work after school so we could buy clothes. Momma spent all the extra money trying to find some new man who would take care of her for more than a night. When you grow up like that you often react one of two ways. It put me off any kind of relationship, and my sister only wanted someone to love her. Wanted to prove she was better than Mom gave her credit for. That girl got a full-ride scholarship to Stanford University. Do you know how hard she worked for that? I still…I don’t know why she gave it all up for a man. She could have been something.”
There was a lot of nuance left out of her dad’s report. “So Shannon gets out of Iowa, goes to California and meets Zach’s dad.”
Her eyes slid away, sorrow on her face. “Raymond White. He was older than Shannon. At the time she was a senior, and she worked in a lab. I don’t pretend to know what she was working on, but I know Ray targeted her because she worked in that lab. He was a low-level drug dealer at the time. He convinced her to use the lab to make some designer drugs that bumped him up a level in his organization. She proved to be excellent at creating drugs. If she was a bartender, she would have been called… What’s the name for it now? It’s real fancy.”
“Mixologist,” Cooper provided.
“Did she stay with Ray?” Kala prompted. “I know he was arrested a couple of times.”
Joyce nodded. “I was already in the Army then. I didn’t know what was happening. She would write letters to me. About her classes and how she was up for a big internship, and then one day they stopped. It was a long time before I could get leave, and when I finally found her, she was pregnant with Zach and fully in Ray’s world. I tried to get her to go back to school, but she loved him. She had a nice house and said he treated her real good, and they had a baby on the way. I didn’t know better. I had no idea how they were making their money.”
“She was still cooking drugs?” Cooper asked. “Did she take them?”
“No. Never. She never did her own drugs,” Joyce said like that was some kind of virtue.
Kala didn’t get that. Shannon had actively harmed the world for money and love.
“She certainly didn’t when she was pregnant. I was in Germany at the time. I thought she was like our mom. She found a man and didn’t need her family anymore. I was hurt, but at least I thought she was happy. She sent pictures when Zachary was born, and everything seemed fine. Then it all went to hell. That’s when I got out.”