Give Me Strength (31 page)

Travis rolled his shoulders. The gesture was a
nervous one that set my stomach churning. He lifted his chin and
met my eyes. “No. Since the beginning.”

The world faded around me, blocking out
everything but the guarded expression in his face. I opened my
mouth but I couldn’t seem to form the next question.

“The AFP hired us to watch you. They’ve had feds
on the inside of a crime group they’ve been trying to bring down
for well over a year. These are the people that David is caught up
with. When the AFP heard he was due out of prison, they assigned
our firm to you.”

Casey cursed softly but I ignored it because my
entire focus was on what Travis was telling me.

“Who…who is the AFP?”

“The Australian Federal Police.”

“The entire time you’ve been with me is because
I’ve been an assignment?” I couldn’t breathe. What I had with
Travis wasn’t real. His entire reason for being with me was a… a
paid obligation.
A job. A fucking
duty.
I licked my
suddenly dry lips.

“To what, keep me safe?” My heart pounded as I
tried to process what I’d been told. “All this time you knew I was
in danger, and you didn’t say a word?”

“No,” Travis began and the hand that rubbed at
his brow shook a little. “Not that…”

“Then wh…” Oh my God. My stomach turned over.
“You weren’t assigned to keep me safe at all. Your job was to get
information. You thought I was involved,” I said accusingly.

I should’ve known.

I really was stupid and just like Beth said, my
life really was fucked. She’d known it all along, but something
inside of me that I’d squashed for so long had rebelled against the
painful words. I’d been battling so hard to let go of my past. Then
Travis had asked me to try. He had touched me so tenderly that I
ached from it, and asked me to
try.
Yet all this time, not
just Travis, but all of them, had suspected me of being involved,
had been sitting back and waiting for what, me to give them an in?
Prove myself as one of the bad guys? The thought was utterly
ridiculous, and I might not have had many friends, but I knew what
friendship was and this wasn’t it.

“Quinn, it’s not like that.”

Travis took a step forward, walking further into
the house, and I took a step back. I barely noticed Mac and Henry
both stumbling down the stairs.

“I might have kept things from you because I was
scared of people I cared about getting hurt,” I told him, “but you
lied to me. You sat there and looked right in my eyes when I told
you I was scared, and you asked me to try. And I was so stupid,
because I did. I tried,” I choked out. I blinked back burning tears
because damned if I was going to let him see me cry. “But what was
the point? Why would you ask that of me?”

“Quinn,” he whispered.

I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, and I fought
against all the instincts that were telling me to run. Instead, I
straightened my back and lifted my chin.

“I didn’t want to hurt you. If we hadn’t taken
on the assignment, then it would have been someone else that—”

“Bullshit!” I yelled, balling my fists, because
if he thought this wasn’t hurting me then he was a right fucking
idiot.

He reached out a hand towards me, and I swatted
it away. “Don’t touch me. I don’t need your excuses.”

“I didn’t trust anyone else with the assignment,
dammit.”

I shook my head when he opened his mouth to say
more. “So tell me what it is I’m caught up in. What is this AFP or
whatever, trying to bring down?”

“Drugs and human trafficking.”

My head tilted back as I choked on a laugh of
disbelief. “And you thought I would be involved in that? Poor
little girl from the wrong side of the tracks, beat up by her
stepdad half her life until she’s so damaged no one will ever want
her. I’m just trash, right? The daughter that got thrown away and
tried to take something back for herself. So what part was I
involved in?” Some part of me was screaming at me to shut up, but
the anger was spewing out and I couldn’t stop. “Was I handling the
paperwork and making the bank deposits for the big bad crime lord?
Or was I on the other side of the desk prostituting myself for
the—”

“Quinn!” Travis barked. The vein in his neck
pulsed angrily.

“You and I were a lie. All this…” I swept out a
hand to indicate the duplex and everyone currently standing in it
watching me break apart “…was nothing but proof of how little I
belong in a world like yours.”

Travis shook his head, his eyes pleading. “We
weren’t a lie, Quinn.”

“Don’t.” Travis had a way with words, somehow
manipulating them to always sound like the truth and something I
could believe in.

My heart squeezed painfully.

“Quinn. Look at me.”

I wanted to but I didn’t trust myself.

God. That night at the bar when I’d spilled my
drink all down his shirt, it must have been all he could do not to
laugh at how easy I’d made the assignment for him.

My eyes sought out Henry. His lips parted in
shock, then Mac, her hand at her throat, and Casey, who just the
other night had me believing my wish for a big brother might
finally have come true.

“Quinn, please,” Travis pleaded, his voice
hoarse. “Look at me.”

I didn’t need to look at him to know what he was
feeling because the anguish was clear in his voice. I hated that I
took satisfaction in hearing his pain.

“I can’t.”

Because I don’t see you. You’re not my
Travis. You’re someone else. I don’t want to look at you and see a
stranger.

Mac reached out for me, and I took another step
back, my eyes focusing on her and her alone. “Mac…” I swallowed. “I
quit.”

“You can’t quit. Travis!” she yelled. “So help
me God, you better fix this.”

“No!” I blurted out. My eyes found Travis and I
flinched. There was no colour in his face. “I don’t want
this
fixed. I just want to leave.”

I backed towards the door.

Travis took a step towards me. “It’s not safe.
You can’t go out there.”

The air left my lungs in a huff of laughter, and
I turned and kicked the side table next to the couch, sending it
clattering across the floor. “I’ve never been safe!” I shouted
through tears.

I stalked for the door and threw it open.
Looking over my shoulder I saw Casey holding Travis back from
coming after me. “No, Travis. You don’t get it. What it’s like for
people like us to have trust shattered like that.”

I shook my head because in that moment that was
how it felt. There were people like me and there were people like
him and never should the two mix.

I made it out the front door and to the side of
the house before I had to lean against the weatherboard for
support. I’d never seen Travis so pale or his hands shake like
that. I’d never heard an ache in his voice like it had been just
before.

The front door opened and I closed my eyes, but
the voice calling my name was Casey, not Travis. I dug my fingers
into the pocket of my jeans and hurriedly yanked my car keys out.
The only person I wanted to wrap their arms around me until it hurt
to breathe was the one who’d just broken my goddamn heart.

“Quinn!”

I ignored Casey and unlocked the car door,
sliding inside and jamming the key into Suzi-Q’s ignition with
trembling fingers.

The passenger door swung open, and Casey jolted
hard into the seat. The agony must have been clear in my eyes
because he glanced away and said softly, “It’s okay, Quinn. Just
drive.”

We were halfway down the street before I could
let a breath out of my lungs. I felt Casey glance my way, but I
kept my eyes on the road. He must have understood my need for quiet
because he didn’t speak, allowing me to focus on calming the wild
rage of emotion.

I pulled into a park by the beach and without
acknowledging Casey, I dodged cars, making my way across the road
to the rail that looked down a rock shelf and onto the beach.
Spying a public seat, I sat down.

When Casey sat down next to me, I sighed.

“I just want to be alone.”

He rested his elbows on his knees. “I know. I’m
sorry.”

“It’s so much better being alone.”

“Better or easier?”

The breeze fluttered over me, and I hugged my
arms around myself. My eyes remained trained on the horizon. The
waves were choppy, the beach quiet. “Easier.”

“You know you mean more to him, to all of us,
than just an assignment, right?”

“I don’t know what to think. I keep getting the
urge to run. Always, there’s the urge to run, but I don’t know what
I’m running from. David? The bad guys? Travis? Myself? Who are the
bad guys anyway?”

“I’ll let Travis explain it to you.”

“I don’t want—” The rest of my words choked in
my throat because suddenly Travis was standing in front of me. “How
did you know I was here?” My eyes turned to the traitor sitting
next to me.

Casey shrugged under the full force of the glare
I aimed his way.

“Sorry, Quinn.” He stood up and slammed a hand
on Travis’s chest and shaking his head, growled, “You and Jared.
Christ. Tired of it. I’ll be across the road getting a coffee.”

Travis sat down in his place.

I didn’t say anything.

He didn’t say anything.

It felt like a bloody standoff, and I started to
fidget because I was fighting the urge to curl into him and cry,
and that just set off another wave of anger.

“Do I really know you, Travis?”

“If you’re asking me that, then maybe you
don’t.” His voice was low and wounded.

“Maybe you should start from the beginning,” I
said coldly.

“Okay,” he agreed and rubbed his palms along his
thighs. “The AFP approached us the day Mac hired you, and we met
with them the next day.”

I remembered back to the day when I’d barricaded
myself in the toilet, so utterly embarrassed to find out that
Travis was Mac’s brother. When he walked out, talking on the phone,
the relief had made me weak, but it was his phone conversation that
pinged my memory.

“
Can’t today, Tim. Tell the AFP to set the
meeting up for tomorrow morning, okay? Did they say what it was
about?”

“So that night at the bar—”

“Had nothing to do with anything but you and
me.”

My chest loosened a little as I waited for him
to continue.

“They’ve been building up a case against this
group of traffickers for so long. They have agents so deep
undercover with the Zampetti crime group that
no one
has a
clue who they are. Jesus, Quinn, men, women, kids.
Kids.
They’ve got all their best investigators on this operation, so they
had to outsource for every possible lead. The minute they pegged
your connection to us was when they approached us. We didn’t know
anything about you, about the abuse. They told us David was in for
assault, but they didn’t say why. They just told us you were his
stepdaughter and they wanted to know your level of involvement. But
Quinn, we don’t like to fly blind. We pulled up his records and
found out it was you he assaulted, but the release date on the
paperwork was wrong. It told us he was due out on early parole
three weeks after he was actually released. I don’t know who fucked
up there, but if we had’ve known he was out, he wouldn’t have
gotten anywhere near you. It wasn’t until after we told the AFP
what happened that they released the photos of the assault and we
found out how bad it really was. No one knew he’d been abusing you,
but after seeing those photos, I don’t know how anyone could not.
Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

I shrugged. “Who was I supposed to tell?”

“Fuck,” Travis muttered and rested his elbows on
his knees. “We managed to put some pieces together and found out
that David was friends with someone called Angelo. Angelo got him
involved in their international trafficking ring. He was helping
transport victims, setting them up in housing. Turns out though
that David has a bit of a gambling addiction and after borrowing
huge amounts of money from some of the bigger players, he couldn’t
pay up because he ended up in prison.”

“Oh God.” I pressed my palms against my eyes.
“Them coming after me for the money is my fault.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Quinn. It’s David’s
fault. All of this fucking mess,” he growled. “The reason we took
the contract was because we
knew
without any doubt that you
knew nothing about it. I’ve told you to trust your gut, and mine
was telling me you had no idea about any of it. I didn’t tell you
about the assignment because I didn’t want you thinking any of us
doubted you for a single second. But also…” He swallowed and looked
out at the ocean. “The AFP wanted to find a way to use you. Their
information says David was the one that sent the Zampetti crime
group your way to either get the money in cash, or get their use
from you some other way. They went for the cash option first.
Trafficking a local female isn’t as easy for them as getting
immigrants who don’t know anyone and can barely speak English. When
a local girl goes missing, there’s more press and local police
involvement. That’s something they don’t want to attract if they
can help it, but the AFP were thinking that maybe if they used you,
it might help them rack up more charges. The Zampetti drug and
trafficking operation is so slick they’re trying to get them on
anything they can, and you were just another option.”

“But no one from the police ever approached
me.”

“That’s because I wouldn’t let them. They’re not
using you, but that stunt in Melbourne only increased their aim to
get you involved.”

Jared stood there, phone in hand. “Mitch
wants to talk to you. He’s been in touch with Melbourne’s AFP, and
they’re sending over a fed. They want to know what the fuck is
happening with this assignment—”