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She replayed their words to herself while she sang along with Diana. He had called her wise.“Don’t minimize yourself.”

It was true of more than this moment. Look what she’d accomplished by talking to Brent, refusing to minimize herself.

“We needed to talk about it, so we could work it out.”

There was one more piece of herself that needed working out. One more conversation she needed to have. She slowed her improvised dance steps, then stood still in the middle of her kitchen. Yes. She could do this too.

She called her mom.

“Hey, Les! What’s up?”

The words came out in a flood that had remained behind a dam in her heart for most of her life, inching higher drop by drop for years—now, since meeting Ryker, rising so much faster and overflowing the dam at last. “Mom, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, about all kinds of things lately but especially about us, about vampires, and I want to talk about us, our family, where we came from.”

It would be okay to ask. It had to be. She had waited to ask for her entire life. It had to be okay now, after so many years.

Except…Mom wasn’t breathing.

“Please,” Leslie said, “I really want to know. Why do we live here, isolated from our kind?”

“‘Our kind’? You sound like an anthropologist.”

No deflecting. She wouldn’t let Mom do it, not about this, not anymore. “Why did you choose Harmony Ridge when you moved away from—”

“No,” Mom said. Flat. Dull. The drop of the heavy curtain.

“Why? Why can’t we talk about it?”

“I have nothing to say.”

“But—”

“The topic is closed, Leslie.”

Leslie’s grip spasmed around the phone, but she relaxed in time not to crush it. “Mom, please.”

“I’m hanging up now.”

The call ended. Leslie trudged to her room and fell back onto her bed and stared at the ceiling for an hour, unable to convince herself to move. A slow, dull pain bloomed in the center of her chest. Stupid little girl, asking careless questions.

Sixteen

Where were they hiding the money?

Ryker sat back in his chair, stared up at the ceiling of his home office, and allowed himself a hiss of sheer frustration. He should have found the paper trail by now. He’d gone through so many financial records in the last twenty hours, simple math was beginning to make his head hurt.

He returned his gaze to his laptop screen and clicked the minimized window to look at his email. Sure enough, here was one from Detective Gene Kim, checking in and hoping for progress. Ryker responded that he hadn’t found the evidence they needed yet but was still searching. He hissed again as he hit Send.

He should have found it by now. The giveaway document, the manipulated math, the mysteriously appeared or disappeared cash. But so far, this organization checked out. To the penny. And he’d nearly worked his way through to the final document secured in Detective Kim’s search warrant.

Nearly. Not done yet.

He had to find it before six o’clock. He couldn’t leave any later than that to pick up his girlfriend from the airport.

Ryker’s heart gave a single beat of anticipation. His girlfriend. Here in his city in a few hours. He couldn’t wait to show her his favorite places, introduce her to the people he loved. To hold her again, kiss her again, of course. But even more than that, simply to enjoy being with her again.

Enough. Focus. Complete the task. The airport pickup was his reward.

He opened a new set of bookkeeping records and got back to work. Careful reading. Mental math. He kept a calculator on his desk, but he almost never needed it even with the longest strings of figures. And note-taking. Constant, copious note-taking on his yellow legal pad, for which most of his colleagues loved to call him “old-fashioned.” But for the son of Senna Maddox, written work was a deeply ingrained habit.