Chapter 10
Troy
MY HOUSE WAS SHAKING . I could’ve fixed these frequent shakes a long time ago, but I didn’t. Instead, here I was, sitting with my best friend in my living room watching Eirlys use my DDR set up.
To be fair to Eirlys, she used the fastest songs she could find, hiked the difficulty all the way up, and still barely missed a step. She was good at this. She’d also spent a decade and a half kidnapped and miserable, so I didn’t mind the weekly house shaking.
The part where I could’ve fixed it, well, I could’ve gotten her a DDR last Christmas, and I didn’t. In my defense, I liked having her and Dylan around.
“I heard you were spotted entering the Love Bites office yesterday,” Dylan said without taking his eyes off his wife for a moment. “Franky and Jessica were really excited when I ran into them at the supermarket.”
Franky and Jessica were both way too young to be excited about it. They were still in high school, for wave’s sake. Although Jessica might have other ideas. I had dated her mom very briefly and very regrettably. Not that anything was wrong with the panther shifter, but our personalities fit together like two coral reefs with jagged edges. Lots of chafing and nothing aligned.
“The crones dragged me in kicking and screaming,” I answered. “Although, I met this cute mermaid, so no regrets.”
“That poor mermaid,” Dylan answered with mock solemnity.
I flipped him off, but that reminded me, I had to check when Growing Up With Hello Kitty was released.
I typed it in on my phone and got the whole history of that series. It released in the nineties, which would check out with Mira’s story, but it didn’t get released in the US until twenty twelve. That didn’t check out at all. The cartoon was made for preschoolers, and she would’ve been in her teens by then.
There was, of course, a chance that her parents were Japanese, and they got their hands on a copy from their home country. It’s not like I had asked Mira if she knew foreign languages.
“Looking for a new cartoon to obsess over?” Dylan asked.
Of course, the asshole was looking at my phone. He probably thought I was checking out Mira’s pictures or something.
“No, I was just trying to figure something out. That cute mermaid said her favorite cartoon was Growing Up With Hello Kitty, but she would’ve been too old to watch it when it was released in the US.”
Dylan gave me a weird look. “Are you going to run a background check on her?”
“No, of course not.” Maybe I should.
The song ended, and a moment later, Eirlys plopped down on the couch next to Dylan. “Kiora loved that cartoon. She had the pirated version when she was little, but the dubs on that were so bad she almost never touched it. When she got older, though, she found the official release and then it didn’t matter that she already knew how to change her clothes.”
Huh. Weird. I never would’ve guessed someone that age would watch cartoons for younger kids. Didn’t teenagers want to do all the grownup things?
“Do you know why she liked it?” I asked for entirely selfish reasons. I wanted to know what made Mira tick.
Eirlys’s smile slipped as she nodded. “I think she wanted a better family. Billy got her the pirated version because he thought it would teach her to obey him.” Eirlys rolled her eyes like that was a ridiculous idea. “Instead, when Billy would complain about my cooking, she would quote the cartoon saying, ‘it’s not nice to call Mama’s cooking yucky.’ I bet he didn’t expect that when he gave her those DVDs.”
Dylan would’ve been a great dad if he’d ever got the chance to raise his daughter, but Eirlys got kidnapped right after she got pregnant.
I looked back at my phone where the image of the White family was shown next to the history of the series. Could it be that Mira also wanted a better family?
Come to think of it, Mira also looked a lot like Kiora. Not the exact same face but very similar.
Kiora had the beauty mark I had been using to rule out all the selkies that have been found or rescued over the last six years. Kiroa’s eyes were green where Mira’s were brown. And, of course, there was the tattoo on her back—something I would’ve noticed yesterday when we went swimming.
No. She absolutely could not be the same person. Dylan would murder me if I kissed his daughter, even without all the dirty things I wanted to do to her. No. Absolutely not. She was not Kiora.
Was she wearing contacts? She had brown eyes, but for some weird reason, my brain was stuck on the image of her with green eyes. Maybe I was imagining things.
Sure, hair could be dyed. That was why I never bothered checking hair color when looking through missing person reports. She could’ve worn contacts to change her eye color. She even could’ve covered the beauty mark, although makeup would’ve washed away in the river. Unless it was some really good water-resistant stuff. But the tattoo... No one even knew about that tattoo.
According to Eirlys, Kiora had gotten a tattoo of cat ears with a red bow on her lower back not long before the vacation Billy had used to make Kiora disappear. Eirlys saw it peeking out from under the elastic band and didn’t mention it to Kiora because Billy had been right there, and she didn’t want to get her daughter in trouble. After that, she decided it didn’t matter. The deed was done.
I would’ve noticed the tattoo.
Unless she had it removed. Squid on a stick, she wasn’t Kiora. No way.
“If Kiora could choose to be Mimmy or Kitty, who do you think she would’ve chosen?” I asked.
Eirlys thought about it for a moment. “She had an imaginary friend named Kitty, so probably Kitty.”
There. That confirmed it. Mira and Kiora weren’t one and the same. I didn’t have to feel guilty about wanting her in my bed. Not that I wouldn’t stop digging into Mira’s past to find out who she was so afraid of, but it definitely wasn’t the fear of Billy. The guy was dead, for wave’s sake.
We also got those traffickers. Well, some of them. The entire mob was hard to take down, but those involved with Billy were locked up or dead. I made sure of that.
Still, the voice in the back of my head whispered that Kiora might not know that. She might think Billy was still out there, ready to sell her.