“Come on, Faythe. Is this really necessary?” Ryan whined, pouting at me as if I gave a damn. I didn’t. I’d let go of any familial affection for him the night he left me locked in Miguel’s basement to fight off two rapists in defense of my honor. And my life.
I gave him a faux casual shrug. “Fine. I don’t give a shit whether or not you eat.”
“All right, all right.” Ryan turned and pressed the side of his face into the brick wall, in the same position he assumed three times every day. At least, until today. Satisfied, I knelt on the floor in front of a small steel flap at the bottom of the cage, through which I shoved his dinner plate and napkin. Then I reached through the bars to set his glass of tea next to the plate.
As I settled into the wooden chair, Ryan shuffled forward to grab his plate in one hand and his glass in the other, completely ignoring the napkin as he backed toward his bunk, the only place he had to sit and eat.
I folded my arms across my chest, grimacing in disgust as he licked butter and congealed fat from the handle of the fork. “You just gonna sit there and watch?” he asked. Then, before I could answer, he glanced around the basement, as if looking for something on the walls. “What time is it, anyway?”
“Four-thirty in the morning.”
He sank his fork into a cold flake of fish. “What are you doing up so early?”
“So late,” I corrected him.
“You haven’t been to bed?” Ryan asked, not bothering to cover his mouth. My mother would have been horrified. Maybe his deteriorating manners were the real reason she wouldn’t come see him. “So what was so important everyone forgot to feed the poor guy in the cage?”
I took issue with the sympathy Ryan seemed to think he deserved, but I kept my mouth shut. The more I pissed him off, the less likely he’d be to tell me what I wanted to know. “We’ve had a very eventful evening.” I leaned forward to make eye contact with him, and as I did, I noticed for the first time how much his face had filled out over the past three months. In spite of the lack of sunlight and fresh air, and the recently missed meals, he looked much healthier than he had in June, when our positions were reversed.
The fork paused inches from his mouth, a spear of asparagus impaled on the end. “What happened?”
“You’ll have to talk the Alpha into reinstating your security clearance before I can tell you that.” We both knew that would never happen, but because I needed information from him, I fought the urge to laugh at the disappointment in his expression. “However, I have a chance for you to earn a few brownie points.”
He bit the tip off the asparagus, his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What do you want?”
“Information.”
Ryan smirked as he chewed. “What kind of information, and how badly do you want it?”
“Badly enough to make sure you don’t get fed tomorrow if you don’t start talking. Right now,” I added, my face carefully blank as his smirk drooped into an angry frown. “I need to hear everything you know about Luiz.”
Twenty-Four
“Luiz?” Ryan relaxed visibly, slouching against the brick wall as he speared several slices of scalloped potato with his fork. “Why do you want to know about him? He’s dead.”
“How do you know?” Suddenly, I wished I’d brought a notebook, so I could take notes. Or at least have something to do with my hands.
My brother frowned. He swallowed his bite and took a long drink of not-so-iced tea before answering. “Well, I guess I just assumed he was dead, like everyone else did. Why? Did he show up?”
I ignored his question, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my forearm. Damn, I hate basements.
“You never met Luiz, right?” I asked, and Ryan shook his head, damp, stringy hair flopping. “Did you ever speak to him on the phone? Or hear Eric or Miguel talk to him?”
He nodded, pushing another asparagus tip around in a pool of hollandaise. “I heard Miguel and Luiz arguing on the phone a couple of days before they brought you in.”
“What were they arguing about?”
“How the hell should I know?” Ryan stuffed the bite into his mouth, then spoke around it. “They were speaking Portuguese. It’s not similar enough to Spanish for me to catch more than a few words.”
My ears perked up, almost literally. “What few words did you understand?”
“Jeez, Faythe,” he said, pulling one filthy-soled bare foot up onto his cot. “That was months ago, and I wasn’t really paying attention even then. I just wanted them to shut up so I could hear the game on TV.”
“Just think about it for a minute,” I insisted. He scowled but closed his eyes in concentration.
“They said something like ‘mujer,’ which means—”
“Woman. I know.” I waved off his explanation. “What else?”
“Give me a minute!” More chewing, and more thinking, and I couldn’t be sure which was more difficult for him. “Um. I heard them both say ‘humano’ a couple of times. And maybe ‘mordedura’—bite. And I know I heard something like ‘mate,’ which means ‘kill’ in Spanish, because I remember thinking they might have been arguing about killing me. But neither of them said my name, so that may not have been what they meant, after all.”
I nodded grimly, almost certain he was right, though killing Ryan was surely somewhere on their to-do list. It sounded to me like they were arguing about their pet project.
The grandfather clock in the foyer chimed five times, and I yawned into my palm, making a mental note to start some coffee when I went back upstairs. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. Luiz said something about someone’s nose. Nariz. Then Miguel kept saying something about a university. Universidad. He seemed pretty insistent, and Luiz kept saying no. Yelling it, like he didn’t want to go to school. I thought maybe Miguel wanted him to go learn some English. But then, when Miguel said they were going after you, I realized that they were probably arguing over how best to snatch you from school.”
I barely heard a word Ryan said after “nose,” because that told me all I needed to know about the last things Luiz said before he disappeared. It sounded to me like Miguel wanted Luiz to take a second shot at me, but Luiz wanted nothing to do with it. Since I’d broken his nose, I couldn’t really blame him.
“When exactly did they have this argument?” I asked, rising from my chair to pace in front of his cage. “What day was it?”
“Shit, Faythe, I don’t know.” He grimaced at the last bite of cold halibut on his fork, hovering halfway to his mouth.
“Well, think about!” I demanded, resisting the impulse to rattle his bars. “How long was it between their argument and the day they brought me in?”
“A couple of days. It was right before Miguel and Eric went after Abby.” He bit into the fish and blanched as if it tasted bad. But I knew the problem had just as much to do with old, bitter memories as with cold, rubbery fish.
My teeth ground together, and my hands curled into fists at my sides as images of Abby behind bars flashed through my mind. She’d been bruised and in shock when I first saw her there, hiding behind a curtain of tangled red curls. She jumped at every sound from the house above and spent most of her time curled up on the bare mattress in one corner of her cell.
Instead of letting her out, or even sending our father an anonymous tip about where to find her, Ryan had let her—and later me—sit in that basement prison dreading every single second that passed.
“If Miguel made Luiz go back on campus the next day to take another shot at me, he could easily have stumbled upon Andrew in the grip of scratch-fever,” I mumbled.
“Who’s Andrew?” Ryan asked. I glared at him, irritated to realize I’d been thinking aloud. But then, as tired as I was, it was a miracle I was thinking at all.
“Are you done with that plate?” I asked tugging on the hem of the tank top now clinging to my damp skin.
“Yeah.” He drained the last of the watered-down tea from his glass. “You can take this, too. But c
ould you refill my water before you go?”
I glanced at the office-style water dispenser situated close to his cage so he could stick his plastic cup through the bars and get water whenever he wanted. The reservoir was dry, and just noticing that made me conscious all over again of how hot it was in the basement.
“Fine.” I removed the upside-down water jug from the dispenser and filled it from the utility sink in the bathroom, then lugged it back across the basement and reinstalled the bottle. Then I picked up the dishes my brother had slid through the stainless-steel flap, and turned to go.
“What’s going on up there, Faythe?” Ryan followed me as far as the bars would allow as I headed toward the stairs. “No one’s come down to lift weights or spar in days, and now they’re letting me go hungry. And you’re asking about Luiz. Have they found him?”
I glanced at him over my shoulder, one hand on the makeshift stair rail, a three-quarter-inch iron pipe running alongside the steps. “Nope. To my knowledge, no one’s even looking.”
“Come on, Faythe!” Ryan shouted as I bounced up the stairs. “At least I kept you informed. I never left you in the dark.”
“Actually…” I stood on the top step, my finger already poised over the light switch. “That’s exactly what you did.” I flipped the switch and stepped into the kitchen, closing the basement door on the heat, the smell, and his protests.
I should have felt guilty as I rinsed his dishes in the sink and started a pot of coffee, but I didn’t. I just felt tired. And famished.
If my mother were up, she’d make pancakes, or omelets, or something equally complicated. But I was far too lazy to chop or mix a bunch of raw ingredients first thing in the morning, especially considering I hadn’t slept, or had my coffee. So, I settled for French toast. Even I could do that, with minimum effort.
While my coffee percolated, its mere fragrance keeping me upright, I beat two eggs in a large glass bowl, then added heavy cream, vanilla, and sugar, and beat some more. In fact, I beat the slimy concoction for much longer than was strictly necessary, because it felt therapeutic. I needed to pound the living shit out of something, and since I couldn’t get past Ryan’s bars, eggs seemed to be my only option at five o’clock in the morning.
Mumbling beneath my breath about how I’d discipline Ryan for his crimes if I were in charge, I rifled through the cabinet beneath the bar for a flat pan with raised sides, clanging every pot and skillet my mother owned against one of its stainless-steel or Teflon-coated brethren.
“Good morning,” my father said from the other side of the bar, startling me so badly that I banged my head against the cabinet. My own racket had covered his approach.
“Daddy, you scared the shi—er…crap out of me.” I set the pan on the counter between us, rubbing the new bump. “Could you maybe make a little more noise next time you enter the room?”
He walked around the bar and took two coffee mugs from the overhead cabinet. “Could you maybe make a little less noise next time you decide to torture your mother’s cookware?”
“Sorry.” I kicked the cabinet door shut and reached into the bread box for a loaf of presliced French bread.
“I needed to get up, anyway.” He poured coffee into both mugs. “Wesley’s flight lands in an hour.”
I glanced at him as I lined up bread slices in the bottom of the pan. “Oh.” Exhaustion settled over me like a literal weight on my shoulders at the thought of Jamey Gardner, still wrapped in black plastic in the barn.
While the bread soaked up egg-slime in the pan, I heated the griddle.
My father set a mug on the counter in front of me. “Why are you up so early?” he asked, flipping open the top on a bottle of creamer. “And don’t tell me you felt like making everyone breakfast.”
“I haven’t actually made it to bed yet,” I admitted, and my father frowned. He opened his mouth to start yelling, but I held up my hand to cut him off, desperate for that initial sip of coffee before I could defend myself with any actual coherence.
I smiled as the first traces of caffeine entered my system, and a groggy peace settled into place. “I think I’ve figured out who’s helping Andrew.”
My father sipped silently from his mug, calmly waiting for me to continue.
Damn him. I’d stayed up all night and probably lost Marc for all of eternity, though my father seemed to have slept through that part, thankfully. I deserved at least a little excitement from my Alpha, especially considering that the information I’d dug up was part of the job he’d assigned me.
Glowering, I turned my back on him and placed the first four soggy slices of bread on the griddle. My stomach growled as the toast sizzled, the combined scents of butter and vanilla sweetening the entire kitchen.
“It’s Luiz,” I said, poking angrily at the bread. Still miffed, I didn’t bother to turn around, and regretted my decision when my father choked on his coffee in surprise.
I whirled around to see him blotting at an undignified splatter across the front of his royal-blue robe. A grin snuck out from behind my scowl, and I hid it quickly with my own mug when he looked up.
“What on earth gave you that idea?” he asked, already recovering his usual poise.
“A leap of intuition.” I flipped the first slice of bread. “And I’m kind of surprised I didn’t think of it earlier. Here’s the thing. There were no other cats anywhere near the UNT campus. But we know Luiz was there, the very day I bit Andrew. He probably saw us together. Then, if he came back the next day, what would happen if he couldn’t find me?”
My father sipped from his mug, unresponsive as he watched me.
I rolled my eyes, gesturing with the spatula. “He’d follow Andrew! Right? To get to me? But I was already gone, and my boyfriend was newly infected. He’d be able to smell my scent on Andrew. In his blood. That’d be pretty hard to ignore.”
He frowned, and I tried to hide my disappointment in his reaction. I should have known he wouldn’t get it. He made decisions based on facts, not fantastic leaps of logic, no matter how well founded they were.
“Faythe, that’s an awful lot of ifs, and no real evidence.” My father set his mug on the counter with a ceramic-on-ceramic clink, which somehow managed to convey his doubt. “It’s going to take something concrete to make me suspect someone who, by all indications, has been dead for a couple of months now.”
“He’s not dead.” I shoved hair from my face and lifted the first slice of toast from the griddle onto a serving platter. “Everyone’s assuming he’s dead because he hasn’t shown up in a while. But they’re making asses out of us all, because he isn’t dead. He’s just been busy making sure Andrew survived scratch-fever.”
“Wait,” my father said, and I closed my eyes in dread, sure I knew what was coming. “You think Luiz—a serial-killing jungle stray—stopped slaughtering college girls so he could nurse your ex-boyfriend back to health? Do you understand how…absurd that sounds?”
My fist clenched the spatula. “Yes. Believe me, I know.”
“And we have no way of knowing that Luiz actually went back after you ran him off.”
I smiled to myself as I removed the last of the toast from the griddle. Time to play the credibility card. “Actually, based on information from my source, I’m pretty sure he did.”
He arched one brow. “And your source would be…?”
“Ryan.”
My father blinked at me, and I grinned from ear to ear. “What did Ryan say, exactly?”
I really, really wanted to fudge a bit on the details, just to make them stronger, since Ryan hadn’t actually said anything but a few half-remembered Portuguese words. But my father would verify for himself anything I claimed to have gotten from my less-than-trustworthy brother, so I told the swear-on-my-own-life, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-be-declawed truth. “He told me what he understood of an argument Miguel and Luiz had the day I kicked his kidnapping ass.”
A brief smile slipped past his usual unreadable expression, so I continue
d, encouraged. “It sounded like Miguel wanted him to go back for me, and Luiz didn’t want to go, because I’d broken his nose.” I turned back to the stove and dropped a fresh slice of toast onto the griddle, accidentally slopping egg batter across the pristine stovetop. “Now, I spoke to Andrew on the phone the morning after Marc and I got home, and he was already getting sick. I wish I’d realized then that it was scratch-fever. But I didn’t.”
“You had no reason to,” my father said, and a flood of gratitude washed over me at his words.
“Thanks. Anyway, if Luiz went back for me that day, he’d have found Andrew instead.”
“But you don’t know for sure that he went back to UNT.”
I smiled sweetly at my father as I set his plate on the counter in front of him, along with a bottle of maple syrup. “No. But you don’t know that he didn’t, either.”
My father and I ate side by side at the bar, chewing in near silence as he thought over everything I’d said. At ten minutes to six, Michael walked into the kitchen, already fully dressed in jeans and a somber, dark blue polo shirt, no doubt his idea of the travel-friendly wardrobe of a man in mourning.
Ethan followed him five minutes later, wearing only a pair of gray jogging pants cinched at the waist. His thick black hair was still sleep-tousled, and his cheek bore a crisscross of pillow lines. He headed straight for the coffeepot, probably led by his nose, because he couldn’t possibly have seen anything through his half-closed eyes.
Yet he was alert enough to snatch the last half slice of toast from my plate as he walked past the bar.
“Get your own,” I snapped, but I wasn’t able to work up any real irritation after he’d tried so hard to console me the night before. Or rather, three hours earlier.
“You know I don’t cook,” he mumbled around a mouthful of my breakfast as he poured the last of the coffee into the teacup he’d grabbed by accident.
“Wake up, Ethan,” my father said, setting a box of dry cereal on the counter in front of him. Michael added two bowls and a half-empty carton of milk, then dug two spoons from the silverware drawer.