Chapter 19 #2
“She did,” Wren said. “She brought Ginger, her Malinois, but made Hawk stay home. Said it was a girls’ trip.”
“I bet he liked that,” I said, remembering that Hawk had watched over his very capable wife as acutely as his namesake animal.
Wren shoved her hands in her back pockets. “He was pretty cool, though that was probably because she was going with Shade and me. He knows me from before and said that, given the three of us that he knows, he could guess that Shade was a lot deadlier than she looked. Shade busted out laughing.”
My eyebrows shot up. Shade was not known for her laughter. “She laughed? Like out loud?”
“For a whole three seconds,” Wren confirmed. “We had a good time. It was relaxing.”
“Dude,” Maddox said, shaking his head at Wren, “it was fifty degrees and drizzling the whole time you were in the mountains. I checked the weather. I don’t get how hiking up a mountain all day carrying a pack and then camping in the rain is relaxing.”
Wren sent him a sneer that shouted younger sister. “That’s because you consider it camping if your sheets have less than a five-hundred-thread-count.”
“Exactly,” Maddox said. “I can sleep anywhere, but when I have the option, I appreciate civilization. Like a normal human.”
“Nothing about you is normal,” Wren teased. Turning to me, she said, “I went through the bin you brought back from the post office.”
Maddox and I followed her to the cubicle where she’d left the mail bin. Inside, the junk mail was neatly stacked, the envelope Silas had left on the top.
“Other than the envelope, there’s nothing in here,” she said. “We’ll save everything just in case, but I’m 99.9 percent confident the letter was the only thing he needed you to see. And he had to know you were going to find it. Soon.”
“Because,” Maddox added, “the postmistress told you she’d been about to contact you to re-up the rental fee, so you would have known the box existed within a few weeks, even if you hadn’t gone down there.”
“He must want you to track down the clue,” Wren said.
She picked up the envelope and pulled out the sheet of paper inside.
“It says internal, missing persons. But these numbers, which look to me like they could be a birth date, and these letters, which could be part of a name, don’t exist in any of our missing persons files.
They don’t exist, as far as I can tell, in any of our case files from Creed Global at all. ”
“Well, fuck,” I said. “I guess it was too much to hope it would be easy.”
“Right?” Wren said, lifting an eyebrow. She tucked back a piece of blonde hair that had slipped from her stubby ponytail. “I searched every way I could think. Nothing.”
“I wonder,” I said, looking at the letters in the code. “Delsh. I think we can agree that’s not a name.”
“Part of a name, maybe,” Maddox said. “But yeah, it’s nothing on its own.”
“I wonder what—” Wren asked, squinting down at the paper.
I tapped the letters. “S H as in Shaw?”
“Doesn’t say Emily or M,” Wren said. “No. And the Sh doesn’t mean Shaw necessarily. It’s just— We have a case, someone linked to Silas, with a last name that starts with Sh, and then this code. It could be related. It’d be easier to know if we could figure out what the numbers mean.”
“True,” I said. “I don’t understand why Silas would make it this difficult.”
“He disappeared,” Maddox said, rolling his neck as if aggravated. “He’s making everything difficult.”
“You don’t know that,” Wren snapped. “Silas has never—” She cut off as I jolted and craned my neck to see if Sylvie was coming back.
That was the second time Wren had said Silas’s name too loudly.
“What?” she asked, and then, as if she put the pieces together, she scowled up at me. “Eli, have you not told her?”
“Told who what?” I asked, sounding exasperated in the hopes that it would stop this line of questioning. I felt squirrely enough on my own about not coming clean to Sylvie. I didn’t need to hear it from my team.
Wren shook her head. “It’s going to bite you in the ass. You know that, right?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.
Maddox cleared his throat, sounding more like he was choking off a laugh, and rolled his eyes. He crossed his beefy arms over his chest and pinned me with a dark look. “Please. You’re not fooling anybody.”
“I’m not trying to,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets, going for innocent when I knew I was anything but.
“Right,” Wren said. “Are you going to pretend you guys are using both bedrooms in that safe house?”
“What makes you think we’re not?” I asked, casting my thoughts back. We hadn’t done anything overt. She’d put her head on my shoulder yesterday, but so had Wren in the past, and I wasn’t fucking her. I cringed inside at the thought. Wren was like my sister. Sylvie was very much not.
“Dude, we know you,” Wren said. “I can tell by the way you look at her. You like her,” she said in a sing-songy voice that had my teeth grinding together.
“Shut up, Wren. We’re not thirteen.”
“No, we’re not,” she said with a smug grin. “Which is why you should be honest instead of keeping very important things from the smart, interesting woman you seem to be involved with.”
“I don’t remember asking you,” I said, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. I looked at Maddox, hoping he’d back me up, give me some solidarity against Wren’s little-sister energy.
But he just shook his head. “She’s smart, Eli. Which I’m guessing is part of why you like her.”
I had nothing to say to that since it was true on both counts.
“And she’s going through a shit time,” he added. “The last thing she needs is you lying to her.”
“I’m not lying to her,” I said, keeping my voice low, unable to resist a hurried look to the hall where Emmett and Sylvie had disappeared. “I’m just not telling her everything.”
Wren laughed. “You know that’s the same thing.”
“It’s not,” I said. “Close, maybe, but not the same thing. And the fact that she’s going through a shit time,” I said, slicing a look at Maddox, “is why I’m not saying anything.
Jesus. How much has happened to her in the last week?
Too much. This isn’t a big deal. It doesn’t have anything to do with her, except that it’s the reason we’re helping her figure out what happened.
Or it was the reason. It’s not important. ”
“I don’t know,” Wren said. “I bet she’ll think it is, and there’s no reason not to just?—”
“Come clean,” Maddox finished. “You want to keep her, don’t you?”
Like she was a stray who’d followed me home. She was so much more than that, and I didn’t like how quickly Maddox and Wren had latched onto what I’d realized earlier. That I was probably fucking up by keeping Sylvie in the dark.
“She’s not a puppy,” Wren muttered.
“No,” Maddox said slowly. “But the principle stands. He wants to keep her, and I can see why. But you realize,” he pinned me with his dark eyes, “if you’re not planning on walking away when this is done, you’ll have to tell her the truth about Silas eventually.
And when you finally do, she’ll know how long you kept it from her. ”
The only reason this was such a big deal—if it really was a big deal—was because I didn’t want this thing with Sylvie to be temporary.
The fact that I cared was the reason it mattered.
Silas was the closest thing I had to a father, and he’d disappeared.
I’d told Sylvie next to nothing about him.
I was dreaming about shared closets and picket fences, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the man who’d given me the only family I had left.
The longer I kept Silas from her, the worse it would be.
Fuck.
“I’ll tell her,” I muttered. “Just not right now. Let’s see if she can get some good news before I piss her off.”
“You just don’t want to cut off access to the nookie,” Wren said with a smirk.
“Ugh. Seriously, what are you, my grandmother? Who calls it nookie?” I said.
“Anything more graphic and I have to imagine you doing it with Sylvie.” Wren’s face twisted with distaste. “Gross.”
“Trust me, it’s anything but gross,” I said.
“I’ll take your word for it. And it’s not the Sylvie part of it,” she said with a grin. “Sylvie’s hot. It’s you.”
“Ow. My ego,” I said.
“Your ego is healthy enough.” Wren laughed, shoving her shoulder into mine.
“They’re probably going to be a while. Emmett wanted her to call both banks and her credit card companies.
Come help me cross-reference the printouts from that other drive.
I pulled anything that had numbers that might match the clue. So far, nothing.”
“I’m on it,” I said. “Something’s going to shake loose eventually.”
I followed Wren and Maddox to another cubicle, this one with papers spread out across the desk. Wren pulled back the chair for me.
“You start. I’ll get you a coffee. I think I’m partially blind from squinting at numbers for an hour already this morning.” She pointed at the paper. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
I settled in to kill time until Sylvie came back, hoping the mind-numbing boredom of sifting through data would dull the ache of guilt lurking in my chest. I had everything under control.
I’d figured out all the angles. I just had to hope we got the answers we needed before Sylvie discovered how much I’d been keeping from her.