Page 61 of Out for Blood
I wasn’t surprised some of the people mentioned on the board were dead. It had been over ten years since my parents had been killed, and let’s face it, there was a higher than average injury and death rate among anyone even loosely associated with Imperium Fratrum.
The others, the ones who were alive, were an assortment of politicians, celebrities, and business titans, and I already had long search histories on every one of them, looking for connections between them that might lead me to the biggest players behind Imperium Fratrum.
I wasn’t working alone. The Hawks were focused on the locations, both the ones depicted in pictures on the board and the ones mentioned in the FOIA requests, looking for connections to Dimitri or anyone else mentioned in the documents.
And then there was the phone taken off the dead guy in the paper mill. I knew the texts word for word, but I still hadn’t gotten a clue worth pursuing. I kept going back to it, refusing to believe that something as valuable as the phone could be worth absolutely nothing to our cause.
The bell on the door of the coffee shop shook me from my stupor and I looked up to see Daisy and Sarai.
“Hey!” I set down my phone. “What are you doing here?”
They looked bright and carefree, their cheeks pink from the October chill, and I was suddenly jealous that they were out there, living their lives without the fear of someone running them off the road or throwing a grenade their way.
It wasn’t fair — Daisy had suffered more than her share of heartache before everything had settled down and Sarai had plenty of crosses to bear with her conservative Indian parents — but I was only human.
“Coming to see you!” Daisy said.
She looked as pretty as ever, her glossy brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, the hourglass of her body pronounced in form-fitting jeans and a deep blue sweater that set off her violet eyes.
“We figured it was the only way we could snag you long enough to catch up,” Sarai said, blowing her black bangs out of her eyes. “And we made appointments at the Springs. I’m dying for a trim.”
She wore a short dress with tights and knee-high boots, a denim jacket and an assortment of gold jewelry finishing the outfit with trademark panache. I knew she’d paid for the short dress — her parents would have given her an earful — but Sarai was slowly pulling away from their expectations.
“You should come,” Daisy said. “They take walk-ins.”
“Can’t,” I said. “I gave Kaylee and Drew the day off.”
There was nothing I would have loved more than to play hooky and spend the day getting my hair and nails done at Blackwell Springs, the new-ish day spa that had opened up a couple years earlier.
But somehow life had gotten both simpler and more complicated in the four months since the Hunt. Simpler because now I knew what — or more accurately who — I really wanted. Complicated because there was a lot of scary stuff — a lot of scary people — standing between me and a possible future with them.
I held on to the fact that Daisy had made it through her own rough patch, and now she had a baby, plus Jace, Wolf, and Otis.
I was a little freaked out to realize my envy had grown with the thought.
Wait… did I want ababy?With the Hawks?
“Helloooo,” Sarai said, breaking into my thoughts. “You still with us?”
“What? Oh… yeah. Sorry. What was that?”
Sarai laughed. “I was just saying that I miss you!Wemiss you.”
“I miss you too. I’m sorry. It’s just been crazy.” Crazy didn’t do it justice but it was the simplest way to describe the last few months.
“Fill us in!” Sarai hopped on the counter and I looked at the door to make sure no one was on their way in. Sarai had a way of breaking rules, and while I didn’t mind it when we were alone, I didn’t want customers thinking they could sit on the counters.
Nothygienic.
I don’t know where to start. We’d texted, so they both knew the basics — about the accident that had left me temporarily blind and the fact that I was trying to find out who’d murdered my parents and the explosion at the paper mill — but even the last couple of weeks were a lot to condense into a coffee shop briefing.
But I tried, starting with the key and the tape recorder left by my parents at the paper mill and ending with everything we’d found in the storage unit.
“So wait…” Sarai’s eyes were like saucers, “… your parents put stuff in storage so that you would find it after their murder?”
“Me or someone else,” I said.
“And it’s been there all this time?” she asked.
