Chapter 27
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
GRACE
Even with food and their attempts at being light-hearted, the evening had settled into a heavy, almost oppressive quiet.
The panic from earlier clung to me like static under my skin — a low, relentless hum that wouldn’t quit.
It wrapped me in scratchy wool, tightened at my throat, and made every small sound feel like a threat, so that smiling felt like wearing a costume I couldn’t breathe in.
I curled up on the sofa in the unlit living room. The place’s sparse furnishings and spartan aesthetic kind of appealed to me. Light crept in via the slats in the blinds and around the edges of the curtains. Not a lot of light, just the dim glow of the street lamps.
After dinner and the briefing, we’d split up and I’d gone up to sleep.
It was the first time in a while that I’d just gone to bed by myself.
I hadn’t asked any of the guys to join me and they all seemed pretty busy.
Staying in bed though, proved even more challenging.
My thoughts kept racing, piling on each other until they threatened to break out of my skull while the knot in my stomach refused to go away.
Each time I closed my eyes, I kept seeing Amorette but only from the corner of my eye. Each time I tried to look at her directly, she just… disappeared like so much smoke. We were finally in Virginia, finally going after her boss, and maybe, just maybe, going to get some answers.
So why was I actively dreading meeting Mark Sinclair? Why did I just want to leave? I never wanted to abandon Am. So what was my problem?
Bones found me there, curled up on the sofa, my knees drawn to my chest. The soft click of a door opening upstairs and another closing barely registered. I didn’t even look up until he spoke.
“Grace?” His voice, a low, concerned rumble cut through the silence like a knife.
The last thing I wanted to do was talk and I really didn’t want to break down again. Even as I met his gaze, I couldn’t figure out how to verbalize that. How to—
“Grace?” The way he said my name when he repeated it, soft and questioning just added to my heart ache. I didn’t want anyone to see me like this, all vulnerable and broken. It was too late, however, he crossed the room, his steps not making a sound because he moved like a ghost.
His presence draped me like one of those weighted blankets. Glancing upward, I met his gaze and the concern reflected in his eyes damn near undid me.
“What’s wrong, Dollface?” he asked, his voice gentler than I’d ever heard it. Kneeling in front of me, he placed his hands lightly on my knees. Warmth radiated out from him alerting me to the chill that iced over me.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I managed to say. My voice barely climbed above a whisper, rough like sandpaper. “Tried for a while. Gave up. Came down here to think.” The words tasted like ash in my mouth, bitter and hollow. Bones nodded, his expression unreadable, and for a moment, we just sat in silence.
“About what?” he finally asked, his gruff tone a gentle prod.
I hesitated, the words catching in my throat, but something in his eyes urged me to continue.
“About everything,” I said. That seemed so—lame somehow.
Everything could mean the pizza we had for dinner as well as the tracker they had to dig out of me a few months earlier.
"About us. About what’s happened. What comes next. What might happen.”
I pressed my lips together to stop the damn tremble when it started.
“I’m scared,” I said, trying to encompass the “everything” in one emotion and I wasn’t all that positive that word was even right. “Scared to go back. Scared to go forward. Scared about what I’ll find.”
Chickenshit never got anyone anywhere and yet the quaking inside of me seemed to increase with each word. Curling my fingers into my palm, I tried to still the trembling vibrating its way through me.
“Tell me?” The entreaty was a request, not an order. That alone made me want to tell him.
Blowing out a breath, I let one my hands settle over his. “I’m probably just overthinking it…”
“Maybe,” he said, with a shrug. “But until you talk about it, I can’t really give you an informed opinion.”
There was just something about the rough timbre of his voice as he said informed opinion, that made me smile. “You and I usually yell it out.”
“So?” He threw the challenge down. “Do you need an argument to let it out?”
“No…” I sighed, closing my eyes as I gripped his hand.
He turned his hand over until he could cradle my palm with his.
One breath. Two. Then, I opened my eyes once more.
“Ever since you found me…or the Vandals found me and got me out, I’ve been so focused on finding Am.
Then on what was in the way to finding her.
Getting home. Getting away from you guys. ”
I gave him a small smile of apology, but he just nodded his head and squeezed my hand.
“It was always about the next thing we had to survive so I could get back to the hunt. Or get to the hunt at all. Even the past few months while I found a way to wait, I kept telling myself one more thing, then we would do this and find her.”
Tears I didn’t want to shed clogged my throat and I tilted my head back, trying to keep them in.
“And now, we’re close, you’re worried that the answers you find won’t be the ones you want to find.”
Each word landed a staccato blow against my heart. “I’m scared that we’re not going to find any answers. That she really is gone…”
My voice dropped to a ragged whisper at the end. I didn’t want to manifest that. I didn’t want to even put that out into the universe, yet, here we were.
“I’m scared that we will find answers but the answer is she is gone…
forever.” As hard as I fought to keep the tears contained, a hiccup of a sob escaped.
Bones shifted, his hands sliding under me as he lifted me up and sat back on the sofa with me in his lap.
“I don’t know what’s worse. Not ever finding out or finding out that she is gone. ”
Because either way, I would have lost her.
The tears slipped past the boundary, sliding down my face one after another. Nothing kept them inside and when he pulled me closer, I pressed my face into the crook of his neck. With care that once upon a time, I couldn’t have imagined he possessed, he rubbed my back in slow circles.
The dam broke and real sobs tore out of me. I didn’t want to cry but that seemed to matter even less right now. The emotion ripped through me like a hurricane, flattening me in its wake. Losing Am would kill me. For months, that was exactly what I fought against even considering.
She had to be alive.
She had to be out there.
She had to be—because if she wasn’t, then I’d never see her again.
I had no idea how long we were there, but I cried until my eyes were swollen, my nose snotty, and my face a blotchy mess. I’d soaked the collar of his shirt. The greenish yellow remnants of his bruises were still visible over that collar. A lot had healed.
But not all of them. He was still hurting, but he was here with the others. They were all here, working on this for me just like they promised.
“Dollface.” He cupped my chin again, then slid his hand up to my cheek before gliding it into my hair and fisting it. The pressure soothed some of the jagged feeling prickling over and under my skin. “You with me?”
I blinked.
A tear escaped, sliding down my cheek and carrying the salty dampness to the corner of my mouth.
“I’m here,” I said after a long moment, probably too long.
The wound inside me split wide open, bleeding without mercy, and I had no idea how to stop it.
No clue how to stitch it shut and keep my focus where it needed to be — on Mark Sinclair, that law firm, and playing Am like my life depended on it.
No, not my life—Am’s.
A stroke of his thumb glided over the upper curve of my cheek. “You are not alone.”
Four simple words and they sliced right through the noise in my head, arresting my attention.
“You will never be alone on this quest. We will be with you every step of the way.” It was a promise. An oath. “You are the priority, you have been for far longer than I wanted to admit. That makes your sister, ours to find as well.”
The emphasis on “ours” was not lost on me.
He searched my eyes as he continued to trace his thumb against my cheek in a petting motion.
“We will find her. Alive or dead.”
I flinched.
“I know you don’t want to think of her that way, so don’t. That’s not your job. Your job is to focus on finding your sister and pouring all of that dynamite energy into finding her. I’ll take care of the rest.”
Swallowing around the lump in my throat, I raised my eyebrows. “You will?”
“Hell yes, I will. You have my word, Grace. No matter what we find, no matter how long it takes, we will find your sister.” His voice was low, steady, assured. He meant every single word. Alive or.. No. We would find her.
He said to focus on the positive. I could do that.
“Bones?” At his raised brows of inquiry, I asked, “What’s your real name?”
Amusement bled into his fierce expression, but he didn’t retreat from where he kept one hand in my hair, the other on my face. He kept me right there with him, but I didn’t want to run away. “Caylon,” he said. “Caylon Gwyar.”
I blinked. “That was the name on the passport at the hotel and on the card…”
He just hummed an affirmative.
Disbelief feathered through me. “You were using your real identity?”
“I wasn’t hiding from anyone, Dollface. That was you.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but snapped it closed when it hit me that he was absolutely correct. I had been the one who’d been trying to stay out of sight.
“Caylon,” I said slowly, testing the sound of it. Voodoo didn’t look like a Bryant to me, but Legend was definitely Legend and I wasn’t using Lunchbox again if I didn’t have to. But Caylon?
“You don’t like it?” More humor flickered in his eyes.