Page 170 of Untouchable

“Found out…” Kelly choked out. It hurt. It hurt even to speak.

Reese’s face twisted again. “You found out? What?” Then something changed in her expression. “Fuck, Kelly, you found out about your dad?”

Kelly ruthlessly directed her head to nod, and eventually it complied. There was some kind of excruciating tension pushing up through her chest. Into her throat. And she was scared it would literally suffocate her.

The room, Reese’s face, started to swim before her eyes.

“Was it Caleb?” Reese asked. “It was Caleb after all?”

Kelly’s hands were shaking helplessly, and she had to use both of them to hold the glass of water steady. “No. No. I was… wrong.”

Saying the words was crippling, but even this—even this most horrifying of realizations—wasn’t the force that was ripping her open, that was tearing her to shreds.

Reese’s face was almost contorted now with confusion and worry. “Oh my God!” she breathed. “So what happened?”

Reese had never known him, but Kelly had.

He had been Kelly’s father. Her dad. Herdad. She could still feel the weight of his hand on her shoulder.

Except it wasn’t. It was Reese’s hand.

Kelly tried to clear her head, her eyes, her throat. Tried to fight against this force that was overtaking her.

Couldn’t.

Couldn’t stop her hands from shaking. And water slopped from the glass all over the hardwood floor.

“Sorry,” Kelly mumbled. She couldn’t physically hold the glass still, and she was barely able to set it on the table before she spilled the rest of it. “Sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Reese said, her voice hard and urgent. “Damn it, Kelly. You have to tell me what’s going on.”

Kelly barely heard her. She stumbled into the kitchen and grabbed a dish towel. Then came back into the living room and knelt on the hard floor, wiping up the spilled water.

She’d wiped up water not so long ago from the floor of the guest suite in Caleb’s house. She’d knocked over a vase of flowers.

And then she’d made herself fuck him.

She kept wiping, even when the water was gone. She scrubbed at the wood, almost desperately.

It was something to do. A thing to be done. She just stared at the floor and kept wiping.

Reese knelt down beside her. “Kelly, stop. Tell me what happened. How did your dad die?”

Kelly wanted to keep wiping, but Reese had pulled the dish towel away from her. So she just stared down, her hands flat on the floor. “He was shot.”

Reese made an exasperated noise. “I know that. Who shot him?”

“Hit man.” There had never been any doubt about who had actually pulled the trigger. She’d always known it was a hit man. Nothing had really changed.

Except everything had.

Reese reached over and put her hands on Kelly’s face, forcing her to look up at her. “Kelly, why are you acting like this? So Caleb didn’t order the murder?”

“No,” Kelly forced out, mostly because Reese looked so panicked. It felt like someone else was speaking, someone else was shaping these words. “Someone else.”

“Someone else? Who?”

Kelly tried not to hear the word repeated back to her, but the sound of it was burning in her ears. “Roman,” she mumbled,trying to shake herself free from whatever was possessing her. “Roman DiMauro. With Caleb’s dad’s approval. Both dead now. Nothing… nothing to do about it now.”