Chapter Twenty-Four Reed
Chapter Twenty-Four
Reed
I let the sun beat down on me, tilting my chin up like Superman soaking power from the rays, hoping a little vitamin D could burn away what Hollis had done to me this morning. Like had me opening up, making me feel things I had no business feeling.
I’d blown my own rules to hell, and it had nothing to do with her being only in a towel. She was irresistible. Always had been, always would be. Fake hate and my three-foot rule didn’t change that.
At the sound of the back door opening and shutting, I pretended it was only the ghost of my past coming to haunt me.
“Hey, you good?” My head fell forward at Alex’s voice.
“Yup.”
“You lying?” He was probably at my six now. Didn’t need him to have my back or be anywhere near me.
“Nope.” I cracked open my eyes, making sure Ranger hadn’t escaped.
He was a few feet away, sunbathing on his back, belly exposed, tongue lolling, as if the world wasn’t falling apart.
“Let me guess: She’s ruffling your feathers?”
Seeing as he wasn’t letting me off the hook, I faced him, jaw rigid, body strung like a trip wire. “I’m not a bird.”
Of course he pressed and called me on my bullshit. “Could’ve fooled me, with all the times you fly away. You know, whenever shit gets real.”
The guy had a psych degree, and I had to be reminded of that at every turn when he tried to use it on me. Not that it ever worked. I was a steel trap, at least before Hollis went missing and turned up only remembering me.
“Come on, man, talk to me.”
“I’m not looking for a repeat of what went down in that office,” I warned. “That duct tape is keeping me together just fine.” The lie was almost comical, considering everything that’d happened with Hollis since we’d arrived at my house.
“And the prayers? How are those?”
I rolled my eyes and stepped forward, untucking the chain I knew he had hidden under his tee, revealing a cross. “Why don’t you go pray for us both, how about that?” No way God wanted anything to do with me at the moment anyway.
Alex glared at me as I let go of his cross; I wasn’t in the mood for judgment, so I searched out Ranger to look at.
“Just tell me if it’s her that’s got you in such a foul mood, or the case. Your father?”
“You’re as bad as her, I swear.” I hung my head. “Just don’t know when to stop.”
“I don’t abandon a brother, and you should know that by now.
” Alex remained locked in, not bailing the way I’d once wished my parents would.
That one of those times when they ghosted me for days on end, they’d just stay gone for good.
I was better off alone at thirteen than cleaning up after them. So I’d begun to believe, at least.
Before I had a chance to continue battling my way through this with Alex, the back door opened.
“I have Constantine on the phone,” Ryder said, holding the door open without coming out. “He might have something.”
I’d never been so thankful for an interruption.
Alex shot me a You’re not off the hook look I ignored on our way inside, Ranger leading the way.
I expected Hollis to be waiting there already, but she was nowhere in sight. After our towel talk earlier, I’d barely spoken a word to her. Saved by Audrey and Chase showing up a few minutes later, thankfully not finding her in only a towel.
“She’s on the phone with Gideon,” Audrey told me, beating me to having to ask.
My pulse grew wings and took off in flight at that news.
“Hollis texted Lyra, asking her to send a photo of Tristan so she knew what he looked like. She was hoping it’d spark something for her,” Audrey explained as Seraphina joined us in the kitchen. “Gideon called before Lyra could even answer, pissed off.”
“Why?” Alex asked, clearly not in the know about this, either, which meant it had happened while he’d been playing shrink with me outside.
“Not a shocker, but Julian and Gideon have been reading her texts.” Audrey held up her hands as if to say Don’t shoot the messenger. “Her asking for a photo set him off.”
“She must’ve forgotten her mother’s orders not to mention Tristan over the phone,” Ryder remarked—and shit, I’d nearly forgotten about that and our code for him because of it, X-Man.
Audrey jerked a thumb toward the hallway. “I’ll go grab her.”
“If I didn’t have safety measures in place,” I said as Audrey left, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were listening to us.”
“Sure they tried.” Ryder grimaced. “They’re taking Big Brother to another level.”
Tell me about it. “Where’d Trevor go? Chase? Eden?” We’d had a full house when I went out back.
“Decided to take them to the park while we took this call. Didn’t want Chase hearing anything that could be unsettling,” Alex shared before Audrey returned with Hollis a few seconds later.
Her hair was a little messy, as if she’d been running her fingers through it.
“What’d Gideon want?” I couldn’t help but ask as she made eye contact with me.
She crossed the kitchen and held out her cell phone. “He asked you to destroy this and get me a new burner. I forgot and, um, mentioned Tristan over text. Julian’s scrubbing the messages and data, but Gideon doesn’t want to take any chances. He wants a hammer taken to it.”
I took the phone from her, careful to avoid touching her, then set it on the counter and placed some distance between us. I could never seem to think straight when she was close enough for me to breathe in the smell of my body wash on her skin.
“After warning me to never mention Tristan over the phone again, he hung up so he could destroy his own device.”
“We really need to find out who the hell your brother is. You know, for real.” Alex pulled out a chair for Audrey, and once she sat, he rested his hands on the back of her chair.
As Seraphina and Hollis took a seat next, I found myself staring in a daze at the fourth empty chair, my thoughts drifting to Hollis’s dream of our family. Part of me wanted to order that fifth chair, and that thought alone was enough reason to send me over the edge.
But for now, I had to hang on for dear life and get through this call.
“Unmuting Constantine. You ready?” Ryder asked Hollis.
Hollis stole a look back at him, then hesitantly nodded before her eyes found mine. There was a story there. An entire saga sitting between us I had no idea how to explain away.
“We’re all here now,” Ryder said, holding out his phone.
“I think I got a lead. Well, my teenage son did, actually.” Constantine’s light Italian accent cut through the line. “He heard about a rave that happened the night Hollis went missing.”
Was Constantine really comfortable letting his teenage son get in the middle of this mess? Not my call to question him, but damn.
“A rich kid took over the basement of a fifteenth-century library for it. Rumor has it, shots were fired, cutting the night short. Though no police reports were filed. If anyone was hurt or killed, there’s nothing in the system.”
“Wait . . . a library?” Hollis sat taller, shoulders arching back, and I knew exactly where her mind had wandered. To the book. To my dad.
I stiffened, keying in on the cross around Alex’s neck, and a prayer sat on the edge of my mind that I couldn’t seem to let loose.
“They cut the alarms and shut down the cameras inside even before the rest of the city’s footage was screwed with,” Constantine went on. “I took a look around myself. There was evidence of gunfire, but no shells left behind. It was clean.”
Because I was full of bright ideas lately, I rounded the table so I could check Hollis’s reaction to all this.
There was a flicker of something in her eyes. It was quick and sharp, like a memory was there waiting to resurface, but she couldn’t pin it down.
“I called in a favor to Gwen before I went there to see if anything stood out about the library, including any rumors about something being sold or traded that night.” He spoke directly to Hollis next.
“Gwen couldn’t find anything, but criminals are getting smarter these days about leaving a digital footprint.
” He paused for a brief moment. “But Gwen did discover there’s a system of underground tunnels down there.
Found one secret door behind a bookshelf so far.
One set of footprints, too. My guess? A woman’s.
European size 39. They stopped outside a crawl space that led to the Museo e Cripta dei Cappuccini. The Capuchin Crypt.”
The only Capuchin-anything I’d ever heard of was a monkey. I highly doubted there was a secret burial place for monkeys beneath Rome. After Constantine gave us the quick explanation, I was almost offended that even with all my knowledge, I didn’t know about this place. Monk bones. Really?
“The trail went cold once inside. Concrete pathway. But there are stairs that lead to a store above. It’s possible she ran out that way.” He was back to speaking as though Hollis wasn’t the subject of our conversation.
At this point, since Hollis had no memory of ever being there, she probably didn’t feel tied to the “she” of his story, either.
“I tracked down the kid who threw the rave, and he’s working on a list of who he invited to the party so I can personally question everyone to see if anyone can confirm if you were there. He denied seeing you, but he was also rolling on E.”
“You believe him?” I asked.
“About the drugs? Yeah. About not seeing Hollis? No.” A deep breath curled through the line in a low hiss.
“His father is Benjamin Putcheski. He’s a businessman from Eastern Europe.
Doesn’t have the nicest of friends. It’s possible if Hollis was at that rave, she wasn’t there for a book, but for someone tied to the Putcheski family. ”
The weight of his words landed hard. Thank the Lord. Now we were getting somewhere.
“And we obviously can’t check footage to see if Benjamin or another criminal was at the rave because of the CCTV issue,” Ryder noted. “What about flights? Do we know if he was in town that way?”
“Benjamin has a boat slip at a marina in Naples. His yacht was docked there the night of the rave. If he went to Rome from there, I haven’t been able to get a hit.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility, but it may just be his son was vacationing in Italy with him and that’s why he threw the party in Rome and not Naples—so his father wouldn’t catch him.
The kid begged me not to speak to his father, terrified of getting in trouble, so . . .”
“This is something, at least,” Hollis said, her tone soft and tentative. “If you found this lead, you think my brothers did, too?”
“Probably,” Ryder answered. “Did you ask the Putcheski kid if anyone else reached out?”
“I did, but his no could be bullshit. I pressed him, but not hard enough that he’d shit in his pants.
He’s not my enemy. Not yet, at least. Not looking to make one of his father at the moment, either, but I will if I have to.
” Constantine kept quiet for a few seconds, before adding, “I’ll talk to Benjamin if need be as well. ”
“If you’re asking people if they recognize me,” Hollis slowly began, “you may want to change up my look a little. Something tells me I’d go in disguise.”
“I already thought of that. I had Gwen put together a couple different photos of you. Glasses in one. Different wigs in a few others,” he confirmed.
“Red,” Hollis said in a hushed voice, lightly shaking her head. “Just . . . try that one, okay?”
“Will do. We’ll also try to get our hands on some cell phones from inside the rave. Might be our best bet at seeing footage, since the security systems and CCTV were wiped. Be in touch when I know more.” He cut the line without a goodbye.
Audrey rested a hand on Hollis’s forearm, supporting her the way I wanted to. “You remembering something?”
“I thought I might, but whenever I try to remember anything, I always go back to that dream.” She shook her head. “It feels like a reset point. I don’t understand it.”
Reset point? I stared at the floor, trying to wrap my head around what this meant. I’d known about her dream, but I didn’t know that she also . . .
My stomach wrenched as a sinking feeling hit me, and the truth blasted into me like a round from a shotgun.
It made sense now, and I almost hated that it did.
The dream, the one she clung to like a lifeline, served as a wall. A fail-safe someone had planted in her head to keep the truth buried behind it. And whenever she tried to recall her memories, she landed on me and those three kids.
“The dream, that perfect picture in your head, it’s there to stop any real memories from surfacing,” I said under my breath, thinking out loud.
Hollis stayed locked on me, eyes wide in understanding. Like she could feel the ground tilting under her, too.
You don’t actually want to marry me. Have kids with me. Not before, not now. Someone just used me—the last man anyone would ever expect for you to want—to keep you from clawing back to get to the truth.
“What dream?” Ryder asked, but I couldn’t give him my attention.
Hollis pushed her chair back and stood, one hand covering her mouth as though holding something in.
“Anytime you reach for the past,” I continued, my voice gravelly, “you land on that dream because it is your reset point.”
Her breath shuddered, and my chest became raw, like her pain was carving into me. Like I’d just lost her and those three kids that were never mine in the first place.
It really was an illusion. This feeling. It wasn’t real, and as fast as the hope for more between us had come—just like I predicted would happen—it was swiftly taken away from me.
“You feel safe with me . . . because someone wanted you to.”