Chapter Thirteen
They convened in the living room. The afternoon had been . . . tense at best, but Zeke was hopeful they’d all come to a kind of understanding about the most important thing. Figuring out what was going on so they could keep Brooke safe.
The men in the group made quite a trio. The cop, the con and whatever Zeke was. Some combination of the two, he supposed.
Then there was Brooke. She’d let go of her mad. She always did. Too quickly, in Zeke’s estimation, but he couldn’t be frustrated with her over it in the current situation. Not when her I was so desperately in love with you would echo in his head for the rest of his life.
Both the way she’d said it, so serious and with all that emotion, that hurt he’d inflicted just there in her eyes. And then the past tense she’d used. Loved. Yeah, he found he didn’t care for that.
“We dusted your car for prints,”
Thomas was saying to Brooke. “We’re running what we found through our system, but I can’t imagine we come back with anything. It was a small very-homemade bomb. Very hard to trace. There was some thought put behind that.”
“I think the bigger concern is that we don’t know what the hell the point of it was,”
Zeke pointed out. He’d thrown some frozen pizzas in the oven and they were now eating them over the coffee table in the living room since his kitchen table couldn’t hold four people comfortably.
Viola moved from person to person, begging for scraps. It might have been homey. Four friends enjoying a meal.
Instead they were discussing car bombs and murder.
“It wouldn’t have really hurt anyone,”
Royal said. “Not unless someone had the hood open when the bomb went off. Even then, not lethal. Maybe just some burns. So the point had to be to scare, not necessarily to accomplish any injury.”
“Scare who, I wonder,”
Brooke said quietly. Her gaze was on her brother. “Me, because it’s my car?”
That, Zeke figured, had been everyone’s initial thought.
“Or you, Royal, because you were at the rental?”
she questioned.
Royal’s expression went even more grim. “Not a soul knows I’m here.”
“Did you check your car for a tracking device?”
Zeke asked. Because even if this somehow connected to Brooke’s work, who would just . . . scare her like that? Without some kind of direct threat, there was no reason to know who or what was behind what was happening. No way to react any way when you didn’t know why you were being scared.
For a moment, Royal’s face registered some surprise. “Well. No.”
He got to his feet. “I’ll go look right now.”
Brooke stood. “I’ll drive you.”
“Brooke.”
Zeke tried not to grimace at the fact he and Hart had said her name at the same time.
“He shouldn’t go alone,”
Brooke said, stubbornly to Zeke’s mind.
“I’ll go with him,”
Hart said, pushing to his feet to stand next to Royal. “We’ll take the cruiser. Check in with where the deputies are at on the investigation while we’re there.”
Brooke frowned, but she didn’t mount an argument. And to Zeke’s surprise, neither did Royal. Zeke supposed he’d have to count it as a point in Royal’s favor that he was willing to head out with a cop. Another point in his favor was that he’d been willing to consider Zeke’s suggestion in the first place.
“I’ll drop Royal back here after we’re done. If we find a tracker, we’ll look at it from a law-enforcement angle this time.”
Hart eyed them all with a kind of censure. As if they should have come to him in the first place.
“And I’ll let Laurel in on everything,”
he continued. “More eyes until we get a clearer perspective on what this is. But you’ll need to get back to the caves tomorrow, Brooke. We’ve got to determine if we’re looking for another murderer there. We have to treat this as two concurrent cases we’re working on. Not one or the other.”
Zeke could read the guilt all over Brooke’s face. No doubt because she had a skull at her lab here on his property and she hadn’t told either of the detectives she’d smuggled it out of the station.
Zeke would have to give her a point for still not saying anything. He knew it went against her rule-following nature.
Royal and Hart departed and then Brooke and Zeke were left together. She got up and began to clean the remnants of pizza, so Zeke did the same. She didn’t say anything. She was quiet and withdrawn and he just . . . hated it.
“It’s totally possible this thing doesn’t connect to you, Brooke,”
he offered, hoping to get that tenseness out of her shoulders.
“It was still my car they were tracking. And bombed. Maybe Royal is at the heart of it, but I think I connect. And even if I don’t, I can’t feel okay with my brother being the target. No matter how much trouble he’s gotten himself into.”
“But if it doesn’t have anything to do with you . . .”
She shook her head, her mouth wobbling just a second before she firmed it, straightened her shoulders, as if going to battle. “He’s my brother, Zeke. What am I going to do? Just set it aside and ignore it? Pretend I’m not scared because he’s a target and maybe I’m not? I can’t. Could you?”
“No.”
He understood too well the reality of having your sibling in danger. He’d done a lot of things to keep Carlyle safe, and still he’d worried about her every step of the way. Hell, he still worried about her, even knowing she was in a good place over at the Hudson Ranch.
But Brooke worrying, being miserable, tied him into knots. He hated seeing her so damn sad. He reached out and rubbed a hand down her back, some pathetic attempt at comfort.
She didn’t pull away. She even leaned into him a little bit.
And he just . . . had to help somehow.
“Let’s see if Granger has a minute to talk. He helped you with Royal’s lawyer, right? He’s got some insight into Royal’s charge and prison time. Maybe he can tug a line on something the cops can’t. Make a connection we haven’t seen. Granger and Shay are good at that.”
Brooke hesitated. “I hate asking them to get reeled back into things they purposefully left behind.”
Zeke laughed and gave her shoulders a squeeze before releasing her, because he needed his distance, or he’d want to . . . Well.
“They don’t mind, Brooke. You know, Granger and Shay and a couple others jumped in to help my family when we finally found my mother’s killer.”
Zeke thought about the gunshot wound he’d received for the trouble. About how close Carlyle and Mary had been to getting hurt. At how beat up Walker had felt after.
But they’d survived, because they’d worked together and because North Star had been there to help. Even after disbanding.
“We’d likely all have ended up dead if they hadn’t helped. And I didn’t have to beg. They were involving themselves before I even got half the request for help out of my mouth. It’s hard to leave all this stuff behind, even when you want to. But even more than that, Brooke, we’re all still a family.”
“I had no problem leaving North Star danger behind,” she said.
A bit stiffly, he noted, and with some of that old primness that might have made him smile if he didn’t feel sorry for her. “Yes, the danger. I’m talking about the people, Brooke.”
She expressly didn’t meet his gaze. And maybe he shouldn’t poke. She didn’t need him to psychoanalyze her. She’d been desperately in love with him and he’d screwed it all up.
But she was here, and maybe he was old enough, mature enough, finally, to realize that life didn’t present you with many opportunities for something good . . . so he probably shouldn’t be afraid of them.
“And I know you stepped away from all the people too.”
He’d kept in touch with everyone enough to know only Granger had been able to touch base with Brooke over the years. “But it wasn’t because you wanted to.”
“Oh, wasn’t it?”
she returned with that chin raised in that way she had. But she didn’t meet his eyes because she knew he was right.
And he understood, in part, because he’d kept his own family at a certain kind of arm’s length for a while there. Thinking if he hid who he was, what he felt, all that untenable worry that existed inside him, they’d be better off.
He’d learned the hard way, when they’d fought through a lot of danger to solve their mother’s murder, he’d been wrong.
And Brooke was wrong to cut off people who cared about her. He understood why, but that didn’t make her less wrong, and she should know it. Sometimes it took someone saying what you knew flat-out to you for you to finally accept it.
“You’re always so afraid. That you might ask too much. That you have to walk on all those eggshells your foster families made you walk on. That if you’re not perfect, people will turn you away. I suppose I didn’t help that any. And I’m sorry. For a lot of things.”
She looked at him now, blue eyes wide and startled. “I don’t think now is the time to have some kind of postmortem about our relationship, Zeke.”
“No, it isn’t. But I’m going to take the opportunity anyway. Because it’s here. I think you must know I didn’t hurt you on purpose, or you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have called me for help. Or maybe I just hope that. I had my own issues, which isn’t an excuse. I’m still sorry.”
She stood there, very still, but he knew she was absorbing what he’d said. Taking it in, sorting it through. Her precious data points. And that was fine. He’d said what he’d needed to.
They could focus on the danger at hand now. So he led her to the living room and told her to take a seat on the couch while he grabbed his laptop. Once they settled together, hip to hip, with the computer on the coffee table, Zeke put in the video call to Granger. He was grateful the man answered right away.
Granger’s expression registered some surprise, no doubt at seeing both of them on the screen, but then he just smiled. “Well, hello. It’s nice to see you two together.”
Neither Zeke nor Brooke said anything to that, but Zeke could see in the screen the bland kind of smile Brooke offered at those words. No point in arguing about together. But she didn’t like it.
“Hey, Granger. We’ve got a . . . bit of a situation.”
“Of course you do,”
he returned, mostly with humor. “Lay it on me.”
Zeke relayed the information from the stalking to Royal to the car bomb. Brooke explained a little about what she was doing with the remains, and the skull.
She leaned forward, getting closer to the screen. “You helped me get Royal the lawyer, send those letters so they wouldn’t be traced back to North Star at all. But he didn’t get them, and he didn’t know I was the source of the lawyer.”
Granger frowned at that. “Not sure how that could have happened. I can go back and look into it. The lawyer. Where the letters would have gone through.”
“And more into her father,”
Zeke added. Because if Royal thought this could involve old members of the Sons, why wouldn’t they look into that? North Star might have destroyed a lot of their records, but Granger knew how to get any and all information on any old Sons’s activity.
“He’s still in jail,”
Brooke said tightly.
“Yeah, but if Royal thinks it might connect, we need to know . . . There’s something with your family and their ties to the Sons going on here because of Royal. Let’s find all the information we can, even if it ends up not connecting to the danger.”
“Zeke’s right,”
Granger said. “The more information, the better off you are. I’ll see what Shay and I can come up with. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Brooke,”
Granger cut her off gently. “North Star might not exist anymore, but we’re still a family. Always will be.”
Zeke took Brooke’s hand, squeezed it, tried to get that sentiment through to her. Regardless of . . . anything. They’d all been connected by something, and it didn’t just go away because that something didn’t exist anymore.
“We’ll be in touch.”
They said their goodbyes and Zeke closed the laptop. He looked at Brooke, hoping she’d seem more settled. Relieved or calm or something. Maybe she couldn’t believe in all those things he’d said, but surely she believed in Granger.
If anything, she looked more upset.
“Brooke.”
She jumped up and started pacing. “I just don’t know what to do. I feel as powerless as when I was a kid.”
She made jerky movements with her hands as she moved back and forth, Viola following her path. “Everything is happening to me and I just—”
Zeke stood and stopped her by taking her hands in his. He gave them a reassuring squeeze. “Give yourself a break, Brooke. You’ve spent the past month studying a cave full of human remains. That’s going to weigh on anyone.”
“That’s my job. And I’m good at my job,”
she said, looking up at him. Her eyes were filled with tears, but they didn’t fall.
Maybe that killed him just as much as actual tears would have. He moved a hand over her hair. “Sweetheart.”
He remembered too late that she didn’t want him to call her that anymore. But she didn’t snap at him.
She leaned into him.
So he pulled her closer, wrapped his arms around her, hoping he could press some comfort into her. She didn’t cry, she didn’t speak. She just stood there with her cheek on his chest. And she breathed. In that old way of hers, careful in and out.
He could have stood with her in his arms for eternity. He’d been so afraid of that feeling four years ago. He didn’t even know what had changed to make it not so terrifying right now. He still had no real future, no real plans. No way to fold her into his life.
But maybe he’d watched Walker and Carlyle find ways to belong to someone else and that had . . . opened something inside him.
It hardly mattered because Brooke was pulling away. He’d had his chance and he’d messed it up years ago. No going back and fixing that. He could protect her in the here and now, but he had to stop thinking about love and—
“Oh, to hell with it,”
she muttered, which sounded more like something he would have said.
But then her mouth was on his. Not wild and angry like the last kiss he’d initiated. Even when she was angry, that wasn’t Brooke. This was soft, gentle. And, it turned out, everything he wanted. Softness and warmth. A sweetness he’d viewed as a weakness when they’d been together, even when he’d been attracted to it.
Yet here she was. Still so fully Brooke. Strong and smart and doing this incredible job, without hardening herself to anything.
It was a wonder. She was a wonder. And he wanted—
She pushed at his chest then stepped away from him when he released her. She took a few steps back. She inhaled shakily and looked at the front door as if expecting Hart and Royal to burst through at any minute. They wouldn’t, but it also wasn’t like this was some appropriate time to deal with . . . whatever was still between them.
Because it was something. But danger trumped it all.
“Do you have any ice cream?”
she asked, chin up as if daring him to demand they talk this through.
The request made him laugh because he realized that any place he’d lived for any length of time, he’d kept ice cream on hand. Not for himself. He could take it or leave it. But ice cream had always been her favorite, her comfort food.
All these years and, somewhere hidden deep in his psyche, he’d been keeping ice cream in his freezer with her in mind. Wishing for this moment.
“Yeah. Let’s have some ice cream.”