Power Trip(29)

“Yup.” He sat beside her, reaching for bread and nodding his thanks to Cal, who set a bowl of soup in front of him. “Nothing from the phone yet.”

Audrey’s mind spun ahead, trying to connect the dots between her job and the odd events of the last twenty-four hours as her brother spooned soup.

“You said your laptop is missing?” Jake spoke with his mouth full.

She nodded.

“Tell me again. Everything that happened to you at work today,” he demanded.

She went over it in her head as she spoke the details aloud. Missing ID, a security guard with a needle, dead animals and Peter’s unusual attentiveness. What would have happened if she had let the guard prick her finger or gotten into Peter’s car instead of her own? And where was her laptop? What was the connection? Suddenly, she thought of her mother’s medical chart, still in her car. Aluminum.

She looked at Cal. “Can I borrow your computer?”

“Of course. I’ll get it.”

When Cal returned with a laptop, she opened the browser and typed in her storage site. She logged in and opened her file folder. Empty.

She stared at the screen. “All of my files are gone.” She would have to start all over.

“Log out,” Jake instructed.

Cal put his hand on her back, spreading warm tingles. She leaned into the comfort of his touch.

“You two need a room?” Jake asked.

“No,” she said, shooting him a dirty look. “But I do need my lab animals.” Maybe an autopsy would give her a clue.

Jake showed his teeth in a grin and pushed his bowl away. “Then let’s go get your pets.”

“Not so fast.” He’d already hinted that he’d steered her away from kink because he didn’t want her involved in his world. How much of her mental and emotional makeup had he manipulated for her own good? “Not until you tell me everything, and I do mean everything, that impacts this situation. I don’t like being manipulated, Jake. Make me understand why you’ve kept me in the dark about so many things. I can’t fight what I don’t understand, and your big brother act has outlived its usefulness.”

The tightening of his jaw told her he was annoyed, but she couldn’t care less. A deal was a deal.

“I’ll make coffee,” Cal said. He gestured at the room behind the kitchen and she led Jake into a well-appointed living area. Floor to ceiling bookshelves lined two walls. The other wall was taken up by a huge flat-screen TV. Although the furniture was broken-in black leather, the warm hues of the rug, the throw pillows and the comfy-looking blanket on the couch lent the room a cozy air. She settled onto the couch and Jake took the arm chair. He braced his forearms on his knees, leaning toward her.

“I have to start at the beginning,” he warned. “It was before our father…left. It was night, but something woke me up, a sound. I got out of bed and crept down the hall. I heard it again. I went into Mom and Dad’s room. He wasn’t there and Mom wouldn’t wake up, so I went to your room and you were gone. I was crying. Then I heard you scream.”

Audrey was cold and she was glad when Cal dropped down beside her. She leaned into him as Jake kept talking. “I found you in the basement, sitting in a chair. You were so small, barely two, and he had you blindfolded and strapped into a car seat. I didn’t know what he was doing to you, but it was making you scream. I screamed too. I told him to stop. He grabbed me, and I looked up at him. I yelled stop, leave her alone, go away!” Her mountainous brother shivered, dwarfed by the big black chair. “He left, Audrey. He walked right up the stairs.”

“He was the first person you hypnotized,” Audrey said, horrified by the realization.

“Yes.” The anger in Jake’s voice sent a chill down her spine. “You were hysterical. I took the blindfold off of you, got you out of the car seat and took you upstairs to my bed where you sobbed for an hour before you fell asleep. Then I went back downstairs and I took everything he had on the table and I put it in the garbage can outside—the blindfold, the rope, the lighter, needles…there was some other stuff, too, but I didn’t know what it was at the time. I got back in bed with you. When Mom woke us up in the morning, I pretended nothing had happened, and I waited for our father to come home.”

“But he never came home,” she said.

Jake shook his head. “And if you expect me to be sorry about that, I’m not. I think he was experimenting on you Audrey, trying to discover a talent, just like you used to do when you were a kid.”

“Did he do it to you too?”

“I can’t remember. If he tried anything, I probably just told him to stop. Depending on when I actually came into my talent, he might have thought I didn’t have any power. But you, you were screaming. He was hurting you.” Jake’s voice was choked. “He left because of me, Audrey. I made him go away, but I’m not sorry because he was hurting you.”