The Disappearance of Sloane Sullivan, page 23
“Oh God.” My breaths came fast and shallow as I frantically wiped my hands on Oliver’s white shirt, streaking it red over and over. When my hands were raw from rubbing them so hard, I took several deep breaths and crawled around the top of the island, avoiding the pool of blood by the man’s feet.
“Mark?” My voice cracked, barely louder than a whisper. I stood and skirted around the body until I could see the face. I dropped to my knees as tears began streaming down my cheeks.
Lorenzo Rosetti’s brown eyes were staring blankly at me.
They were dull and empty and I couldn’t look at them. I glanced to the side and gasped at the bullet holes gaping in his chest. I covered my mouth with my hand and immediately pulled it away at the rusty smell of blood. There was a dead mobster in my kitchen and I was covered in his blood. I had to get out of there.
I scrambled to my feet and tore out of the house, running so fast across the backyard that Oliver’s baseball cap blew off my head. Mark would find me. I knew he would. I came crashing through the thicket of trees, only to find the Dumpsters behind the Mexican restaurant still deserted.
I placed one hand against a Dumpster and leaned over, focusing on tiny, irrelevant details—an ant marching across the pavement, the trail of something white that had run down the side of the Dumpster, the way the breeze made the ends of my hair sway apart and back together again—until my heart slowed and my tears stopped and my stomach quit churning. I straightened and a hand clamped down on my shoulder.
“It’s me,” Jason whispered.
I whirled around, shock making my mouth dry. “Jason?”
Jason’s gaze trailed from my forehead to the bottom of my shirt. His eyes grew impossibly wide. “Is that blood?”
I looked down at my shirt. The front was almost as red as the V-neck I’d had on earlier.
“Are you all right?”
I glanced from Jason to the trees. How did Jason find me before Mark?
Jason stepped in front of me and placed his hands gently on either side of my face. “Sasha. Are you hurt?”
I shook my head.
“What happened?”
“He’s in there.”
“Who’s in there? What’s going on?”
The question I’d thought of when I first saw Lorenzo returned. “How’d he find me?”
Possibilities began running through my head. Jason didn’t tell anyone, I was sure of that. Jason’s mom? I didn’t think that was likely. I hadn’t had contact with anyone else from my past, no social media networks, no picture—“Damn!” I focused on Jason. “Do you have your phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Check Livie’s stuff online.”
A minute later, Jason cursed and held his phone out to me. Livie had posted the picture of the two of us asleep in the hotel room with a comment that included Jason’s first name, my first name, and a few choice words about us being the scum of the school—the full name of the school. I looked at the time of the posting: 1:10 a.m. Sunday morning.
I wasn’t sure how that picture had led Lorenzo to my doorstep, but it was too much of a coincidence not to have played a role.
“I deleted that picture myself,” Jason muttered.
“She probably emailed or texted it to herself before you deleted it. Whiz with the photos, right? She wanted a little insurance of her own.” I shook my head. It didn’t matter. What mattered was finding Mark. “How’d you find me? I told Sawyer—”
“I know. But I promised I’d find you. And when Oliver told me you demolished a phone and left through the bathroom window, I wasn’t about to stay there and do nothing. So I snuck to my car and started driving around. Then I saw you running through your backyard.”
“Did you drive by the front of my house?”
Jason nodded.
“Was there a car in the driveway?”
“No.”
“But your car’s close?”
Jason bit his lip. “Yeah.”
“I need to borrow it.”
His hand slipped into his pocket and curled into a fist around what had to be his keys. His expression matched the one he’d had when we first saw Sawyer in the hall that morning, like he knew something was about to change and he was preparing himself for it. “I’m coming with you.”
“Jase, no.” He thought I was running from some Marshals. He had no idea about Lorenzo or whoever else from the Rosetti family was in town. “I can’t—”
“Don’t try to talk me out of it.” His voice was hard. “I know what I’m saying. I’m in this, all the way. I don’t care how dangerous you’re going to tell me it is. Where you go, I go.”
I pursed my lips.
A smug expression flitted across his face. “I’ve got a car, an ATM card with about two thousand dollars in the bank and a cell phone. What have you got?”
I narrowed my eyes. We wouldn’t be able to use those things for long, but at least they’d get us someplace safer where I could come up with a plan for finding Mark. “An annoying partner in crime, apparently.”
Jason half smiled at my acquiescence. “And as your partner, I deserve to be told what’s going on.” His face grew serious. “Starting with whose blood that is.”
Before I could answer, a tinted older model sedan pulled into the alley behind the Mexican restaurant, blocking the narrow road. The driver’s side door swung open. I bounced on the balls of my feet, ready for whatever was about to happen.
The agent with the buzzed salt-and-pepper hair who’d spoken on stage during career day climbed out of the driver’s side. A second later, the youngest agent with the brown hair and brown eyes stepped out of the passenger’s side.
I shifted slightly in front of Jason but remained silent.
“Sloane Sullivan?” the older agent asked. The expression on his face told me he already knew who I was. When I didn’t respond, he continued in an authoritative voice. “I’m Agent Kessler and this is my partner, Agent Dixon.” He waved at the younger agent with one hand and pulled a badge out of his suit pocket with the other. “We’re with the US Marshals Service. We’ve been looking for you.”
I pretended to study the badge. I didn’t know what was going on anymore, but I wasn’t about to trust just anyone who claimed to be an agent. Not when at least one mobster who should’ve been in jail had been close enough I could’ve touched him. Badges were easy to fake. Who knew who else was in town? And even if they were real Marshals, they weren’t my Marshal.
I laced my fingers in Jason’s. I wasn’t leaving his side. Not after the so-called agents had seen us together. They may have had a vehicle they’d left running, but Jason and I could maneuver faster through the cramped beach town on foot than they could in that monstrosity of a car. And there was no way the agents knew the town better than Jason. We were going to run and hide somewhere until it was dark. I was just waiting for the right moment to give Jason the signal.
Agent Dixon eyed my shirt. “Is that blood?”
I needed to draw the agents away from the car a little to buy us a few extra seconds when we escaped. I cleared my throat and asked, in a voice much steadier than I was feeling, “What’s your name again?”
Dixon left his open door and took three steps toward me. “Agent Dixon.”
I nodded so slowly Mark would’ve been proud. “Agent Dixon, where is Agent Markham?”
Dixon’s eyebrows flattened. “Who?”
Kessler strode to the front of the car and placed his hand on Dixon’s arm. His suit jacket spread open slightly, revealing a gun in a holster. “Agent Markham is fine. He’s at a safe house nearby. He asked us to bring you to him.”
I had to work hard to keep a straight face. They didn’t know who Mark was. Because if they did, they would’ve known there was no way Mark would’ve sent someone unfamiliar to collect me. Even if he was dead, his ghost would’ve floated on over to the Dumpsters just to make sure I was okay. I squeezed Jason’s hand and, out of the corner of my mouth so my lips barely moved, whispered, “Bet I can run faster.”
We took off in the opposite direction of the sedan, heading for the thin layer of trees that separated the restaurant from the house on the opposite corner. I planned on hiding anywhere we were protected from view: backyards with fences, pool houses, inside a house if we were lucky enough to find an open door or window. I was going to be like Ferris Bueller in his mad dash through people’s backyards, only I wasn’t racing my parents.
As I approached the line of trees with Jason easily keeping pace at my side, I knew I wasn’t slowing down for anything. Even if the agents started shooting or a whole fleet of sedans crashed through the trees after us, I wasn’t stopping.
“Sasha, wait!”
The clear, melodic voice carried over the ocean breeze. It was a voice I instantly recognized even though I hadn’t heard it in almost six years. A voice that, despite what I’d just been thinking, made me jerk to a stop. Because it was my mother’s voice.
Twenty-Five
Jason skidded to a stop next to me. A wrinkle appeared in between his eyebrows as we both spun around.
From a distance, the woman standing in front of the sedan could’ve been my mother. She had the same shade of dirty-blond hair, although it was longer than I remembered my mom’s being. But I was too far away to see anything definitive, like my mom’s freckles or green eyes or the thin scar that bisected her left eyebrow.
The woman took several steps in my direction.
“Julia,” Agent Kessler warned.
She waved him off, never taking her eyes off me. “It’s okay, Sasha. It’s me.”
The voice brought back a flood of memories, of all the little things I missed the most when I lost her: the elaborate stories she made up at bedtime the year I was afraid of the dark and didn’t want to go to sleep, the way she sang along to the radio as loud as she could while driving with the windows open, her refusal to eat any kind of ice cream that didn’t have chocolate in it, which was the reason I still didn’t like vanilla. I opened my mouth, but no words came out.
Heart pounding, I closed the distance between myself and my mom until I was close enough to make out the scar in her eyebrow. “I don’t—”
The rest of my sentence was swallowed up by my mom’s bone-crushing hug. “It’s really you,” she whispered into my hair.
It felt like I was drowning, like I was sinking back in time and couldn’t breathe and didn’t know which way was up.
“But...you’re dead,” Jason said from my side, his voice unsteady. “I went to your funeral.”
Over my mom’s shoulder, I saw the agents really look at Jason for the first time.
Mom pulled back enough to study Jason but kept both hands on my shoulders. Her head tilted to one side. “Jase? Is that you?”
“You know him?” Dixon asked.
She nodded. “He’s our old next door neighbor, Jason Thomas.”
I didn’t miss the glance the agents exchanged. It made me want to stand in front of Jason again, protect him somehow.
I took a shaky breath. It didn’t matter what I was feeling, I needed to take control of the situation. I’d dragged Jason into this, and I needed to keep it together until I understood exactly what was happening.
Jason shook his head. “Everyone was at your funeral. My mom, your sister, your parents.”
“Everyone except Sasha and her father,” Kessler corrected.
The annoyed edge to his voice rubbed me the wrong way. I wiped a tear from my cheek and narrowed my eyes at him. “You need to tell me what’s going on, and you need to do it right now.”
Kessler opened his mouth, but my mom removed her hands from my shoulders and waved him off again. She stared at me. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think those brown eyes were real.” She shook her head, as if she was trying to dislodge the sadness in her eyes that said I missed too much, then sighed. “My accident wasn’t real. The Marshals staged it to protect me from the people who took you.”
I turned to Jason. My own confusion was mirrored in his expression. “Let me get this straight,” I said, my gaze bouncing from my mother to each of the agents. “The Marshals faked your death to protect you from the Marshals?”
There was a full ten seconds of silence before Dixon said, “What?”
I was losing my patience. I didn’t understand how my dead mother was standing in front of me, I still didn’t know where Mark was and the urge to run was making me antsy. “I’ve been in WITSEC this whole time!” I snapped.
“Oh, baby, is that what they told you?” Mom brushed her fingers down my arms, leaving goose bumps in their wake. “It’s not true.”
Twenty-Six
One hour. It had been one hour since my mom said those three little words that made me and Jason agree to take a ride in the sedan to the Marshals’ safe house two towns over for some explanations. Thirty-nine minutes since she let go of me long enough to give me some extra clothes and a pair of flip-flops and let me take a scalding hot shower, during which I tried to ignore the reason why the white bar of soap kept turning pink as I scrubbed myself clean. And eighteen minutes since I sat at the large square table in the safe house’s dining room and Kessler and Dixon began to lay out their theory, a small digital voice recorder documenting everything they said. And I still had no idea what was going on.
“Are you okay?” Jason asked from his seat next to mine at the table.
I reached over and squeezed his hand. From the way he pursed his lips, I knew he was taking my silence as a no. The answer to his question was no, but that wasn’t why I hadn’t spoken. I’d been trying to say as little as possible because of the voice recorder. I didn’t like the idea of my words being used against me. Or Mark.
I took a deep breath. “So what you’re telling me is that I haven’t been in WITSEC since I was twelve. Instead, I was kidnapped by Angelo Rosetti’s son. Did I get that right?”
Dixon nodded. “Yes.”
“That’s impossible.”
Directly across the table from me, Kessler sighed.
I glared at him. “We’ve already established that Lorenzo Rosetti is dead in my kitchen. I know what he looks like. I haven’t been with Lorenzo. And I knew Dante Rosetti. He was in my class at school the year I left. I wasn’t kidnapped by a sixth grader.”
“It wasn’t Dante or Lorenzo,” Dixon said. “We believe it was Angelo’s oldest son who took you.”
I frowned. “Lorenzo is Angelo’s oldest son.”
Dixon’s gaze dropped to the manila folder on the table in front of him. He stared at it for a second, like he was debating something, then pulled out a picture. Without a word, he slid it across the table to me, facedown. But he didn’t take his eyes off the manila folder.
The way he wouldn’t look at me unnerved me more than anything. My pulse raced as I picked up the photo.
For one infinite moment, my eyes didn’t blink and my lungs didn’t breathe and my heart didn’t beat.
I was looking at four guys in suits at what seemed to be a wedding: Dante, who was a little younger than I remembered; Lorenzo, whose eyes were bright and full of mischief; Angelo, who looked just like he had the few times I’d seen him pick up Dante at school; and...Mark. He was off to the side, separate from the rest of the group. His thick brown hair was longer than I’d seen it in a while and his facial hair not quite as thick as he’d been able to grow it since I’d known him, but it was definitely him.
“His name is Marco Rosetti.”
My chest constricted at Dixon’s words.
Kessler cleared his throat. “That’s the only picture we have of him. He was a recluse, never out in public with the family, homeschooled most of his life. We know very little about him.”
I couldn’t stop staring at the photo. Mark. Marco. It’s not possible.
My mom placed a hand on my arm. “Sasha?”
I blinked. From the way everyone was staring at me, I knew it wasn’t the first time someone had said my name.
“Is that who had you?” Dixon asked with a nod to the picture.
I studied the familiar brown of the younger Mark’s eyes. “He didn’t have me. He was protecting me.”
“She’s brainwashed or something,” Kessler muttered.
“I’m not brainwashed!” I insisted. “Every time there was a threat he kept me safe and hidden.”
“From his own family?” Kessler asked, doubt dripping from his voice.
Dixon shot his partner a cutting look I wished could’ve been recorded and turned back to me. “My guess is that those threats were actually times we got close to finding you.”
Jason reached over, took the photo out of my hand, and frowned at it. He’d been too quiet since we arrived at the safe house.
I rested one elbow on the table and leaned my cheek against my fist, watching Jason. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Kessler barked out a laugh. “You know what doesn’t make sense? That you could’ve believed you were in WITSEC to begin with.”
Jason’s whole body tensed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that before you can enter WITSEC there are vetting and interviews that have to be done. You don’t just magically pop into the program.”
I scowled. “There was an interview! Look, my dad and I saw—” my gaze flickered to the digital recorder “—something. We ran. Only, right after it happened, it was too much for my brain to process and I shut down. Dad said I went catatonic, stopped speaking and just kept rocking in the backseat of the car. So he drove around to make sure no one was following us and tried to get me to respond. And after a while I did. But when I started talking again, I didn’t remember what we’d seen.”
