Page 27 of Hell of a Mess

Twenty-Three

Luther

Jerking open the passenger door, I grabbed Lace’s arms and turned her to look at me. She was crying silently.

What the fuck had I said?

“Lace,” I said sternly, “look at me.”

She blinked, and she was back. Recognition and anguish stared back at me.

I started to ask her what that was, but I stopped, afraid of her response. Instead, I pulled her to me and held her while my heart rate slowed back down.

Jesus Christ, what the hell had happened to her?

“You’re here. With me. You’re okay,” I told her, running my hand down the back of her head.

“I’m sorry,” she choked out.

“Don’t apologize,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Damn, she smelled good. I shouldn’t be thinking about that, but it was hard to miss. And it was helping calm me down.

She sighed and sank into me as her arms wrapped around me. It was then I remembered her ribs. Shit!

“I forgot about your ribs. Did I hurt you?” I asked, easing back and releasing her.

She shook her head. “No.”

Either she had a high pain tolerance or she was lying.

“Here,” I told her, holding out my hand. “I’ll help you down.”

She looked at my hand, then back at me. “Luther…” Her voice was almost a whisper.

“Yeah, sugar?”

She licked her bottom lip, then bit it nervously. “I don’t want to go back.”

“Where?”

If she’d decided she didn’t want to stay at the house, I wasn’t sure how I would handle that.

“Ho—Alpheus.”

The terror in her eyes, staring back at me, made me feel unsteady, as if I was close to snapping. I wanted the fucker who had caused this dead.

“You’re never going back there,” I told her.

She let out a shaky breath. “He won’t let me leave.”

I grabbed her chin and leaned in close to her. “You already did. He can’t get you here.”

A few seconds ticked by before she replied, “Okay.”

I’d brought her out here to get answers. But the easiest of questions had sent her off to a place I didn’t want her to ever go again. Fuck that. We’d get our answers another way. I could not handle seeing her suffer.

“Jack and Diane are checking us out. We need to go say hello,” I told her, taking her hand and easing her out of the truck.

“The horses’ names are Jack and Diane?” she asked, a small smile tugging at her lips.

I nodded. “Yep. And Heartland is around here somewhere. Might be in the stables. She’s a feisty little thing though.”

She stepped onto the ground, and I didn’t let her hand go until I was sure she was steady. When she turned to see the horses, the beam on her face made my chest tight.

I moved around her to close the door, then nodded my head toward the stables. “Let’s go.”

Not taking her eyes off the horses, she began walking in their direction. “They’re beautiful,” she said with awe.

“What about your horse?” I asked her, thinking that was safe since she’d had that memory before and it had been fine.

She paused and frowned. “I don’t have a horse,” she replied, glancing at me.

Shit. Was she suffering memory loss now?

“Griffin, the white horse.” Which was registered to the other motherfucker I wanted to kill.

Her expression fell, and she turned to look back at the horses. “Oh. He-he’s not mine. When I remembered him, I thought he was, but he belongs to Arun. He bought him for…he bought him for someone else.”

Who had he bought the horse for? Why had she remembered it? Why did it make her sad?

FUCK! I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to trigger her again.

“Did you want it?” I asked, wincing, not sure I should be pressing this.

She didn’t respond right away, but she was still walking. That meant she was alert. Still with me.

Finally, she nodded. “Yes. He was born in our stables. I fell in love with him. And when I asked if I could have him”—a bitter laugh fell from her lips—“Arun bought him, then gave him to his friend.” She shook her head.

“I should have never asked. Alpheus hadn’t planned on selling him until he found out I wanted him. ”

Motherfucking bastards.

I didn’t ask anything more. Instead, I stood back and watched her as she went up to the fence and talked to both Jack and Diane, petting them and praising them.

She was at ease with the horses. There was no trepidation.

The more I thought about her wanting that horse, the more my loathing grew.

Neither of those men deserved the oxygen wasted on them.

“You were with her all damn day,” Linc pointed out.

I shrugged. “That’s what I got. We know it was Arun who beat her. He bought the place to get rid of the security camera footage of it. We add him to our kill list.”

Linc shook his head. “No, we fucking don’t. And if we do, that is Mal’s decision. She is HIS daughter.”

I was aware of that. Just like I was aware he was currently outside on the patio, visiting with her.

I’d wanted to stay with her for it, but with Mal glaring at me, I figured it might be smoother this way.

I hadn’t realized Linc was going to take the opportunity to bitch at me though. I should have left the house.

“Look,” I said, “I tried asking her about her sister, but she…she…” I rubbed my jaw, hating that memory.

“She checked out on me. She just stared with this expression that…damn, I don’t know how to explain it.

But I couldn’t push her anymore. What I do know is, there is some dark shit in that fucking Halsten house.

She was trembling and crying, lost in a memory or something. But it messed her up.”

Linc stared at me for a moment, then sat on the edge of his desk and crossed his arms over his chest. “And you had asked her about what exactly when she did this?”

I picked up my glass of whiskey. If he was going to make me go over this again, I needed it for my goddamn nerves.

“I’d asked her what she did before, during the day.

She said she took care of someone. I asked who.

She didn’t respond, so I repeated the question.

She said Dalia, and then she just”—I snapped my fingers—“checked out on me.”

He wanted more than that, but it was all I had.

I’d spent the rest of the day making sure she was happy. Doing shit I’d never done before. When I’d asked Jayda to pack us a picnic basket, she had just stared at me with her mouth slightly agape, like I’d just told her I no longer fucked women.

“Wilder was able to dig up some more information,” Linc informed me.

Why was he just now telling me this? I straightened in my seat.

“What?” The word came out sounding like a demand, causing Linc to pause.

He finally picked up some paperwork from his desk. “Seems Ravina gave birth twenty-nine years ago to a girl. Lassandra Madison Halsten,” he read.

We’d already known that.

“Six years later, Ravina drowned while boating in Lewisville Lake. Lassandra is said to have also drowned. Ravina had been trying to save her,” he said, glancing up from the paper.

“The official statement is that she rented a boat to take her oldest daughter out for the day. However, Wilder found that Ravina had been seen with the man who owned the boat—a Timothy Walter, who went by the nickname T—on more than one occasion, and Alpheus paid to keep that silent.”

“Why the fuck did the bastard claim that Lace was dead?”

Linc looked back at the papers. “That’s a question we don’t have a solid answer for.

Lassandra’s body was never found. I’m going to make an educated guess, however, that Alpheus knew she wasn’t his.

Especially considering their wedding date was almost a year after Lassandra was born, and then there is the fact that Lace believed she was a year younger than she actually is. ”

“So, Mal knocked her up, and what, they waited until she had the baby before getting married? Did they hide her? And where is the sister? Dalia?”

Linc’s brows drew together as he read. “It seems Ravina lived in a home Halsten had in Florence, Italy, the year leading up to their marriage. Then they honeymooned in Spain and Greece for six months. There is a write-up in the newspaper, congratulating them on the birth of their daughter, Lassandra, shortly after Ravina returned from her travel abroad—Halsten had come back sooner than her,” he said.

“And I thought it was Dalia who drowned and that Alpheus claimed it was Lassandra for whatever fucked-up reason. But if Lace said that she took care of Dalia, then she’s not dead.

But something is wrong with her. Dalia would be twenty-five years old.

Well past the age of needing someone to take care of her. ”

I rubbed my temples in frustration. We were normally good at figuring stuff out. But this motherfucker had done some twisted shit. Why trade out his two daughters?

“You’ve got to ask her what is wrong with Dalia,” Linc said.

I glared at him. “No.”

“We can’t fix this if we don’t know what we are dealing with!”

Fuck! I knew that, but I hated the idea of her doing that thing again. Going to that dark place.

I stood up, taking my glass with me, and started for the door.

“Where are you going?” he demanded.

“To check on things outside,” I replied, not giving a shit what he thought about it.

Just as I jerked open the door, he called my name.

Pausing, I clenched my teeth and took a deep breath. “What?” I asked.

“She’s fragile,” he said.

“I know that.”

“She needs something you can never give. Don’t let her get attached.”

“I’m helping her. That’s all,” I spat out, then stalked from the room before he could say any more.