Chapter Eight
Harper
Harper lowered her gaze as the wolf shifter pulled on some clothes, her heart racing.
She turned to her brother and looked him up and down once more, checking for injuries.
One of his eyes was swollen and bruised and there was a cut on his lip.
His t-shirt was dirty, and it too had smears of blood.
There was a cut on his arm and his pants were dirty and torn.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Jack sucked in a quick breath then nodded. “Yeah. You?”
Harper shook her head. “Honestly? I’m not even close to being okay.”
Jack winced. “I didn’t mean for you to get involved. Why did you come here? You should have stayed in Fort Worth.”
Harper glared at her brother, and all of her anger, frustration and fear came pouring out of her mouth in a spew of vitriol and rage.
“Why did I come here?” she spat. “How dare you ask me that! I’ve been bailing you out of one mess or another for years!
What was I supposed to do, huh? Sit at home worrying about you until months had passed with no word, and then what would have happened?
I would have been left wondering what had happened to you after these men left you in the damn jungle to rot, that’s what! ”
“That wouldn’t have happened!” Jack said. “It won’t happen. I’m going to get us out of this. You’ll see.”
Harper shook her head. It was the same story every time with him. He was always planning on getting himself out of whatever mess he had gotten into, but Harper was always the one who ended up saving his ass after he called her to come and fix things. She was tired of it.
“How could you do it, Jack? How could you steal that Cryptex?”
His eyes widened. “How do you know about that?”
Harper rolled her eyes. “Honestly? Is that all you care about? That I found out? What is wrong with you! You never show any remorse for anything you’ve ever done!”
“Look, I am sorry, okay! I never meant for any of this to happen. But I owed them. They made me do it. They made me take the job in the damn gallery. I was supposed to find out what items of value the Grayson’s had and report back to them.
When I told them about the Cryptex and the treasure it was supposed to lead to, they were interested. They made me steal it.”
Harper frowned. “If they told you to steal it, then why did they come to Fort Worth looking for you?”
When Jack lowered his gaze, Harper groaned. “You double crossed them, didn’t you? You wanted to find the treasure and keep it for yourself.”
“Yes, and he’s going to pay for it!” the wolf shifter spat, as he strode their way. “But if he’s lucky, we might let you go.”
Might.
Harper knew in that moment that whatever the outcome with her brother, the shifters had no intention of letting either of them go.
Her stomach sank as she realized the reason they had wanted to grab her so badly.
Leverage. They were going to use her to force her brother to do their bidding, to find the treasure and hand it over to them.
If he didn’t, she could imagine the lengths they would go to, to get him to cooperate.
There was no way that her brother was going to find any treasure so her only hope was that Toby would find them before the wolf shifters needed to get their point across.
The traitorous thought that Toby might not be alive to help her tried to force its way into her mind, but Harper would not, could not entertain it.
Toby had to be alive. The alternative was too terrible to contemplate.