Page 6 of Behind These Four Walls
She offered him a little wave and the biggest smile she didn’t mean. It was hard to see his actual reaction, but she knew whatever it was wasn’t pleasant. That made her uneasy, like he could see right through her and knew her innermost, darkest thoughts. She had to get herself together. The night was almost done.
“Thank you, Isla,” he said.
The way he said her name, deep and confident, made her stomach flutter with betrayal. With Myles waiting, she fumbled her way into Hasaan’s back seat, troubled by her unsettled feelings. It wasn’t until she shut the door, sealing herself off from him, that he finally followed his sister. Their car passed over the threshold, the taillights receding in the distance until the gates closed, separating the haves from the have-nots.
Chapter Four
Hasaan was already talking three miles a minute as he made a U-turn and began their long trek down.
“Do you think they’re hiring? I’ll even take the front guard position. Wow, that was unreal, am I right? Those people are intense! I think I nearly shit myself. But you’re in luck, because I didn’t!”
Isla rubbed her eyes, all the adrenaline oozing out of her. “If you give me your Cash App, I’ll split the thousand dollars they sent me on top of the fare.”
At the prospect of becoming $500 richer, Hasaan nearly swerved into the narrow shoulder with only the metal railing separating them from the perilous drop below. Isla’s heart plummeted, and her thoughts ran wild. She tried not to read too much into signs or think that the dark abyss beyond that guardrail foreshadowed what was to come.
As Hasaan rambled on about his good fortune, Isla quietly removed a set of keys from where she had wedged them into a crevice between the passenger seat and door. A dorm key, car fob, and student ID jangled on the Mary Washington lanyard. She studied Holland’s beaming image.
“Sorry, kid,” she mumbled regretfully.
Hasaan asked, “Say something?”
“No.” But she was about to do something.
She had been watching Holland Corrigan for days. The youngest Corrigan had a predictable routine when she was home on break from college. Practice with her trainer, then the coffee shop. Rinse andrepeat. Usually she was driven, but when she was let off the leash and allowed to roam the city like a normal nineteen-year-old, her routine remained relatively the same, and it wasn’t that hard to keep track of the unsuspecting girl.
At first, Isla hadn’t been sure if Holland was the right way in. She was easygoing. Too sweet, too sheltered from the real world. Upon meeting the young Corrigan, Isla had found the girl to be very real. She had liked her immediately, though she hadn’t wanted to. She’d even felt a twinge of protectiveness toward the naive Corrigan, who couldn’t tell when someone was being insincere or had designs on her. And it had gone much better than Isla had planned.
Those same attributes were what made Holland the door Isla needed to get into their world. Someone who wouldn’t easily suspect the friendliness of a stranger—one who happened by to offer assistance at the same moment her tire had obtained a mysterious flat—to be a setup. She wouldn’t catch the purposeful hand miss that had rendered Holland’s phone unusable. Or that her uniform-clad savior had chosen Uber because Lyft had a new algorithm that matched female riders with female drivers, and Isla knew that Holland Corrigan would balk at riding alone with a man not employed by her father.
Holland had fallen into the setup. She had trusted Isla emphatically, held out a branch of friendship. It tweaked at Isla’s guilt. Holland was the path of least resistance, because once in, Isla would have enough suspicion directed her way.
Isla would have to atone for her deceit later, because if she wanted to expose the secrets the Corrigans thought they had buried, if she wanted to finally find out what had happened to Eden the night she’d disappeared without a trace, leaving Isla alone in this town they were just supposed to be in for a couple of days, then she’d have to set her conscience aside.
Still, Isla fought her conscience and trepidation all the way to her rented studio apartment.
She should, could, say something to Hasaan and end this crazy plan before it began, turn back and return the keys, go back home, to her real home in Los Angeles, letting guilt eat away at her and pretending once again that the Corrigans and that time of her life didn’t exist. Even Eden.
But she didn’t. Not when she was so close and could actually do something now, no matter the outcome.
Instead, she palmed the keys, feeling their weight and their significance, heavy in her hand. Holland was the first step to Isla’s true objective.
“On to the next.”
“What was that?” Hasaan asked over Kendrick Lamar. “Everything all right back there?”
As the car wound its way down the treacherous mountain road, Isla’s grip on the door tightened. She imagined the steep drop-offs and shadowed valleys, all reminders of how precarious her situation was, of how she stood on the precipice. One wrong move, one misplaced word, and everything she had returned here to fight for could come crashing down.
Chapter Five
Six Months Ago
On Wilshire, Isla parked, turned off the car, and considered the high-rise office across the busy street, where she was to meet her contact at one of the PR firms she and her team worked with as their research and procurement—the ones who got the dirt to help the firm manage whatever crisis it needed to manage for its clients. She preferred the termresearch and procurement. It made her team sound moral, a step or two aboveTMZ, because at least they weren’t selling salaciousness to gossip magazines to destroy someone’s career. Isla, Rey, and Nat were there to help, not harm. Or so Isla liked to tell herself. In the passenger seat beside her was a manila envelope, innocuous in appearance, though its contents were contradictory and promised a world of hurt for someone.
She was reaching over to grab the envelope she was going to deliver when her phone buzzed from where it sat in its holder. She glanced at the screen, forgetting the envelope for a moment to answer the call, which connected through the car’s Bluetooth.
She asked, “Everything all good?”
“Good as it’s gonna get.” Rey’s voice filtered through the car speakers. “Are you there?”