Page 87 of Dreadful

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

“Okay.” He glances at me over his shoulder, cable still in his hand. “I’m joking.”

“Cruz.”

His mouth twitches as he assumes a deep, faux serious tone. “Bells.”

“What the fuck is going on?” I stare at him, willing him to give me a crumb of information.

He sets the other tools down on top of the next safe, turning toward me. He slides his hand along my neck, his fingers tangling in the hair at the nape as he tilts my head back. “Do you trust me?”

I wet my lips; my mouth has gone dry as the concrete floor beneath us. “Yes.”

He leans closer, ghosting his mouth over mine—close enough that I feel him smile against my lips before he speaks. “Good. Then trust me. Besides, I just need to see something.”

I nod, two shallow dips of my chin, and our lips just barely brush—a half-second kiss that ends before it starts. “Okay. What are we looking for?”

His eyes search mine, steady and unhurried. “I don’t know yet.” He presses a soft kiss to my lips and pulls back.

“You broke into your mother’s storage unit your brothers don’t even know about, and you don’t know what you’re looking for?” I sound incredulous. I am.

“I’ll know when I see it,” he says, flashing me that goddamn charming smile of his.

A soft beep pulls my attention from his face to the device on the first safe. The screen goes green, and Cruz turns the handle. The door swings open on hinges that don’t make a sound. I lean over his shoulder and look inside.

The interior smells like old paper and cold metal.

Stacks of cash fill most of the bottom shelf, bundled in clear plastic sleeves and packed so tightly they’ve lost their shape, flattened against each other like bricks. The bills are all hundreds, crisp enough that I don’t need to count them to know I’m looking at six figures.

“Jesus.”

Cruz barely glances at the money. He reaches past it without looking, elbow brushing a stack aside, and pulls out a small pile of folders held together with a thick rubber band. He opens the top one. Passports—a handful of them, different colors, different years. Coco’s face stares back at me beneath names I’ve never seen before. The photos are all her, but her hair changes color in each one—blonde here, dark brown there—and she’s wearing glasses in the third that she doesn’t own.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” I murmur, looking over his shoulder. I reach over him and grab another folder, thumbing through what’s inside. The pages are heavy bond paper gone yellow at the edges. “These are all property deeds.”

“Keep going.” He flips another passport open and closes it without reading it.

I look sideways at his nonreaction. “Okay, so not looking for secret identities and her real estate portfolio.”

“Just seeing what’s here.” He sets the passports down on top of the cash like they’re takeout menus.

Cash and fake identities make a certain amount of sense. Their entire lives are built around preparing for everything that can go wrong. If anyone would have an escape plan tucked away somewhere, it would be Coco.

The properties are harder to explain but not implausible. There are three deeds in this folder alone—two in California, one in Nevada—and each one has her name on it, or one of her names.

“Does she have family? Could these be inherited?” I ask distractedly as I scan the documents. It’s all legal jargon that bleeds together—warranty clauses, grantor this, grantee that.

Another beep cuts through the silence, and Cruz’s gaze snaps to a newer safe across the unit. “She had a stepsister for a few years.”

“Had?”

“Yeah, something about her mom marrying some guy with kids or something.” He crouches in front of the new safe without looking back at me. “She doesn’t talk about it much. Just a couple of times, after she came back from doing ayahuasca in the desert.”

He leaves the cash and documents where they are and crosses back to the newer safe. I follow, setting the deeds on top of the open one before crouching beside him.

The screen on Rafe’s device flashes something I can’t make sense of—a sequence of numbers that rolls too fast to read.

Cruz apparently can.