Chapter 61 The Blade Is Betrayed
The Blade Is Betrayed
TALIA
“Where the hell is she?”
It comes out like a screech, reverberating through the halls of the main house as I stomp in.
I’m in the foyer, one boot off, as I discard my shoes so I don’t fuck up Hex’s clean floors.
The house is calm and shadowed, but I am vibrating with betrayal so foul that it leaves a metallic taste in the back of my throat.
My free hand spins Baby, a nervous tic that usually comforts me, but today is failing.
I climb the stairs, searching for the cat, my voice furious and raw, as I shout, “Someone tell me where the hell she is right now!”
My husband pops out of his studio at the end of the hall, his expression full of surprise.
He was clearly elbows-deep in damp, ochre-clotted clay—a new project, I assume.
Rafe never tells us about them until they’re done, as if the act of creating is more intimate than the results.
His hair is tied back tightly, and his cheeks are streaked with concentric arcs of dust. He blinks at me as if I’ve materialized from nowhere, which I didn’t.
He won’t be happy with what I’m going to do, but it cannot be helped.
I want to scream my suspicion at him, but the words swell and jam in my throat.
It’s the cat and her stupid groupies; it’s always the fucking groupies.
I’m not sure why she can’t kick them to the curb, but she can’t, and it’s going to fuck everything up.
I didn’t find her in any of the usual hiding spots—the garden, on a mission, or at that stupid Town Hall with Lily.
She is not anywhere she should be, nor was she yesterday—which is the problem.
Why, why, why?!!
My husband wipes a hand on his sweatpants, leaving a streak of red clay that will never, ever wash out. His expression is not apologetic, or even curious, just tired. “What did she do now?” he asks, his voice heavy with resignation.
“Tell me where she is,” I hiss. The word splits the air like a lash. “She’s not upstairs, or she would have heard me screaming as I came up. Where the fuck is she?”
He stretches the ache from his shoulders as he shrugs.
Rafe is a tall clone, but he appears smaller because of the sadness shrinking him.
His hands hover in front of him uncertainly, caught between defense and surrender.
Looking at me, he stays quiet as if the answer to my question might pop up out of thin air.
“Did she not come back last night?” he asks, his voice gentle in a way that makes me want to destroy something.
Since he was with Taurus, of course he doesn’t know. What was I thinking?
“She didn’t come back,” I spit. My anger is irrational, volcanic, but I don’t care. “What was she doing after work? Do you know?”
Rafe pauses, his brow furrowing as he thinks.
“I thought she was here with you. Did you check the closet? She hides there and blocks people if she’s really upset, you know.
” He runs a hand through his hair, leaving a dollop of clay just above his left eyebrow.
“I didn’t see her this morning, but I figured you were all off on missions. ”
“She didn’t show up there,” I snap. “I checked with Mikhail, and then I stopped in to see if she was with Lily. I checked the beach and your old house. She’s not there. And obviously, she’s not fucking here.”
My husband blinks again, finally registering the scale of my panic.
“Did something happen? I felt nothing, nor did Simba last night. Did you?” he asks as he throws the studio door to walk back in.
He stops the wheel and grabs a towel, hurriedly cleaning himself up as he waits for me to tell him what I know.
As if I have anything to report beyond what I just said—damn it.
I consider telling him the one thing I know that isn’t her location.
There was a note slipped under the windshield wiper of my car in the Company lot, with a crude sketch of the cat and a bunch of hearts with names in them surrounding the words ‘everything changes.’ There was a web address on it, and what I found there is why I left work to hunt down our mate like a gazelle on the Serengeti.
But I don’t say any of that; I just stand there, Baby still twirling, and let the silence vibrate between us.
I’m not ready to share my reasons for finding the cat yet; otherwise, he might not be as helpful as I want him to be.
Rafe is still her primary, just like Taurus is mine, and occasionally, that bond makes it hard not to protect them over everything else.
As he pulls on clothes, Rafe looks baffled. “I swear I haven’t seen her since yesterday. Did you check the stupid, evil bar?”
“Does a bear shit in the woods?” My sarcasm is razor-edged and unfair, but I can’t help it.
“Could have just said you did,” he grumbles. “I figured I’d ask. It’s easy to put that place in a box so you don’t have to think about it and shit.”
I want to scream, to lunge at him, to brandish Baby and demand he be as pissed as I am.
Instead, I let my shoulders collapse inward, my spine stiffening as I remind myself that he doesn’t have all the information yet.
Everyone will be furious when they see what I did, but until we get a fix on where the hell Deli is hiding, I can’t share the images I can’t get out of my mind ever since.
Also, he isn’t the bad guy here, and we’re all working hard not to take fury out on the wrong people now.
Rafe stands there, his arms open, but when I don’t come over, he frowns. “Why are you being so… cold? Are you that worried?”
I watch the way the light from the window halos his golden hair, and I have to push away the emotions I feel for him.
The possibility of violence when I find the cat is still there, but the possibility of tenderness surrounds my husband.
For a second, I don’t know which I want more, and I grit my teeth so hard I might crack them.
I break the stalemate by saying, “I have to do this so I can focus. You know that.”
If I stay here, I’m going to upset him, and I don’t have time for that. I have to get to her before I lose my steam.
Turning on my heel, I leave. I don’t slam the door on my way out, but I want to because I’m so damn infuriated that we can’t go a week without something tearing us apart.
When I stomp down the stairs, the foyer is still again.
I stalk through the house, glaring at things that remind me of what my family could be doing instead of constantly fighting.
There’s a bay window where we could read on rainy Sundays, and a library full of books to choose from.
The pool and gardens are perfect for frolicking rather than people collapsing near death during a storm.
It makes me rub my chest as my stress-level spikes.
I count my breaths, my heartbeats, and my grudges. While I was part of most of the things we’ve survived, nothing I did is as bad as what she’s done. And I am not just searching; I am hunting, and the difference is not lost on me.
Deli is not hiding anywhere that we usually find her in her sorrow or grief, but she’s also not working as if nothing happened.
I don’t know if that means that she regrets her betrayal, or that she doesn’t care how it’s going to affect our family.
Does she even know that she’s been caught?
If not, that might be why she’s so damn scarce; she’s just doing something secret and has no idea what’s waiting for her when she comes home.
Our cat has unleashed a tsunami of trouble and disappeared like smoke in the wind.
That’s when I reach for her again. It’s a reflex now, the way I test the perimeter of my consciousness, sending out the smallest pulse to see what vibrates back.
It’s like a dog whistle, but for trauma.
I touch the bond between us hopefully. Yesterday, I could sense her anywhere in the city, like a thread tugging at my ribcage.
Now, she’s shrouded, but I try anyway. I close my eyes, grit my teeth, and force the connection open.
Deli is not nearby; she is somewhere else, and the bond is so faint that I know she wants it that way.
I don’t bother relaying that to my husband.
He would want to come along and that is not a good job with my current mood.
Instead, I slide my shoes back on and step out into the gloomy day outside.
The sky is the color of old bruises, and the wind slices over me painfully as I walk to the car.
She’s hoping we won’t find her because she’s so far down that she doesn’t even want anyone to look at her.
I’d give her space, but I can’t this time.
She has to answer for this whether she wants to or not.
There’s only one place she would go now that she knows I’m looking for her.
It’s the kind of logic that only makes sense if you’ve spent your life expecting the movements of something wild, something that loves you and hates you in equal measure.
She’ll hide out where she knows I have no interest in being—which, ironically, is what my husband asked about.
Starting the car, I take off with a grimace that isn’t going away.
This ends here.
The Zoo glares at me from the end of the block when I arrive, a festering tumor on the face of our community.
Since Belle left, it’s often empty, especially now that everyone is pretending it wasn’t a weapon.
I cross the street in a diagonal, noting the way the tumultuous weather bends around my anger.
I want to kick the door down, but I don’t.
I slip through the doors, my jaw set as I prepare myself to face her.
The pain in my chest reminds me that I am not numb, no matter how much I want to be, and I take a deep breath.
Inside, the air is stale with old booze and new mildew.
It’s colder than I expect, but my body runs hot as I’m always ready for the next emergency.
I scan the darkness, see nothing, then blink twice and see everything.
The tables are upended, and chairs flung around like toothpicks.
Broken glass crunches under my boots, and I sigh, ready to scream until I see it.
Someone has painted the words ‘everything changes’ in red across the back wall.
They’ve been here, too. I see the website address scrawled under the words and let out a snarl of fury.
I feel Deli now; she’s closer than before.
I follow the pull up the narrow staircase to the balcony, where the pool tables rot beneath tarps.
She’s perched on the edge of one, her tail curled around her feet and her eyes like twin wounds in the gloom.
She doesn’t run; no, she just watches as I approach, the way she always does.
It’s obvious she wasn’t avoiding me or her primary; she wasn’t even avoiding her husband.
This disappearing act is about withholding shit from herself, so she’s upset about the wrong goddamn thing and will expect me to fix it.
It makes me want to yell, to drag her home by the scruff of her neck, to shake sense into her because I love her so much, but I also want to murder her.
Instead, I look at her with all the ugliness in my heart and mind since I saw that motherfucking video.
It’s a lot, and I’m sure she feels it through the bond.
She makes a sound that’s more surprised than scared, and I suck in a breath to calm myself.
“You fucking bitch,” I whisper. “We asked for one thing… one bloody thing. How could you?”
She blinks, looking confused for a second before hopping from the balcony to the bar below.
I chase her because, of course, I do. She leads me through the maze of tables, out the back door, into the alley behind the bar.
I have no idea why she’s taking me outside this cursed bar when she also led me here, but that’s how the cat handles being scolded—she runs.
I am too old for this bullshit, but too furious to give up.
She finally stops at the edge of the alley, looking at me as we face one another like we’re in a duel. I pull the stupid note out of my pocket, tossing it at her in a wadded-up ball as I sneer.
Unfolding it with shaking hands, the woman who just deep-sixed all our progress frowns as she reads it. I wait as she turns it over, looking at the drawing and the words on it. My heart stutters. I look at her, but she just pulls her phone out to look up the link.
“Why?” I ask, though I know she won’t answer yet. “Why did you do it?”
She flicks her tail, and for a moment I think she might run again as it plays.
But there’s only the silence and the memory of all the promises our family made that she just broke.
Rafe warned us she might crack. He warned us that the inner and outer turmoil might cause a big bad problem.
I believed him, but I would have never suspected this would be how it happened.
That’s why I’m going to start this fight. I won’t let her get away with it, not when there’s video proof.
I’m not na?ve; I know they set her up. No one has a webcam security system enabled in their home if they don’t plan to use the video for something. She took the bait, though. The cat owes us an explanation, but I’m first. She’d better not lie to me, or we’re done.
Everything is ruined, and it’s all her fault.
Why couldn’t she let them all go?