Alex didn’t say anything for a long time, but she could feel his disappointment—and anger—coming from the other side of the table. “Does it matter that much to you if they are?”
Lacey looked away. She had no right to be asking any questions, especially since she was the one who’d come begging for help. “I guess not. I just want my sister to be okay.”
They both fell silent after that, concentrating on their food until they were done eating, then staring at their coffee. Anything to keep from having to look at each other. Lacey shifted in the booth, more uncomfortable than she’d ever been in her life. It was hard to believe that so much had changed so quickly. She supposed finding out your boyfriend was a monster could do that.
Lacey breathed a sigh of relief when Alex’s teammates showed up. She’d met Remy, Becker, Max, and Brooks at the engagement party but hadn’t given much thought to how big and muscular each of them was at the time. Now that she realized they were like Alex, it made sense. It was difficult not thinking about them having fangs and claws, though. She needed their help, so she’d just have to deal with it.
Since they wouldn’t all fit in the booth where she and Alex were sitting, they moved to a nearby table. After the waitress poured coffee for each of them, Lacey told Alex’s teammates the same thing she’d told him that morning about Kelsey’s disappearance. They took turns asking her questions after that, mostly about Kelsey’s friends.
“Can you call them and see if they’ll meet with us?” Max asked.
She frowned. “Do you think they know something about what happened to Kelsey?”
Alex exchanged looks with his teammates. “They may know something and not even realize it.”
Lacey sighed. She wasn’t sure what they could possibly know that they hadn’t already told her, but she dug in her purse for her cell phone and called them anyway.
* * *
Alex opened the door to Lacey’s apartment, urging her inside with a gentle hand on the small of her back. The fact that she didn’t flinch and pull away from him was just another indication of how tired she was, not to mention how shell-shocked from everything they’d learned about Kelsey today. He felt for Lacey. It couldn’t be easy finding out she hadn’t known Kelsey nearly as well as she’d thought.
Lacey walked straight to the couch and dropped down into it with an exhausted sigh. She was falling apart in front of his eyes, and it killed Alex to have to stand all the way on the far side of the room and watch it happen. But he knew she didn’t want him beside her no matter how much he wanted to be there.
Giving him a sad look, Leo moved to sit on the floor beside her and rest his chin on her knee. Lacey ran her hand gently over his head.
“How could I have missed all that?” she asked softly, close to tears.
The urge to pull Lacey into his arms and tell her it was all going to be okay was hard to resist, but Alex managed.
“How could you have seen it?” he said. “Kelsey never gave you a reason to think she was lying to you, so you trusted her.”
She let out a sound of frustration. “This is like our mom all over again.”
“What do you mean?”
“Drinking. Clubbing. Guys.” Lacey shook her head. “Kelsey is doing all of that and now she’s going to end up just like our mother.”
Alex frowned. “No, she isn’t. Because we’re going to find her.”
Lacey didn’t say anything.
“Kelsey isn’t like your mom, Lacey. She’s a normal college student doing what every other college student her age does.”
Lacey didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t argue. “I didn’t know about anything Kelsey was doing, but you and your teammates figured it out right away. How?”
He gave her a wry smile. “The job requires a certain level of cynicism.”
Within minutes of sitting down with Kelsey’s girlfriends at a coffee shop near the RTC campus, one of them had admitted that Kelsey had two drinks last night. When Lacey had flipped out, saying that Kelsey wasn’t old enough to drink, the girl immediately tried to backtrack, but it was too late. That’s when everything started to unravel, and Lacey learned that her sister was a lot more like a typical college sophomore than she’d ever guessed.
After dinner at the restaurant, Kelsey and her friends had gone to a big honky-tonk bar on Cedar Springs Road. Not only did Kelsey have a fake ID, but she kept clothes at her friends’ places to change into when they went out partying. According to her friends, with the right makeup, she could appear five years older.
Lacey had looked like someone slapped her at that revelation. She’d sat there stunned while Alex and the other guys had peppered Kelsey’s friends with questions. They admitted that Kelsey had left the bar before they had.
“We thought she’d just met a cute guy and gone home with him,” a petite redhead with freckles explained. “She’s done that before a few times, so we didn’t think anything of it.”
That overdose of reality about her little sister had been too much for Lacey. She’d spent the rest of the day in a daze. The only time she’d looked alive was when Brooks had picked up Kelsey’s scent at the honky-tonk bar and followed it out a back exit. But when the trail disappeared, so had that tiny spark of hope.
“Could you and Brooks really track Kelsey’s scent back in the bar?” Lacey asked now as if reading his mind. The tears that had been threatening to fall earlier were gone, replaced by an intensity that had been absent most of the day.
