Page 22 of Shadowed Witness (The Secrets of Kincaid #2)

Dion hitched his backpack higher on his shoulders.

Part of him wished he could have stayed at Eric’s place.

He quickly squelched it. Detective Thornton had always been good to him, but he was still a cop.

Even if he wanted to keep Dion more than one night before turning him over to the system, he’d change his mind in a hurry once he discovered what Dion had been up to over the last year. What he was responsible for.

His hands balled into fists. He hadn’t known.

He shouldn’t have tried to argue with the big guy. He wasn’t usually an idiot.

No, he was just a bottom-of-the-chain drug dealer who hated drugs almost as much as Detective Thornton.

He grunted. Maybe he was an idiot. But his job had kept food on the table for him and Lucky when Mom blew her entire paycheck on meth.

He’d never sold to her, and she never questioned where her boys’ food and clothes came from.

Things were working out just fine until she’d found his stash last week.

Of course she’d stolen it. All of it. Then kicked him out when he confronted her.

He’d had to wipe out his meager savings to cover the loss so the three of them didn’t end up on a hit list.

And then she’d promptly OD’d because the drugs were tainted —though he hadn’t realized that until Bernie told him a few days ago.

He hadn’t told Eric the whole story about finding his mom.

Couldn’t share all those details. But they replayed in his mind now.

He’d sneaked back in during the night to check on Lucky and try to recover some of his merchandise.

At first, he thought his mom was just passed out on the couch, but when he couldn’t find Lucky, he’d tried to wake her up.

She was cold and stiff. He’d forgotten about looking for any remaining drugs and just hightailed it out of the house.

It took him the rest of the night to figure out what to do, but he’d finally gone back in and used her phone to call in the wellness check so they wouldn’t be able to trace it back to him.

He’d hung around to watch the cops arrive, keeping his distance to avoid being spotted. That had backfired. By the time he saw Lucky slipping out of the neighbor’s tree house and making a beeline for his bedroom window, it was too late to stop him without calling attention to himself.

He should have tried anyway. They might have been able to make a break for it before anyone realized there were kids in the household.

Now Lucky was in a foster home, Dion was on the run from one of the only decent adults he’d ever known, and he had to report to the big guy.

Or at least, bigger than Marco had been.

He wasn’t sure who the real big guy was, and he didn’t want to know.

Safer for him and Lucky if he didn’t. But he was stuck in this thing, and now he was totally on his own.

At least his mom had somehow kept the house while she was alive.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to happen.

How many of his so-called friends would have died if she hadn’t stolen his stash before he had the chance to off-load it? Would they have taken less than Mom and been okay? Or would he be responsible for multiple deaths?

The new package hidden in a wad of clothes at the bottom of his backpack made it feel like he was hauling a bowling ball around. If only he could just bury it out in the woods somewhere. But that wasn’t an option.

Maybe if he could make up what he’d lost—save enough—he could find Lucky and escape this town.

Go somewhere Bernie wouldn’t think to look for them.

He just couldn’t owe them anything when he disappeared.

As long as they didn’t consider him a threat and he could figure out a way to leave payment without taking new inventory, maybe they wouldn’t bother seriously trying to find him. He and Lucky could be free. Go legit.

The improbability of being able to get that far ahead made his shoulders sag, but he shook off the fear of failure. He would do it. He had to. If not for himself, then for Lucky. His brother deserved better.