All the Secrets We Keep (Quarry Book 2) Read online

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Afternoon delight, nothing better. Niko stretched and yawned, drowsy beneath the blankets. Alicia sighed from beside him and nudged her head against his shoulder. Her hand, flat on his belly, toyed with the curly hairs below his belly button until, chuckling, he had to grab it to make her stop. “Ooh, you’re ticklish,” she said. “I’ll have to remember that.” He turned his face to kiss the top of her head. “Don’t you dare.” “It could be fun,” she told him. “Kinky, even.” Niko laughed but kept her hands from teasing him again. Alicia laughed, too, and kissed his bare shoulder before rolling onto her back. She kicked at the covers, pushing them down. When he protested, she knuckled his side gently and rolled over him to get out of bed, then walked naked to the chair in the bedroom corner so she could grab her robe. “Don’t.” He pushed up on his elbow. “I like to see you walking around naked.” “I’m sure Theresa wouldn’t appreciate it.” Niko fell back onto the pillows. “I tho

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Ilya had brought in the mail, a handful of bills addressed to him, and the rest mostly junk. He’d opened the slim letter and shaken out the check made out to his mother in a nearly illegible hand without paying much attention to it until he realized it had not been meant for him. He looked it over. Fifty bucks, no change. The weird thing was it had come from Barry Malone. “This is yours,” he told her and set the check and envelope in front of her. It was nearly three in the afternoon, but Galina was eating a buttered English muffin and drinking coffee. She snorted softly as she slid the check toward her. She shrugged, maybe at the amount, and tucked it in her pocket. “Thank you for opening my mail. Apparently I’m so old and decrepit I can’t be trusted to do it myself.” “It was by mistake.” He wasn’t going to let her get to him. “Why’s Barry sending you money?” “We were married,” Galina said, like that made sense. Ilya snorted much the way she had moments before. “Sure,

  CHAPTER TWENTY Ilya and Niko had gone together to pick up the pizza while Alicia and Theresa dug through the cabinets in the den to pull out a selection of old board games. If Alicia or Niko was upset that Theresa had invited Ilya to join them, neither showed it. Still, she thought she’d better make sure. Theresa swiped dust off the lid of an ancient version of Clue. “I should’ve asked first if you’d be cool with me asking Ilya to come.” “No problem.” Alicia shrugged and held up Monopoly. “We used to play this for days.” “I’m not sure why I did,” Theresa admitted as she set a battered game of Stratego on the table. “He called me to follow up on the offer, you both had just asked me to hang out . . . I don’t know. I guess it felt like I should. Kind of like . . .” “Old times?” Alicia nodded. “Yeah. I get it. Don’t worry. Really. Ilya’s the one who has to deal with me and Niko being together. It’s not like I’m holding on to any lingering romantic feelings for him.” “That’s good.” She’d s

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Meet me at the diner at one today. The message had pinged his phone about an hour earlier, but Ilya hadn’t heard it. Now he had only twenty minutes or so to take a shower and get over there, and even if he rushed, he was going to be a few minutes late. He shot Theresa a message in return letting her know he was on the way, but he stalled out in his bedroom, not sure what he ought to wear. It wasn’t a date, he reminded himself. They weren’t going to do that. Even if he was interested in dating anyone on a regular basis, which he wasn’t and hadn’t been for a long time, it couldn’t be Theresa. “You look nice,” Galina said when he stopped in the living room on the way out to tell her he was leaving. “You always did clean up well, Ilyushka.” She sounded drunk, although there was no evidence of her drinking. The pet name was a sign, though, as was the way she lolled on the couch watching daytime television. Ilya ran a hand over his hair, damp from the shower, and looked do

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Then “There’s been an accident.” That was what Galina had told them. Not much more of an explanation than that. Jenni had been missing for a day and a half before they found her body in the water at the quarry. In their swimming spot. Now it had been nearly a week and a half since then, and finally they were allowed to bury her. Theresa had overheard her stepmother talking to her dad. Jenni hadn’t drowned. She’d fallen off the ledge where they’d so often laid out their towels. She’d hit her head on the way down. Broken her neck. She’d been dead before hitting the water. Drunk. On pills. The murmured conversation between Galina and Theresa’s father, huddled together in the living room, shot out small, suggestive nuggets that left Theresa’s head buzzing with unanswered questions. “Listening at doors, you never hear good things.” Babulya shook a finger at her, though she didn’t look angry. Only sad. “Come away from there.” In the kitchen, Babulya pulled out baking sheet

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Theresa had been thinking about Ilya’s suggestion that she work at the diner, re-creating and preparing Babulya’s signature recipes to give the restaurant its own unique menu. It made no sense. She could cook, but not on that scale, and it was something she did for love. Not as a career. More important, aligning herself with him, tying herself to him, even in the least personal of ways—that could not be something she was considering at all. Could it? Staring at the ceiling of the room in a bed that did not belong to her, in a house she did not own, and in which she was only a guest by the grace of a woman she’d known long ago, Theresa folded her hands on her chest and took a long, deep breath. Agreeing to this would be insane, but she hadn’t stopped turning over the idea in her head since Ilya had offered it. With the money from her commission, she could pay off a good portion of the credit-card debt, making the rest manageable. She could continue her freelance wor

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Then There was shouting going on, muffled behind his mother’s bedroom door. Galina and Barry had been going at it, on and off, every day since the funeral. Ilya didn’t care what was going on with them; he didn’t care if they were breaking down or angry or grieving or in the depths of despair or anything else. His whole world went dark, and nothing else mattered. Still, the constant rise and fall of their angry voices drifting through the wall between their two bedrooms made it hard to sleep, and that was all he wanted. To sink into oblivion. He would get drunk again, if the thought of taking even a single sip of booze didn’t make his throat convulse and sour spittle fill his mouth. He wouldn’t be able to drink a sip without puking at the reminder of how hungover he’d been. Not enough to get a buzz, much less hammered the way he wanted. That left sleep, and he couldn’t find it. He put the pillow over his head, crushing it against his ears, but that didn’t help. Tossi

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Theresa’s father didn’t look good. Pasty. Circles under his eyes. He’d lost weight. Still, his gaze was clear, and he met hers unflinchingly as she took the seat across from him at the coffee-shop table. She hadn’t hugged him when she came in. “It’s good to see you, Ter.” Her father was the only one who’d ever called her that, and she’d never liked it much. Theresa flashed back to how different it had felt when Babulya had called her Titi, an endearment, a nickname born of affection and not simply a truncating of her name for the sake of convenience. She’d never told her dad not to call her that, though, so it was her own fault that he still did. “Thanks for coming,” she said. Her dad looked faintly surprised. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?” The last time she’d seen him had been at Babulya’s funeral, when it would’ve been out of line for her to cause a scene. Before that, though, the last time had been brutal. Her father had wept in a way she hadn’t seen him do since J

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Ilya hadn’t been this nervous about meeting a woman in a long time, and the fact that it was Theresa Malone meant his anxiety made no sense. Still, he paced. If he’d been a smoker, he’d have gone through a pack already. She’d said she wanted to go in on the diner with him, but that she had to work out some things first. He knew that meant something with money. She’d been up front about not being able to cosign a mortgage with him, that she’d be a liability, and although it had been obvious there was way more to the story than she was tel