Page 46 of A Violet Obsession

“She’s not my girl.”

“Uh, huh? So that’s your hairband around your wrist?”

I scowl at him. “She’s my sister’s friend. I’ve known her since she was a kid.”

“Sure.” He doesn’t even bother pretending that he believes me. “I wear all my female friend’s hair bands.”

“You don’t have any female friends because you try to fuck them all.”

“Neither do you.” He smirks and then snaps the band on my wrist.

He’s lucky I don’t shoot him.

Instead, I turn away before he can say anything else, heading for the door.

Go home. Shower. Change. Sleep.

That’s the plan.

My hand reaches for the handle and stops halfway.

I stand there, tension locking my shoulders, the image of her face and those green eyes burned into my retinas.

She’s scared. Understandably so.

I’m supposed to be able to walk away from scared people. It’s literally part of the job description. Do the work, protect the principal, eliminate whoever needs eliminating, go home. Don’t get invested. Don’t blur the line between professionalism and whatever the fuck is happening in my chest right now.

I exhale sharply and pivot. My feet are already moving before my brain accepts what I’m doing. I flip on the lights in the cyber room and drop into my chair.

I’ll get some answers. Figure out what Lily is hiding. Then I’ll go home.

The search starts simply enough. Lily Stewart becomes Lily Jenkins at nineteen—a legal name change filed in Fulton County. Before the change, her digital trail is almost nonexistent. No social media. No tagged photos. No digital footprint at all for a teenage girl in the age of Instagram and Snapchat.

It’s not that Lily Stewart had a small online presence. She had none. As if she’d been deliberately kept invisible. It appears Lily Jenkins is the same.

I dig deeper. Her online college transcripts under the new name are easy to find, but the tax returns take a bit more time. I scan through them, frowning. It looks like Lily was barely scraping by, working two and sometimes three low-paying jobs simultaneously. A brief stint at a restaurant. A cleaning service. Retail. All of it starting roughly six years ago, as if she materialized out of thin air.

What happened before eighteen?

Her parents died when she was in her early teens, and I have a vague memory of being told she was placed with her mother’s family. It takes me eleven minutes to breach the Georgia DCFS database. Their firewall is a joke.

That’s where I find Scott Jenkins.

Jenkins. They placed her with him at fourteen, and five years later she adopted his surname. Was it gratitude? Loyalty?

I run Scott Jenkins through every database I have access to.

His criminal record loads first.

Petty theft at eighteen. Aggravated theft at twenty-three—eighteen months served in the county jail. Several more arrests for minor felonies. Then a longer stretch in a state prison for burglary, released a year before he was awarded custody of his fourteen-year-old niece.

A pit forms in my stomach.

Why would DCFS place a child with him? It doesn’t make sense. There’s no way a man with a record like that would get approved. I’ve heard enough of how the system can fail a child from Callum, another Elite operative, to know how it works—overloaded caseworkers, not enough foster placements—maybe a biological relative willing to take the kid looks like a win on paper.

I keep searching, and the weight in my gut gets heavier. Jenkins has two more arrests after Lily is placed with him. He wasn’t incarcerated for more than a few months each time, but when I go back into DCFS, it doesn’t look like anyone even checked in on her during that period.

Who was taking care of her?