Page 57 of Healing Conviction
The elderly woman left the room with surprising mobility and came back with two glasses of ice and a pitcher of tea. She set them beside the half-full glass, sweating on a cork coaster on the coffee table and began pouring. “I already got myself one, so here y’all go.”
“Thank you,” Nora took a sip of the tea and moaned the same sound he knew for a fact she made when she came. He shifted on the couch beside her and leaned back with his ankle over his knee and his arm over the back of the fabric. “Beatrice, this isscrumptious.”
“Made it myself.” Beatrice’s chuckle drifted into a nostalgic smile.
Draco sampled the tea with a sneaking suspicion he wasn’t going to like it. At the slightest taste, cloyingly sweet sugar coated his tongue, nearly making him gag. He feigned a cough before putting the glass down.
“Mmm. Delicious.”
A mischievous grin spread across her dark cheeks. “I been makin’ sweet tea for a long time, child. I know when someone don’t have the taste for it. Hold on a sec.”
Before he could object, Beatrice was already back with a glass of ice water. He guzzled it down to drown out the sugary residue before nodding his thanks.
“Thank you again so much for invitin’ us into your home, Bee. Do you think Jasmine could meet us here, or…”
Beatrice’s dark cloudy eyes stared off as she smiled. “I ain’t been called Bee in a while. Jasmine used to. But not anymore. Shoot… feels good to talk about her again.” She snapped her gaze back to him and Nora and they both waited for her to continue. “She was like you, once. Bubbly, always had a smile on her face, and a sweet-talker, too. But there was always something else brewin’ under the surface. That was even before she first ran away. We all thought she was just a teenager, but when she ran off that second time, we realized it was more than that.”
“Ran off? Twice?” Nora asked as she took another sip. “What do you mean?”
“Her momma never did do right by her. I don’t know how my daughter got such a mean streak in her. This house wasn’t enough for her, and I guess she got obsessed with living better than we did when she was growin’ up. She had these impossible expectations for the poor child. I wondered if that was what it was. If Jazz had left instead of putting up with feelin’ like a disappointment. The older Jazz got, the worse their relationship was. Her momma said she ran off that first time, and none of us expected her to come back. I think her momma was embarrassed about losin’ her own daughter. She was as surprised as the rest of us when Jazz came back. But after that, Jazz was… different. Like she’d seen too much. This group was helpin’ her. The Rahab Group, or somethin’ or other. Apparently she’d gotten into it with some bad folks and she’d needed help. She came to live with me after that, durin’ her last year of high school. I thought she was doin’ better, but one day she just… disappeared again.”
“Disappeared how?” Nora pushed gently. Her body had tightened beside him with every word, and he desperately wished he could know what she was thinking.
“She wanted to go to college, but we didn’t have the money. There was some fundraiser up north that she heard about at a college fair. Said she’d been offered a scholarship from some foundation that’d tried to help her out a time or two. She used her waitress tips to get a dress and went up there, tellin’ me she was gonna stay with a friend. When I didn’t hear from her, I figured she was still with her friend, but after two weeks went by, I went up there and spoke to the police. One of the investigators said they couldn’t help me. That because she had a history of truancy before she was eighteen and was now an adult, they figured she’d gotten into somethin’ bad or ran off on her own for good.”
“What do you think happened?” Nora asked and Beatrice shrugged her small shoulders.
“I’ll never know. She came back a year later, bone thin, hooked on the same poison as her daddy had been on before he overdosed. That darkness inside my granddaughter had boiled over, burnin’ away everything good she’d tried to show people. She had come back to me, but her mind was still sufferin’ wherever she’d come from, sayin’ she wasn’t supposed to be here. Thattheywere comin’ to get her again.”
“Wh-who’s they?” Nora asked.
“Beats me, child. Ain’t no tellin’ with Jazz.”
“I’m… I’m so sorry, Beatrice. But maybe I can help? I work with survivors and it sounds like Jazz is in desperate need of someone to walk her through what she’s feelin’. Does she still live here? Or can you tell us how we can get in touch with her?”
Sadness swelled in Beatrice’s eyes as she shook her head. “I’m afraid you ain’t gonna like where you find her, baby.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE
“So you’re saying you can definitely confirm that Shanna’s family sold her?” Drake asked into the phone as he paced along the grass.
“Yup,” Snake answered. “Went back and checked some bank statements from around the time of that party two years ago. I had to find some defunct bank accounts and ones that were under false names, but it was all there, just took some digging. Shanna’s family received a big payday the day before and the day after the party. Now all I have to do is follow the money trail. I don’t know how they hid that shit from the IRS.”
“I don’t know how anyone is hiding any of this. Fuck, Snake. Did MF7 not make a fucking dent? Did we make it worse?”
A sigh on the other line made his heart heavy. “I’m sorry you’re just now finding out about all this, man. We couldn’t tell you in the hospital, but yeah, what Shanna said about the Rahab Foundation checks out. I don’t know the extent of it, or who, if anyone, we were actually helping.”
Draco swiped down his face and beard before shaking his head. “That fucking sucks.”
“It does.” Snake hesitated for a long moment before continuing. “But there was no way we could’ve known—”
“Wasn’t there, though? You can’t tell me we couldn’t have figured it out. That was our literal job, Snake. Why didn’t we see the signs ourselves? Why didn’t the commander tell Eagle, or the general tell any of us? They had to have known, or else who the fuck was pulling all our strings?”
“I think we both know who that probably was, Draco. And as far as we know, he’s with the fucking enemy as we speak.”
Phoenix.
Draco blew out a breath and bit back his argument. He wished he was confident enough in his friendship and teammate to fight for him. But security tapes don’t lie, and it looked like Phoenix had, for a long time apparently.