Page 33 of Cryptic Curse (Bellamy Brothers #7)

HAWK

S eventeen Years Earlier…

I don’t know what I did wrong.

Mom barely looks at me anymore. Not unless I break something or forget to say thank you to one of her friends. Then it’s like I exist all over again, but only in that sharp, annoyed way. Like I’m an interruption she didn’t plan for.

I used to try harder, but none of it mattered. She still sighs when I walk into a room, like I’ve brought too much air with me. Like I’m something she has to tolerate instead of someone she gets to love.

Dad’s not much better. He’s always somewhere else—on a phone call, on a plane, on another continent.

Ted’s the only one who sees me. He’s my dad’s assistant, technically, but I think of him as more like an uncle. My dad hates the earring, says it’s “unprofessional.” When I told Ted, he just laughed and said, “Stars are professional in space, aren’t they?”

Ted remembers stuff. Like how I hate mushrooms but love strawberries.

Like how I draw spaceships in the margins of my homework when I’m bored.

Like how sometimes I don’t want to talk, just sit and be around someone who won’t make me feel weird for being quiet.

He also gets me. He doesn’t just say “life isn’t fair” when I go on about something that I think is wrong.

He doesn’t tell me to toughen up when I get upset. He doesn’t roll his eyes or say, “You’re too sensitive.” He just listens. And when I told him once that I didn’t think my mom liked me very much, he didn’t try to argue or fix it. He just said, “That’s not your fault.”

And I believed him.

Some days I wish he were my dad. Or maybe just that he lived down the hall and not in downtown Summer Creek.

Because when Ted’s around, I don’t feel like an interruption.

I feel like a kid who matters.

* * *

Present Day…

I haven’t been able to get Daniela out of my head.

I went outside today, worked the land with my hands. It’s what I do when my mind is racing.

Because besides Daniela…

There’s the issue of the missing body.

Falcon is meeting me later to discuss it more fully. We’re having dinner at his place. Savannah is going into Austin to see her friend Gert. She’ll be gone a few days.

I met Gertrude Levinson once. At the time, I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Dark hair and eyes, great body. I guess I have a type. Still, it never occurred to me to approach her.

She’s Savannah’s friend, after all.

But enter Daniela Agudelo, and wham .

Younger than Gert and even more beautiful, and I can’t get her the hell out of my mind.

And I have to, because I need to focus.

Something’s going down, with that body being gone and all.

With my father being hospitalized and aphasic.

And Eagle…

I swear to God I believe him. He didn’t have anything to do with this, and he never told a soul about that night.

Despite everything else he’s put me through in the last eight years, I fucking believe him.

Plus, he’s my brother.

I love the shithead.

I drive to Falcon’s, but instead of inviting me inside, Fal is waiting beside his truck.

“What gives?” I ask.

“Savannah left us fried chicken for dinner, but fuck, Hawk. I can’t eat.”

I frown. “Yeah, I’m not too hungry either.”

Falcon adjusts his cowboy hat. “If you’re not hungry, I know it’s bad.”

He’s not wrong. Of three teenage boys with monstrous appetites, I could always put away the most while we were growing up.

Every so often I’d catch some curt remark under my mother’s breath about how I was eating her out of house and home.

Falcon and Eagle ate nearly as much as I did, but they never seemed to be on the receiving end of those muttered comments.

“It’s early yet,” Falcon says, looking at his watch. “Only four o’clock. I want to go check the site.”

“Fal, the more often we’re there, the more likely someone could see us.”

Falcon spits on the ground. “Don’t care. I was up all night thinking about this. I want to see for myself.”

“You think I’m lying to you?”

“Hell, no. I just…” He takes off his hat, rubs his forehead. “I just want to see for myself. That’s all.”

I nod. I get it. If I were in his shoes, I’d want to witness everything firsthand too.

“Okay.” I slide into the passenger side of his truck.

Falcon’s place is slightly closer to the border than mine, so we get there within about twenty minutes. He makes the turn onto the dirt road that leads to the old barn. Tires crunch over the dirt and gravel, and neither of us talks.

In fact, we haven’t talked since we got into the car.

He pulls up by the barn, and we get out of his truck.

“Shit,” I say. “The shovels and work gloves are in my truck.”

“You think I didn’t come prepared?” He gestures to the back of his truck. “I don’t anticipate that we’ll need to dig anything, since you guys already did that, but I’ve got everything we need just in case.”

I simply nod, and he and I go into the barn.

“Here it all is,” I say.

“What did you do with the drugs?”

Fuck. They’re still in my truck. I forgot all about them.

“I took care of it,” I say.

Or I will, first thing when I get back to Falcon’s house. Shit, my truck is parked in his driveway. Anyone could drive by and see the garbage bag in the back.

But Savannah’s not home, and Falcon’s security guards are certainly trustworthy. And it’s not as if the cops have any reason to come sniffing for drugs here at the Bellamy ranch.

Everything may not be as above board as the residents of Summer Creek think, but one thing we don’t mess with is drugs.

Still, I’ll be on edge until that shit is flushed down the toilet.

Falcon goes over to the hole Eagle and I dug and paces around it. Then he kneels, looks inside.

“Goes pretty fucking deep,” he says.

“Yeah, that’s why I stopped digging after a while. Especially after I found that red bandana. Whoever was down there, he isn’t there anymore.”

Falcon simply nods.

“And I have a feeling…”

“What’s that?”

“It’s just… What if they just moved him? Or what if…”

“First of all,” Falcon says, “who would they be? You, Eagle, and I are the only people who knew about this.”

“Except for those two goons.”

“Who were stopped at the border and never heard from again,” Falcon says. “They probably got sent back across the border and were killed for their trouble.”

I shove my hands in my pockets. “Yeah, probably.”

He looks up at me. “What?”

“Well, there’s the contact at the EPA.”

He rubs at his forehead. “Yeah, you’re right about that.”

“And…” I shuffle my feet.

He glares at me. “And what?”

“And…Dad.”

Falcon shakes his head. “Dad doesn’t know. You can’t think that he has anything to do with this.”

“I don’t want to think it,” I say. “But something’s going on with him. I mean, he tried to kill himself.”

“Yeah.”

“And then he wouldn’t wake up, and there was no medical reason for it. I’m not saying he was faking it. I don’t think you can fake a coma. But it’s kind of like he willed himself into it. Like he didn’t want to face whatever he had to face.”

“Man,” Falcon says, “I don’t like thinking about Dad like that.”

No, of course he doesn’t.

Falcon was Dad’s right-hand man. His firstborn and his oldest son.

Falcon was everything to Dad.

It nearly killed Dad when Falcon had to go to prison.

I doubt he would’ve been that upset if I had been the one to cop to the killing of that young police officer.

But Falcon insisted. He was the older brother, and he felt it was his responsibility.

To be honest? I’m not sure I could’ve done it.

Not even to save Eagle. Because I’d be damned if I was going to confess to something I didn’t fucking do. It’s just not right.

“I know you don’t, Fal. I know how close you are to Dad.” I take a few steps toward my big brother. “But let’s face facts here, man. Something is eating at him, and now I think he’s trying to tell us, but the words won’t come out.”

“You think we should tell him about this?”

“For fuck’s sake, no.” I look around the barn, my heart beginning to thrum. “The fewer people who know about this, the better.”

He narrows his eyes at me. “But you seem to be insinuating that you think Dad knows.”

I look at my feet, shuffle my weight between them. “I’m not insinuating anything, Falcon. I don’t know. All I know is that eight years ago you and I buried a body here, along with some drugs. And while the drugs were still there, the body is fucking gone.”

“Right. And you said the dirt was hard.” He scratches the side of his head. “So this happened a while ago.”

“Exactly.”

“You want to do some more digging?” he asks.

I draw a breath. “Yeah,” I say. “I do.”

My body is sore from the digging yesterday. Still, I worked like a horse on the ranch today. Nothing like good physical labor to keep your mind where it needs to be. And I wouldn’t mind a little more right now.

We head back to Falcon’s truck and grab the supplies we need.

“You sure we should be doing this in the daylight?” I ask. “E and I were here after dark.”

He gestures broadly. “Look around you, man. No one’s here. No one knows we’re here.”

I simply nod.

We walk back into the barn and take a look around.

“If you were a dead body, where would you be?” Falcon asks.

He means to be funny, but I don’t laugh.

This is all a little too macabre. We can laugh about it when the mysteries are solved and back in the ground where they belong.

“Let’s just try here, right next to where we buried Vega.” I stick my shovel in.

We dig for about an hour and come up empty-handed.

I pull off more floorboards and continue to dig.

I sigh. “I’m sweaty as a pig,” I say. “And I’m not seeing?—”

The sun is moving toward the west, and it’s sliding through the slats on the roof.

And something glints.

I kneel down, pull a small object out of the dirt.

And I gulp.

It starts in my chest—tight and hot, like someone lit a match under my ribs and now I can’t breathe right. My hands go cold first, even though I’m sweating. My fingers twitch inside the leather gloves, like they’re trying to shake something off that’s already inside me.

My mind goes loud. Too loud. Thoughts crashing into each other like a hundred people shouting in a tunnel. I can’t catch a single one. Can’t focus. Can’t think.

I’m there . Back in that moment I’ve spent so long trying to bury. But it doesn’t add up.

My heart stutters. Not like fear. Like recognition. Like, oh—this again .

I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. Anger? Panic? All I know is I want out. Out of this barn, out of this body, out of this memory that’s wrapping itself around my neck like a noose.

But I can’t run.

So I stay still, hoping my brother can’t see how hard I’m trying not to fall apart.

“Hey, man,” Falcon says. “You okay?”

I breathe. In, out, in, out.

Then I nod. I can’t talk. Words will fail me in this moment.

For in the palm of my gloved hand, I hold a silver earring in the shape of a star.