Midnight Rising(40)

“Jesus,” Dylan muttered under her breath. “I said those files are private.”



“Yeah, you did. But now I’m curious. Why did that particular case matter so much to you?”



Dylan shook her head and leaned back from her breakfast. “It was my first assignment fresh out of college. A little boy went missing in a small town up north. The police had no suspects and no leads, but there was speculation that the father might have been involved. I was hungry to make a quick name for myself, so I started digging into the guy’s history. He was a recovering alcoholic who never held a steady job, one of those class-act dead-beat dads.”



“But was he a killer?” Rio asked soberly.



“I thought so, even though all the evidence was circumstantial. But in my gut, I was sure of his guilt. I didn’t like him, and I knew if I looked hard enough I’d find something that pointed to his guilt. After a few false leads, I ran across a girl who’d babysat for the kids. When I questioned her for my story, she told me she’d seen bruises on the boy. She said the guy beat his kid, that she’d even witnessed it personally.” Dylan sighed. “I ran with all of it. I was so eager to get the story out there that I didn’t fully check my source.”



“What happened?”



“Turns out the babysitter had slept with the guy and had some personal axe to grind. He was no Father of the Year, but he never laid a hand on his son, and he sure as hell didn’t kill him. After I was fired from the newspaper, the case blew apart when DNA evidence linked the boy’s death to a man who lived next door to him. The father was innocent, and I took an extended leave from journalism.”



Rio’s dark brows arched. “And from there you ended up writing about Elvis sightings and alien abductions.”



Dylan shrugged. “Yeah, well, it was a slippery slope.”



He was staring again, watching her with that same thoughtful silence as before. She couldn’t think when he was looking at her like that. It made her feel exposed somehow, vulnerable. She didn’t like the feeling one bit.



“We’ll be leaving tonight, as I mentioned yesterday,” he said, breaking the awkward silence. “You’ll have an early dinner, if you like, then, at dusk, I’ll come back to prepare you for travel.”



That didn’t sound good. “Prepare me…how?”



“You can’t be allowed to identify this location, or the one we’re traveling to. So tonight before we leave, I will have to place you in a light trance.”



“A trance. As in, hypnotize me?” She had to laugh. “Get real. Anyway, that kind of stuff never works on me. I’m immune to the power of suggestion, just ask my mother or my boss.”



“This is different. And it will work on you. It already has.”



“What’re you talking about, it already has?”



He gave a vague shrug of his shoulder. “How much do you recall of the trip from Prague to here?”



Dylan frowned. There wasn’t much, actually. She remembered Rio pushing her into the back of the truck, then darkness as the vehicle started rolling. She remembered being very frightened, demanding to know where he was taking her and what he intended to do with her. Then…nothing.



“I tried to stay awake, but I was so tired,” she murmured, trying to recall even another minute of what had to have been several hours of travel and coming up blank. “I fell asleep on the way here. When I woke up I was in this room…”



The small curve of his lips seemed a bit too self-satisfied. “And you’ll sleep again this time until I want you awake. It has to be this way, Dylan. I’m sorry.”



She wanted to make some crack about how ludicrous this whole situation was sounding—from the vampire bullshit he’d tried to feed her yesterday, to this nonsense about trances and traveling to secret locations—but suddenly it didn’t seem very funny to her. It seemed impossibly serious.



It suddenly seemed all too real.



She looked at him sitting there, this man who was unlike any other man she’d ever known, and something whispered in her subconscious that this was no joke. Everything he’d told her was true, no matter how unbelievable it might sound.



Dylan’s gaze fell from his stoic, unreadable face to the powerful arms that were crossed over his thick chest. The tattoos that snaked around his biceps and forearms were different from the last time she’d seen them. Lighter now, just a few shades deeper than his olive skin tone.



Yesterday the ink in them had been red and gold—she was sure of it.