Page 37

Elliot Crane

Are you coming out to see me today?

Seth Mays

If Hart and Raj finish with me early enough.

Raj?

Rajesh Parikh. Hart’s boss.

Tony the Tiger?

Yeah.

Do we like Tony the Tiger?

Val gives everybody so much shit it’s sometimes hard to tell.

Yeah, we like Raj. :)

Does Val?

Yeah.

As much as he can like anybody besides you and Taavi.

He likes you.

He even lets you call him Val.

Not that you ever do.

It’s weird.

Like calling your teacher by their first name.

You’re practically another brother in the Hart family at this point.

You should get used to it.

I can’t get over the fact that Judy named him that.

Neither can he.

It actually wasn’t as weird as I was making it out.

Not anymore, anyway. It had been really weird when he’d first asked me to do it, but since that had been at a Hart family Christmas event, I’d seen the rationale.

It didn’t really bother me to call him Val, but I was so used to him being Hart that it was still my default.

And while Elliot got away with calling him Val around other people, I felt like me doing it was somehow disrespectful. A betrayal of trust.

No, I can’t really explain why. It just was.

I was sitting on the bed in the hotel room, Sassafras curled up against my thigh—the non-injured one—texting Elliot while Hart and Raj argued about what their next steps should be.

“We have to call them out on their fucking bullshit,” Hart argued.

He was sitting on the other bed, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees.

Raj—as tall as Hart, but broader and smoothly muscled where Hart was all elegant angles—was pacing, the light mahogany skin of his forehead furrowed under a sweep of black hair.

It was impossible not to feel awkward and oafish in a room with these two.

Especially since if I wanted to go anywhere or do anything, I had to do it with two giant sticks—a.k.a. crutches—and one knee locked in place. I also had no car, so it wasn’t like I could go anywhere without Hart driving me, anyway.

“You want to admit to them that we’ve been lying?” Raj asked, his low voice smooth with a slight rumble that gave away a little bit of his felid second nature.

“We’re not the ones who are fucking lying,” Hart argued. “ They fucking ran Elliot off the road and are claiming he’s dead when they have no fucking body.”

I didn’t much like talking about Elliot’s near-death, but I was starting to get used to it. The fact that Elliot was texting me at the same time made it a little easier, since I had immediate evidence that he was alive.

“But they are assuming that he crawled off and died,” Raj pointed out reasonably. It seemed to be making Hart more agitated, and his pointed ears were starting to turn pink. “While we are pretending that we also think he’s dead, while we know that is is, in fact, very much not.”

“No thanks to those fuckers.”

“Maybe not,” Raj allowed. “But we are also technically concealing evidence.”

“Elliot isn’t fucking evidence ,” Hart growled.

I had to agree with him, but I was leery of pissing off a giant tiger shifter.

Not that I was genuinely concerned that Raj Parikh would actually hurt me, since he seemed to be a good guy and had saved Hart’s life more than once, but my wolf definitely had a very healthy dose of respect for Raj’s tiger, and I could sense that even with both of us in fully human form.

Raj sighed, a long-suffering sound that made it clear he was used to dealing with Hart and his semi-volatile temper. “Fine. We’re concealing a witness , then.”

“For his own safety.”

“I’m not saying you did the wrong thing, Hart,” Raj explained, clearly trying to placate him.

“But I am saying we can’t just run in there and start accusing them of lying without having evidence—or a witness—and without admitting that we’ve known Elliot wasn’t dead the whole time.

” He shot a glare at Hart, who was spluttering a bit.

“This requires some finesse , something you, Keebler, utterly lack.”

Hart muttered something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch, although I thought I heard something about chickens, fuckers, and fists, but I might have been wrong.

The fact that I missed most of it was fairly impressive, given that I have wolf hearing.

Then again, Hart was engaged to a xolo shifter, whose bat-ears might have been even better than mine.

“You want to say that again?” Raj asked, half-teasing, half-aggressive.

“Fuck you, Tony.” Hart was annoyed, but there wasn’t any real bite to it. Then he turned to me, and I fought the urge to try to disappear into the pillows propping me up. “What do you think?”

“He’s not a part of this investigation,” Raj interrupted.

“The fuck he isn’t.”

“Not as an investigator, he isn’t. We shouldn’t even be discussing this in front of him.”

Technically, Raj wasn’t wrong. I was the boyfriend of the attempted murder victim and the son of the actual murder victim. And the twin of the prime suspect. And the son of the missing-presumed-dead-man who was almost certainly the actual murderer.

I shouldn’t have been anywhere near this case.

And yet, here I was.

“Yeah, well, if Augusta County had even a millimeter of competence, they’d have had their own CSIs actually do their jobs, and I wouldn’t have had to rope Mays into this.”

Raj stopped pacing and ran a hand down his face. “You’ve made a complete mess of this, Hart.”

“It wasn’t me who made the fucking mess,” the elf retorted, his ears turning even pinker.

“You didn’t do anything to clean it up, though, did you?”

“I didn’t see your stripey ass here trying to help,” Hart snapped back.

I didn’t really want to watch this devolve any farther.

“How about we just figure out what we are going to do instead of blaming each other for the shit-show that, realistically speaking, is my father’s fault?” I suggested.

They both turned to look at me.

“Any ideas?” Hart asked me, not really willing to give up the fight just yet.

“Hart! Leave him out of it!”

“Do we know who’s listed as next of kin in Elliot’s will?” I asked, suddenly. I didn’t think it was me, but it might very well have been Hart.

They both gaped at me.

I shrugged. “I have wills on the brain,” I replied. “Since my mother’s is what started all this.”

“What do you mean?” Raj asked.

I explained about how my mother had tried to contact Noah, how she’d gone to Humbolt to draw up a new will, and how she’d left property to both Noah and me.

I explained about Rachael, who’d gotten sick and died, and how that might have caused my mother to finally, finally start defying my father.

I told him what I knew about the evidence they had—the DNA that hadn’t matched either Noah or me, but which had been a family match.

And then I offered up the working theory that my father had killed my mother, that he’d then decided that I had to die, too, so he’d used Mosby to run ‘me’ off the road so that I would stop raising questions and trouble.

I included everything I’d gleaned from the knife I’d turned in to the blood tracks to the shrapnel of headlight fragments found on the highway where Elliot had been driven off the road. I also explained how the Community was trying to claim my mother’s body.

“The point ,” I concluded. “Is that if everyone believes Elliot is dead—or is pretending he is, anyway—then his will goes into effect. And whoever is next of kin not only should have been notified, but should be able to try to claim his… body.” I’d tried not to hesitate, and failed.

“So who’s his next of kin?” Raj wanted to know.

I turned my head to look at Hart, and found him staring at me. I raised both eyebrows.

“Fuck,” is what he said.

“What?” Raj demanded.

“It’s me,” Hart replied, his voice tight. “It’s fucking me.”

As it turns out, it wasn’t Hart. Or, rather, it wasn’t just Hart. It was both of us, something that had me sniffling all over again because it meant that Elliot thought of me as family in a permanent enough way to have added me to his will at some point in the last six months.

He was listed in mine alongside Noah, but that was less surprising.

I was now a first responder and a trained firefighter, and one of the things they make you do when you pass the firefighting exam is update your will because you’ve taken on a career trajectory in which your risk of death is considerably higher than the average.

Also because if they needed to call somebody to act with power of attorney for surgery or something, I needed someone in close proximity, and Richmond to Shawano was not really a quick little jaunt.

But a carpenter doesn’t usually need to have a will updated—at least not a healthy carpenter in his early forties. Although I suppose Elliot was in regular contact with people who did have to—Hart and me. And he’d had his life threatened enough that maybe he figured it would be a good idea.

The fact that he’d chosen to add me meant everything.

Hart was relieved, because it meant he could use me as the grieving widow—his words, not mine—so that he could worry about doing his, and I quote, “fucking job being a dickhead cop.”

“You’re a federal agent,” Raj reminded him as we exited Hart’s Charger.

I levered myself out of the back seat using the crutches, grateful he had a four-door.

“What’s your point, Tony?” Hart half-growled.

“Try not to force me to wash your mouth out with soap, please,” came the mild reply. “And I really don’t want to have to pay anyone to clean blood off the floor.”

The smile Hart offered him was feral.

“I mean it, Hart,” Raj said, then, and his tone was tight, serious. “You lose control, you’ll destroy the whole case. You do that, I will not hesitate to fire your ass, you get me, elf?”

Hart glared at him, and Raj met his gaze, steady and unrelenting, his gold eyes sharp.

“You got me?” he repeated.

Hart scowled. “I fucking got you,” he grumbled.