Page 12 of Tell Me Why (Tell, The Detective #5)

He snorted and opened the window, taking a moment to figure out how to dismantle the screen so that she could climb in.

“Not exactly at your most dignified,” Tell said as she slid through to the floor and turned to close the window behind her.

“Daryll thinks I went to check the perimeter,” she said. “I’ve been antsy and anxious for days.” Definition of irony. “We need to talk.”

“I see,” Tell said, indicating the couch. “Have a seat, I suppose. We don’t have much time, then?”

“No,” she agreed, going to sit. “I did pick out good stuff for you guys, didn’t I?”

Tell gave her a dry smile as he sat down with her.

“I’m sorry about Tina,” Isabella said. “I wasn’t sure you would come back.”

Tell nodded.

“It’s the only way I get her back,” he said. “I’m going to finish this, and I’m going to do it all of a sudden. Do you have any hesitation betraying him?”

“Daryll?” Isabella asked. “No.”

Tell narrowed his eyes at her.

He actually didn’t believe her.

She shook her head.

“This is what I came here to do,” she told him. “I haven’t deviated.”

Tell considered that. He still didn’t believe her. She was at least superficially loyal by nature, and kind. She’d had the luxury of station to be able to keep those facets of her personality, even as she developed her subtle tactics that were coming to play, here.

She was good at what she did. One of the best. But Tell still couldn’t envision her pulling the rug out from under someone she cared about that much without a second thought.

Even as he suspected that that was exactly what she’d done with him, all those years back.

He still couldn’t picture it.

It wasn’t what he believed about her.

“You’re going to find them,” Isabella said.

“I am,” Tell said.

“I need the names of all of the upper-level people involved, the ones who know how to do the work of preparation, the location of their confirmed headquarters, and every site where they are doing preparation work.”

Tell nodded slowly, ticking them off in his mind. He could figure out how to do each of those.

Time was slipping away from him, but all of it was doable.

“I need a favor,” he said, and she lifted her eyebrows.

“I see,” she said, and he nodded.

“I’ll get it. Every bit of it. But I need you to have Keon go to the facility in Texas first.”

“It will take time to organize all of his men,” Isabella said thoughtfully, and Tell dipped his head.

“I need him to start now . And to lead there.”

“Because that’s where Tina is,” Isabella said. “You think you can rescue her.”

“I’m going to,” Tell said.

“Starting now risks them noticing that something is happening,” Isabella said. “It takes risk based on your promise that you’ll be ready quickly enough to justify it.”

“I know.”

“I can’t negotiate on my father’s behalf,” Isabella said.

Tell nodded grimly.

“I know,” he said.

She pressed her lips and stood.

“I haven’t sent word to him, the entire time I’ve been here,” she said. “I will tonight.”

He walked with her to the window, and she waited with her hand resting on it for a moment.

“She is worth this much to you?” she asked, and Tell nodded.

“She is.”

Isabella reached across to take his hand, squeezing it.

“Good luck, then,” she said.

Tell sighed.

“Thank you.”

Tell wasn’t coming back. She was certain of it, now.

They were working on her every day. Mostly at night, but sometimes during the daytime hours as well.

Sometimes she was just… there… barely aware of anything that was going on, and other times she watched.

The pain was all she could think about, sometimes, and other times… other times she was dangerous.

More dangerous than they knew.

She was getting weaker and stronger at the same time, paradoxically, and she had no idea what she was going to do, but she wasn’t going to not do anything.

She was going to fight.

When the moment came, she was going to fight. She just had to find it.

And hope that she was there when it came.

Everything was for show.

He was pretending to run the lab.

He was pretending to scout for spies.

He was pretending to be a part of the pretend team of vampires remaining at Daryll’s house.

He went back the next night and found Leonard sitting outside of the lab.

The vampire looked up at him as he approached.

“They try to process you?” Tell asked, and Leonard nodded.

“They did.”

“How did you get away?” Tell asked.

Leonard shook his head.

“They got sloppy for a half a second, and I made a break for it,” Leonard said. More likely, Tell though, his patron had intervened as part of a gentlemen’s agreement and he’d been set loose, but not before they’d started in.

Tell was willing to pretend like Leonard had escaped, though. Why not? Everything else was a lie.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Tell said, unlocking the lab and opening the door. Leonard scrambled to his feet, following Tell in.

“They took her,” Leonard said.

“I’m aware,” Tell said.

“You aren’t going to do anything about it?” Leonard asked.

“What would I do?” Tell asked.

“I know the stories about you,” Leonard said confidentially. “I know that you can do things.”

Tell looked at him, tired.

“You’re tipping your hand, boy,” he said. “Both that you have actual feelings about her and that you aren’t the simple player in all of this that you appear to be. Good way to get dead.”

Leonard gave him a sullen look, and for the briefest of moments, Tell considered taking him into his confidence, but then he saw it.

Leonard hadn’t gotten out by gentleman’s agreement. He’d gotten out because sweeping him hadn’t been the intent, in the first place. Maybe he’d never even been taken in at all.

He’d called in the hit himself.

There were only a few vampires who would actively seek the tropical zones. There were the moneyed ones who did it in the far east, because they could live entirely underground, there, and then there were the ones who viewed a white desert as a thousand miles of moat.

Tell knew of one who had once built a compound in the middle of the Sahara, until the sand had overrun it once more.

It was interesting knowledge, but not particularly useful knowledge.

Until you had the list of all of the men making the key decisions in the vampire-parts industry.

And then things started slotting into place quite rapidly.

And Tell knew who Leonard worked for.

And if Venus was with him, a dozen other alignments fell into place quite neatly. Matching the type of personality that would appeal to the organizations involved to the ones presently here… the puzzle suddenly got a lot less amorphous and a lot easier to solve.

And either Leonard was begging Tell to go rescue Tina because he couldn’t negotiate to get her out on his own, or he was baiting Tell into a trap to try to finish removing him from involvement with Daryll.

Uncharacteristically, Tell believed that Leonard actually cared what happened to her.

Tell sighed.

“I shouldn’t have brought her here,” he said. “It was a mistake. I’ll have to learn from it for next time. But I don’t take these things lightly. I intend to see this through.”

“You’re just going to leave her,” Leonard said. “Even if she’s still alive?”

Leonard didn’t know that Tell had seen her, knew what was happening to her.

It made sense.

Silix, by whatever name he was going these days, liked to keep his information compartmentalized, and he liked his lackeys clever.

Tell drew a pensive breath, then looked squarely at Leonard.

“Would you risk your life for her?” he asked.

“You wasted her,” Leonard answered. “Threw her away on a game.”

“That’s what we do, boy,” Tell answered. “Their lives are short as humans and shorter as vampires. No one ever mentions that upfront, though, do they?”

“No,” Leonard said, sounding glum.

“No,” Tell agreed. “Now, you should go back out there and start acting like they expect you to, or else your life is going to end up being rather short, as well.”

Leonard shot him a sharp look, and Tell lifted a shoulder just a fraction as he settled in at the podium he’d set up for himself.

Aleksander was around here somewhere. Henning had gone back home.

Tell was going to have to pretend to bring in another technician and hunt down Henning to pretend kill him.

Neither man knew anything interesting.

Tell had hired them because they were aspirational idiots who liked to use big words and lord over the people around them in their academic certainty, and it made them absolutely harmless, but he had to pretend like all of this was in earnest for a little while longer.

Which meant a fake search party, to start.

“I tried to get her away from you,” Leonard said from the doorway.

Tell didn’t look.

Pretend-Tell didn’t care.

Real Tell heard the admission there, that Leonard had tried to save her, but he’d been too late.

Poor boy.

He was too soft for this line of business, but Silix wasn’t going to care about that. He would choose clever-but-soft every time, because you could harden the soft, but you could never sharpen the dull.

Life was going to be hard for Leonard.

Tell didn’t really feel sorry for him.

It already was hard for Tina, and that was Leonard’s fault.

Maybe Tell would kill him on the way out, just for good measure.

Maybe.

He wouldn’t.

Not really.

But it felt nice to think about, on a night like this.

On a night like this.

The days were ticking.

Tell was feeding once a day and getting up and going down well outside of his normal hours of operation. He was set on his path.

He had considered trying to reach out to Hunter or to Ginger, knowing that Hunter would help and suspecting that Ginger would try, but he didn’t want anyone to know what was happening, and less contact with the outside world protected the secrets inside of it better.

More, he was certain that Keon would have more readily available resources to storm the facility in Texas, where Ginger was more of a nuke-it-from-space kind of girl.

Hunter would just be in the way. This wasn’t what he did .