He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Safe

I was dressed and in the truck before Cal had found his keys.

"Stay here," I said.

"No."

"Cal, he's my father."

"And he has a gun and the keys to a building full of ammonia," Cal said, pulling on his shirt. "I'm driving. You can tell me where to go."

He drove the Causeway at ninety.

I sat with the phone against my ear, ringing my mother's landline, and it rang and rang.

"She can't get to it," I said. "She can't get out of the bed."

"Then she's safe in it," Cal said.

"What if he's already..."

"Jo."

I stopped.

"He isn't going to do it," Cal said. "If he meant to, he'd have done it in his kitchen with your mother in the next room. A man who wants to die doesn't drive to the ice house."

"Then why is he there?"

"Because there's something in it he wants more than the sheriff to find."

I turned and looked at him.

The dash lights lay blue across his jaw.

"The old books," I said.

"The old books."

The ice house stood at the end of the pier in the dark, a long tin-sided building with a single yellow bulb over the door.

My father's truck was nosed up against the loading ramp with the driver's door open.

A thin sour smoke was coming out of the roof vent.

I was out of the truck before Cal had stopped it.

The steel door at the side was propped with a block of ice.

Inside, the air was cold and thick and tasted of char.

The compressors were running.

My father stood in the middle of the packing floor in his captain's cap and his undershirt with a coffee can of gasoline at his feet.

A pile of paper lay in front of him on the concrete.

Brown daybooks, fat and water-stained.

Compressor logs.

A cardboard box of invoices, split at the seams.

One book was already burning.

A small flame had caught the edge of its cover and run in a ring.

Beside him, in the crook of his arm like a child, he held an old twelve-gauge shotgun, with the barrel pointed at the floor.

"Daddy," I said.

← Chapter 16 · All chapters · Chapter 18 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend