“Not really. Just a desperate hope that I won’t get Juniper killed by flying by the seat of my pants.” I turn to Torin. “Do you still have the box your mom gave you?”
“You mean all that evidence that will put her away for a very long time? I do. Why?”
I point at Lottie. “Give it to her. We’re swinging by the police station to drop her off. Lottie can tell them everything.Andshe’ll have proof to back up everything they’ve been doing.”
A frown line forms between Archer’s brows. “But they have Juniper.”
I squeeze his shoulder. “Yes, but they don’t know Lottie is going to the cops, and they won’t know until after we’ve gotten Juniper away. Dad will never expect us to go to the cops. We have to do the unexpected, or he’ll stay two steps ahead of us the way he always has been. It’s time to end this once and for all.”
“What about you?” Lottie glances between us. “You can’t go back there. He’ll be expecting you.”
“Us, yes,” Torin says slowly.
I struggle to read his expression. “You have an idea.”
He pulls his cell phone from his back pocket. “Not one guaranteed to work, but it’s something. I just need to make a call.”
“Don’t go,” Lottie warns us, her eyes pleading. “He will push you into doing something you don’t want to, or you’ll push him into hurting Juniper. Just come to the police station with me.”
My smile is bitter. “We’ve spent years pushing each other’s buttons. It’s time this ended.”
The front door of the house I grew up swings open easily under my hand.
An unlocked door is never a good sign, and if I weren’t already walking into this house braced for battle, it would have had all my alarm bells ringing.
There’s no sign of Veronica or Wilkes’s body at the bottom of the staircase that Lottie said he fell down. There’s also no sign of any blood. Whoever cleaned up the mess did a good job. Then again, my dad knows all about how to deal with bodies at the bottom of staircases. How to make them look like an accidental fall, and how to clean up after them, apparently.
Behind me, Archer and Torin are quiet.
We dropped Lottie at the front door of the police station minutes before. We had watched, engine running, as she walked up to the entrance, cradling a medium-size archive box in both hands. Torin’s mom, along with my dad and several others, will be going to jail for a very long time once the cops have picked through the photographs and letters going back decades.
Lottie had hesitated at the entrance to the police station and peered over her shoulder, gnawing on her bottom lip, visibly worried.
“Go,” I’d mouthed, and finally, she’d released a soundless sigh, turned around and walked into the police station.
Lottie is safe. For the first time, she’s free from harm.
But our mate isn’t.
“We’re in the dining room,” my dad calls out before I can take one step into the entryway.
His voice is unaffected. Completely unworried.
I walk toward the dining room of a house I hate almost as much as the man it belongs to.
I see Juniper first.
Her eyes are wide, and terror is palpable.
She has a good reason to be afraid. My dad is standing behind her, holding a needle filled with a clear liquid to her throat.
“I was waiting for you to come after your scent match,” he says with a warm smile. “Sit. We have a lot to talk about.”
Chapter 40
June
“Let her go, Dad,” Callum says softly from the dining room doorway.
