“The coroner said Micah died of massive hemorrhaging. He was left on the side of the street. Gran said that was bullshit. She said it was a syndicate object lesson. She said that’s what they did to kids—to anyone—who refused to fall in line. They gave the poor kid conflicting orders and let his body tear itself apart in front of an audience.”
“Oh...” Sera’s voice carried little sound, but infinite pain.
“It was my fault. I took him from his bed in the middle of the night and gave him to the mafia.”
“And now you’re trying to make up for it.” She didn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. She didn’t absolve me of the blame, or belittle my responsibility with platitudes.
I shook my head. “I can never make up for it. All I can do is try to stop it from happening to someone else. To anyone else.”
“That’s what you were doing when Kori and Kenley joined the syndicate?”
My exhalation tasted as bitter as it sounded. “Ironic, huh? In trying to save strangers, I let my own sisters fall.” I closed my eyes. “I believed Kori when she told me she had it under control. She joined the syndicate to protect Kenley, who was coerced into joining a few days before. Kori made me promise not to tell my grandmother that they’d joined, and she made me promise to stay away from them. She said she could handle it. That they’d serve their five years, then get out, but that if Tower knew she and Kenni were close to me and Gran, he’d use us against her. And vice versa.”
“So you stayed away?”
I nodded. “I stayed away. I thought I’d be making things worse by getting involved. Worse for them, and worse for the kids I was working with. And in the beginning, that was probably true. If I’d known what was going on, I would have joined the syndicate instead of Kori, but she didn’t even tell me until it was too late, and then there was no one else left to take care of Gran. But if I’d... I don’t know. If I’d done things differently, maybe I could have kept Kori out of the basement.”
Maybe I could have prevented whatever put that haunted look in her eyes and made her scream at night.
“You couldn’t have stopped it.” Sera was hardly awake, yet she sounded certain. “You can’t stop stuff like that from the outside. Sometimes you can’t even stop it from the inside...”
As she fell asleep on my arm, I realized she was talking about herself. She’d tried to save her sister. She’d tried to stop it from the inside, and instead, she’d lost everything.
I wanted to give her something.
I waited nearly an hour until she rolled over on her own because I didn’t want to wake her up. But as soon as she was on the other side of the mattress—all but one small foot, resting against my shin—I snuck out of bed and turned off the lamp, then stepped into my jeans and crept downstairs, this new need still only half-formed.
On the bottom step, I groaned when I saw the light shining in the kitchen. Shit. I’d hoped to keep this new detail of my relationship with Sera private, at least until I knew how much she wanted everyone else to know.
Also, I’d wanted privacy for my new errand. But that wasn’t gonna happen.
Gran never woke up in the middle of the night, unless she was...confused—or someone turned on the TV—and I really didn’t feel like pretending I was still a twenty-year-old college dropout. Not with Sera still sleeping without me in the bed that could hopefully now be described as “ours.”
“Gran?” The living room floorboards creaked beneath my bare feet.
“It’s just me,” Ian said, and I was relieved for a second. Until I realized that unlike Gran, he probably wouldn’t forget me sneaking out of Sera’s room in the middle of the night.
Ian sat alone at the table, tapping on Vanessa’s laptop keys with two fingers. I crossed to the cabinet over the sink and took out a bottle of whiskey—the only alcohol in the house—and a short glass, then sat down next to him.
“Kori will skin you alive if you drink the last of her whiskey.”
“I’ll blame it on you.” I unscrewed the lid, and his brows rose. “Fine. I’ll pick up more tomorrow. I need to take Sera shopping anyway.”
Ian eyed me over the open laptop with a quiet smile. “So...you and Sera?”
I swallowed a groan as I poured two inches into my glass. “Please tell me no one else heard...”
“The walls are thin.” Which I knew all too well. “But Van only went up to bed ten minutes ago, and Kori sleeps more soundly than I do—until the nightmares.”
“Are they getting any better?” Kori’s nightmares made me feel useless, because I couldn’t fix her any easier than I could fix Sera.
Ian nodded. “Slowly.”
“What’s with the computer? You finally joining the twenty-first century?”
“Kicking and screaming.” He sighed. “I’d much rather read a newspaper, but they’re in short supply around here, so I’m stuck using this thing. Van showed me how to use a search engine, but all I’m getting are pop-up ads and the same ten results, every time I click ‘go.’” He turned the computer around and demonstrated.
I laughed. “Click on ‘next page’ for the rest of the results. There are more than ten thousand of them, but you just keep refreshing that first page full.”
Ian took the laptop back and frowned. “Oh. Thanks.”
“Shopping for an apartment? Are you leaving us?”
“It’s for me and Kori. For after we get Kenley back and things settle down.”
“You think she’ll want to stay in the city once all this is over?”
“I think she’d be bored in the Outback, and I’m not leaving here without her.” He glanced at my show of skepticism and exhaled slowly. “We’re going to end it, Kris,” he confessed at last. “Not just Julia and the Tower syndicate. Cavazos, too. Kori can’t go on with her life knowing that other people are still suffering the same things she went through. This won’t be over for her until they all fall down. And if they don’t...well, she’ll die trying to make it happen. We both will.”
“And after we take down Cavazos?” Because they weren’t doing it without me.
“Then we’ll head to the West Coast and fight the good fight with a view of the ocean.” Ian shrugged. “At least that’ll keep us busy.”
That it would. And they wouldn’t be alone.
“So, what’s with the nightcap?” Ian closed the laptop with a soft click. “Post-coital regret?”
“Not even kinda.” I would never regret a single moment I’d spent with Sera. Except for kidnapping her. “I just need to think.”
“Do you find that easier, staring at the bottom of a bottle?”
“Not always.” I sipped from my glass, relishing the mild burn.
He pushed the computer toward the middle of the table. “You’re more like Kori than you know.”
“I’m older,” I insisted. “Which means she’s more like me.”
“You both have big hearts. The only difference is that she hides hers behind guns and a foul mouth, and you hide yours behind guns and a smile. So...where’s the smile?”
“I must have left it in bed.”
“Sera’s?”
I took another sip. “You all seem to be forgetting that it’s actually my bed.”
“Not when she’s in it,” he said, and I had to concede the point.
I drained my glass, then set it down and studied him critically for a moment. “I need to talk about what just happened with Sera. You game?”
Ian chuckled. “Of course. Should I reciprocate, to cement our friendship?”
I flinched. “Please don’t do that.”
That time he laughed. “I promise that was an empty threat.” He poured another inch into my glass. “So. What’s up with you and Sera?”
“Everything. Up there, we just—”
He pu
t one hand flat on the table between us, and the gesture felt very much like a stop sign. “I know what you did. No need to elaborate.”
“Not that. Well, there was that, too.” I frowned, wondering if I should start over. “But this isn’t about sex. Before that, she showed me something. She let me in.”
“Still sounds like we’re talking about sex...”
“Well, we’re not. I owe her, Ian.”
Ian frowned and crossed both arms over his chest. “Was she that much better than you in bed?”
“Ha, ha,” I said when his grin told me he was kidding. “She likes me, Ian. I think she likes me a lot, and I don’t want that to change.”
“What makes you think it will?”
How could it not, once she found out that I’d failed to stop what happened to her?
“I was supposed to do something, a while back.” I took another sip from my glass, then started over from the beginning. A beginning I hadn’t even realized our story—mine and Sera’s—had until that moment. “For years, I’ve been wondering about Noelle. About why she picked me. My bed. My ears. My pencil. I’ve always felt like there must have been a reason, but I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t make any of the lines make sense, and I couldn’t stop anything they warned me about. I couldn’t even understand the warnings.”
“And now?”
“Now...” I frowned and looked up from the table to meet his gaze. “I know this sounds crazy, but I think it was about Sera all along.”
His dark brows rose. “You think Noelle slept with you off and on for six years because of Sera?”
I shrugged. “Well, I hope she had a more personal motivation for the sex part of the equation, but I think she stayed and talked in her sleep with me because of Sera. Her name’s all through that journal, Ian. Noelle warned me over and over, and I couldn’t see it. I was supposed to stop him. I was supposed to protect her and her family. I was supposed to save her baby, and her body, and her future.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.” I nodded, just to underline my certainty. “Maybe Elle knew I’d wind up with Sera. Maybe she didn’t. But she knew I was supposed to be there three months ago when that bastard shoved a knife through her belly and through her baby.” I drained my glass while he stared at me. “The problem is that I didn’t know.”
“I take it Sera doesn’t know, either?”
“No. I’m going to tell her. I have to tell her. But first I need to give her something. I need to show her how sorry I am. I need to make her believe that I’ll never let something like that happen to her ever again. I want her to know that I can protect her, and that I’m so fucking sorry I wasn’t there when she needed me.”
“Kris, you didn’t even know her.”
“But I was supposed to know her. I was supposed to protect her.” I picked up my glass again, but it was empty. “Ian, I think I love her.”
He blinked. “Are you serious?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know how to tell.”
“Okay, so what do you know?”
“I know that she’s like a light in the dark, and I’m a bug drawn to her flame. She’s more sad, and beautiful, and determined than anyone I’ve ever met. She’s like...a human superlative. She’s the most...everything.”
Ian’s brows rose, and I knew what he was thinking. “I sound like a sap, don’t I? I’m not, though. I’m not blind, or deaf, or stupid. I know she’s not perfect. She yells at me, and hell, she tried to stab me. She kicked me out of my own room, and nearly made me break my nose on the closet door. And she lied to us all about being Jake Tower’s kid. Sometimes I’m not sure whether I should kill her or kiss her. Is that crazy?”
“You’re talking to the man who fell in love with your sister. If ‘crazy’ were a deal-breaker for me, I wouldn’t be here. This whole house is crazy.”
I nodded. “This place is crazy, and we’re gluttons for punishment, you and I. How we’ve survived Gran, and Kori, and Sera is beyond me. I wouldn’t want to face any one of them in a dark alley on a bad day, and we’ve got them all under one roof. Kinda makes you think Kenni and Van have the right idea, huh?”
“If you’re changing teams in the middle of the game, I’m gonna have to cheer you on from the stands, man. My compass points toward women. One woman in particular.”
I laughed. “Glad to hear it, for my sister’s sake. And no, I’m not changing teams. Far from it.” In fact, the heading on my own internal compass was steadier than I’d seen it in years. Instead of pointing to the entire female gender, it now seemed to be singling out Sera. Only Sera. And... “The thing is that for the first time since Noelle, I’m not scared to do this.”
“To do what?” Ian unscrewed the cap from the whiskey bottle and took a short gulp. Bonding with me had driven him to drink, after only a quarter of an hour.
“To be with her. In every sense, not just the biblical. Although that was—”
“Stop there...” Ian warned, tilting the bottle up again, but I hardly heard him.
“She’s like this living fire, jumping and sparking, and lighting me up even while she casts fierce shadow all around us, and when I’m with her I can totally see how fire could be the source of all life, because that’s what she is. She is life. She burns with it. And I want to kill everyone who’s ever laid a cruel hand on her.”
I hadn’t realized I was clenching my empty glass until Ian shrugged and pushed the bottle my way. “So do it.”
Glass clinked as I poured. “Do what?”
“Kill him. We both know who you’re talking about. Find him and kill him.”
“I can’t.” Well, I could, but... “She wants to see him die. And I don’t fucking blame her.”
Ian frowned, as if I’d started speaking gibberish. “I didn’t mean now. I’m just saying that if you want to prove you can protect her, give her what she came here for.”
“That’s the plan, but I can’t do much until I know who the bastard is.”
“Just give it a little more time. Before she went to bed, Van was making a list of possible suspects based on Sera’s description and details from the crime scene. She’s planning to show mug shots to Sera tomorrow. If they can identify him, Cam and Liv will be able to find him.” He shrugged. “Then you can do what you do best, which will be giving her what she wants most in the world.”
“You think killing is what I do best? Did you learn nothing from whatever you heard through the thin walls?”
“Ah. Humor as a defense mechanism. I know that tactic well.”
I didn’t bother denying it. Nor did I own up to what was really bothering me. I was supposed to stop Sera’s bad guy before he killed her family. Killing him as an afterthought wouldn’t give her back what she’d lost.
“No use stressing over it now.” Ian pushed his chair back from the table. “There’s nothing anyone can do until Sera’s had a chance to look at the mug shots.” He stood and pushed his chair in. “I don’t think you have anything to prove to her, though. She likes you. We can all see that. So just don’t kidnap her anymore and keep doing...whatever you did upstairs, and you should be golden.”
After Ian went to bed, I poured another inch of whiskey and pulled Vanessa’s laptop into position in front of me. Ian might not have understood computers, but I understood them well enough to find Van’s search history and the files she’d worked on most recently. After three minutes of clicking links and opening documents, I found what I was looking for, though probably only because she’d made no effort to hide it. A series of six mug shots taken from a police database she shouldn’t have had access to, compiled and labeled with both a number and a letter designation. Three files later, I found the code key, which provided each paroled—and one escaped—criminal with an arrest record, labeled with those same letter/number combinations.
I
stared at the pictures, wondering which—if any—of these men had smiled at Sera as he drove his knife into her. Which of them had shot her parents, then stabbed and violated her little sister? Which man would I have to kill to see that rage in her eyes replaced with a sad peace that would grow a little less sad and a little more peaceful every day?
But their pictures told me nothing, except that all of them had light eyes, pale skin, and dark curls of various lengths.
Their arrest records didn’t say much more. All had been arrested for violent crimes within one hundred miles of her parents’ home, including multiple counts of rape, aggravated assault, murder and one other home invasion. Three had been convicted and served time—several years each—before being paroled. One escaped from a local jail, where he was being kept during his appeal. One was acquitted. One never went to trial, thanks to police error. Such was the state of the justice system—I knew men who’d done more time for drug charges and nonviolent robbery than any of the sick fucks the police had questioned in Sera’s case.
But none of that told me who to kill. Vanessa’s technical sleuthing was no more help than Noelle’s incomplete predictions had been. But maybe together...
I stood so fast my chair screeched across the kitchen floor, and for a second, I was afraid I’d woken Gran. But when no sound came from her room, I practically ran into the living room and hauled my duffel bag out from under the coffee table, where I’d been storing all the stuff I’d taken out of my room when Sera moved in.
Elle’s notebook was at the bottom. I pulled it out carefully, aware, as always, that the cardboard cover and flimsy paper pages wouldn’t last forever.
In the kitchen, I rooted through the junk drawer until I found a pen and a half-used pad of sticky notes, then I sat in front of Van’s laptop again, ready—no, desperate—to make sense of passages whose meaning had been eluding me for years.
There was no guarantee I’d have any more success this time, but I couldn’t help thinking that I was more prepared than ever to unravel Elle’s knot of prophesies, considering that this time I already knew not only what and where the crime was, but who the victims were.