Of course, the ice cream hadn’t been neglected, and someone had obviously found time to eat Ryan’s cheesecake.
Great, I thought. He’s going to be in no mood to talk tonight. If he was even awake. Huffing in frustration, I set the empty dessert plate and fork on the counter, then picked up the tray. I balanced the tray on one hand as I pulled the basement door open, then marched down the stairs, glad the basement light was still on to illuminate my way.
Halfway along the steps, the stench of an un-flushed toilet hit me, no doubt made worse by the stifling heat in the basement, even in the predawn hours.
“’Bout time,” Ryan snapped by way of a greeting, sitting up on his mattress. “You guys forget I was alive down here? Or has Dad decided to remedy that?”
“One can only hope.” I stopped several feet in front of the cage to stare at him. “And don’t blame me for the delay. I spent most of today in New Orleans.”
For an instant, his eyes lit up in curiosity. But then his usual scowl slipped into place, and he whipped the conversation back around to his favorite topic: Ryan Sanders. “Yeah, well, someone could have at least emptied the damned coffee can and brought me some dinner. Or has the list of basic human necessities changed since I last saw daylight?”Frowning, I set the tray on the seat of a ladder-backed chair next to the cage. “You’re in the lap of luxury compared to the hell you put me through, so shut up before I flush your dinner down the toilet along with this.” Growling, I picked up the foul-smelling coffee can he’d set just outside the bars of his cage and carried it into the bathroom on the other side of the basement, behind the weight bench and stand of free weights. “Why aren’t you asleep, anyway?”
“The sound of my stomach growling kept me awake.”
My teeth ground together as I rinsed the can in the sink.
“Try sleeping through the sound of your cousin crying herself to sleep after being raped.” Angry now, I stomped back to his cell and set the can where he could reach it, then returned to the bathroom to wash my hands.
Back at the bars, I picked up Ryan’s plate, sloshing hollandaise over the side, and dropped the fork into the middle of his scalloped potatoes. “Step against the far wall and put your hands over your head, palms flat against the bricks.”
“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.”
Chapter 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.