“Maybe now is the perfect time, Dad.” My voice is neither taunting or petulant. In fact, it’s so calm it’s almost somber. Even Enrique seems to be paying closer attention.
“Leira, there are things we obviously need to discuss, but first, I want you home. Now.”
He’s not going to tell me. Perhaps he never will. I’m almost certain that even in exchange for agreeing to come home, he wouldn’t tell me.
Because he obviously has something to hide.
For some reason, it has me feeling…disappointed.
Enrique’s earlier taunts come back to me about my father being in the drug business. The same father who swore to me that he wasn’t. The father who has never once lied to me.
“I’ll be home soon, Dad.”
I hang up before he can respond, handing the phone to Enrique so I don’t immediately call and take it all back.
“Are you okay?” Enrique asks, his brow lowered with worry.
I look up at him and any hint of guilt or fear eases from my mind. While Barcelona may not be the last place my father’s enemies might look for me, being here incognito is just as safe as anything.
Layla was taken down at the shipyards where Dad’s boats are. Lucinda was snatched while in the care of one of my father’s bodyguards.
“Let’s go,” I say, forcing a smile to my face.
Enrique, opens the back of the phone and does something with a piece inside. “Just to be safe, I’m destroying any traceable parts of this.”
I nod, and watch as he tosses the pieces in several trash cans. He comes back to me, putting his arm around my shoulders again to lead me on.
“We’re going to a hotel instead of my apartment here. I don’t want to take any chances. We’ll check-in, and then I’ll tell you everything.”
We end up at a hotel called Chic & Basic, which has a cool and funky interior. In the lobby are several young people that we blend in well among. If the circumstances were different, it would be Enrique and I laughing in the seating area underneath the bookshelves as we prepared for the night out.
Instead, we get our key and head up an impressive, winding marble staircase with a chandelier that hangs in the middle almost all the way to the bottom level. On our floor, every door is surrounded by a curtain of hanging strings, each lit up in different colors.
Inside the room is a single queen-sized bed. Oddly enough, the shower is what separates it from the window leading to the street below. I stare at the glass-encased shower, which can only be meant for an exhibitionist.
I drop my mind back to more pressing issues. I follow Enrique to where he settles on the edge of the bed. I sit next to him and wait.
“The name of the man I’ve been targeting, my father, is…Richard Coleman.”
Anything he says after that is lost in the echo of my stomach as it drops into an abyss. I’m not sure if it’s my mind or my body that is reeling in the aftermath of that.
It takes only a moment for Enrique to catch that something isn’t quite right with me.
“Leira, what is it?”
“Richard Coleman?”
His gaze sharpens so hard I can almost sense it being honed into a fine point.
“Yes?” He says with an edge in his voice. “What about him?”
“That’s the name of the man my father gave me. The one he told me never to mention to anyone.”
Part II The Prince
Chapter Thirty-Five Enrique
Richard Coleman.
What the hell does Leira, or rather her father, know about my biological father?
“Your father told you not to tell anyone about him? Why? What does he know?” My fingers are practically curled, and it’s everything I can do not to shake it out of Leira, even though I haven’t even given her a chance to respond yet.
“I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head, obviously feeling the same frustration that I am right now.
I shoot off the bed, walking back and forth with my hand snared in my hair.
“You’re just now telling me this? After everything I said, you couldn’t figure it out that he was my father?”
“Me?” she retorts, giving me an accusatory look. “You’re the one who wouldn’t give me a name to begin with.”
I sigh, knowing she has a point. It doesn’t really matter since there wasn’t much I could have done with the information anyway.
“Besides, he only gave me the name and a location just before he sent me off to that convent. And it wasn’t like they had any cell service on that island so I could look him up.”
“Wait, he gave you a location as well?” I ask, stopping to stare at her. “What location?”
She pauses, giving me a wary look.
I sit down on the bed next to her. “Mira, Leira. Your father obviously knows my father. Whether they are working together or they are enemies, I still don’t know. Neither do you. But we’re here in Barcelona with people after us, and if we’re going to work together, we need to know everything.”
She takes a breath and exhales before speaking. “It was just an address. 147 Pathfinder lane in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.”
“Nevada?” I repeat, cursing my luck. Then, an idea occurs to me. I pull out my phone and type the address into Google maps. I switch to street-view.
“It’s just a building,” Leira remarks as she looks at it over my shoulder.
It’s more like a house, as nondescript as possible. Just a one-story structure that looks like it should be part of those sprawling mini-malls I’ve seen in American TV and movies. Beige brick, brown roof, tinted windows, all without any indication that there’s activity inside. There isn’t even signage telling me what services are provided. Just the 147, noting the address.
I close out of the maps and type in the address to Google to see if it pulls anything up. No matter how I type it, with and without quotes, I get nothing.
“What exactly were
