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 could 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 continued, 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.”