Page 63 of The Lovely and the Lost
My eyes went to the folder still lying open on the table. My picture was still visible. So washers. Long dark hair. Eyes like mine.
“Gabriel’s outside,” Bales told me. “It was everything I could do to keephimfrom coming after you. I’d take it as a kindness if you could go tell him you’re in one piece.”
A kindness?I thought incredulously. If Bales hadn’t come into this room, there was no telling what I would have done. I’d lost control, and I knew from experience that for weeks—maybe even months—I’d be standing right on the verge of losing it again.
An animal. A dirty little animal.I swallowed. I reached and closed my hand around the file folder. I picked it up, and step-by-step, I made my way toward the door.
“The next time you come after my family?” I heard Bales tell the sheriff behind me, his voice low. “I’ll take advantage of the fact that I’m dying and make it a point to take you with me when I go.”
Bales led the way out of the sheriff’s office. Gabriel was standing on the street outside. He wasn’t alone.
The librarian who’d caught Jude’s fancy was standing beside him. When she saw Bales and me, she laid a hand lightly on Gabriel’s shoulder, then took her leave.
“Checking up on you?” Bales asked.
Gabriel shrugged. “Apparently, I need checking up on.” As if to prove the point, he brandished his wrists in my direction. “Look,” he said. “No cuffs.”
Was he really joking around right now?
“I’ll get the truck.” Bales raised an eyebrow at the two of us. “Try not to kill each other before I get back.”
Moments later, Gabriel and I were alone. His smirk wavered ever so slightly. “I didn’t ask you to come with me.”
“So?” I didn’t have energy or words to waste on why I’d come. I was literally holding my past in my hand, and I had just as literally gone for the sheriff’s jugular. If Bales had arrived a minute later, there might have been no coming back.
“I could have told you they would separate us, Kira.” Gabriel kept his tone light, but the glint in his eyes was anything but. “Do you think I was in abetterposition knowing that if I didn’t give him what he wanted, he’d be more than happy to go play games with you in the other room?”
What he wanted,I thought.And what exactlydidhe want, Gabriel?
“Seriously, princess, do you really think having you here helped?”
The fact that he could stand there and call meprincess, like I was some pampered, spoiled little girl, likehehad to protectme, pushed me over the edge.
“Do you really think,” I echoed his own phrasing back to him, “that your brother is dead?” That was what he’d led me to believe back in the caves—he’d talked about accidents, about dropping dead, about predators.
Gabriel’s face went blank.
“Or do you think,” I continued, “that he has Bella?”
* * *
Gabriel didn’t give me an answer. He split the second we got back to the house.
“I’ll send Jude and Free out,” Bales told me. Cady’s father seemed to know that he couldn’t fix this—or me.
“Don’t,” I said abruptly. “I want to be alone.”
“I find myself doubting that, Kira,” Bales said gently.
“Please.”That was all I could manage—and all it took for him to leave me to my own devices. The file I’d taken from the sheriff’s office was heavy in my hands. It had my picture in it. It had my mother’s. But a file that thick? There had to be more.
Police described the abuse as intermittent but severe. They think you used to take refuge in the forest to escape.
Something wet and cold brushed the back of my hand—NATO. When I looked down at him, his tail started to wag.
“Go away, NATO.”
If Jude’s hound had been capable of smiling, he would have beamed at me—right until Saskia appeared between us and bit his nose. NATO yelped and backed up. After a moment’s contemplation, he darted forward again to lick Saskia’s face, then took off running before she could respond.