“Only because I couldn’t find any real food in the cabinets. I would have been out of luck if it weren’t for all the takeout menus you have tacked to the wall beside your phone,” his sister said with a smile that seemed almost genuine. “You two seriously need to go shopping for some real food, especially now that Kat is spending more time at the apartment.”
The coy way his sister said it had Connor glancing at her out the corner of his eye to see Jenna making a face at him.
“Bro, I know you said you’ve been seeing each other for a while, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that she’s started staying here since her toiletries are in the bathroom.” His sister’s smile was a little more mischievous now. “Plus, she offered to give up your room and volunteered both of you to sleep on the couch, remember?”
He grunted and went back to eating.
“So what happened today with the kid who got kidnapped?” Jenna asked a few minutes later. “Were you able to find who did it?”
Connor shook his head with a sigh. He shouldn’t be talking about this stuff with Jenna at all, but after what happened to Hannah, he knew she had a special place in her heart for missing kids, so he knew he had to tell her something that would relieve the worry.
“I can’t get into the details of the case,” he said. “But unfortunately, no, we haven’t found the kid yet. Or any of the kids who have been kidnapped over the past few days. Thanks to Kat, though, at least we have a lead on who took them. We’re hoping that gets us somewhere soon.”
He thought that answer would put an end to the questions, but it turned out he was wrong. The moment he’d mentioned Kat helping, his sister’s face lit up.
“That’s right,” his sister said, looking at Kat eagerly. “Connor mentioned you’re a consultant. Are you a profiler or something?”
“No, nothing like that,” Kat started, smiling a little as she threw a glance Connor’s way. “The people who kidnapped the kids are part of a group that I had a bad experience with a few years ago. I was lucky enough to get away from them, and now I’m trying to help Connor find the kids before they have to go through anything bad, too.”
Jenna’s eyes widened, and Connor knew from experience that his soul mate was about to be on the receiving end of about a hundred completely unfiltered questions that would sooner or later verge into subjects he definitely didn’t want to get into with his sister.
“Enough about us and the case we’re working,” Connor said, knowing he had to distract his sister before she got going. “You haven’t told us a single thing about what you’ve been up to out in LA. How’s work going?”
It was usually difficult to pull Jenna off a topic of conversation once she sank her teeth into it, but thankfully, there was one thing she was always willing to talk about—her job. It wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to say that her love of the special-effects industry was her life. Connor didn’t understand her fascination with the world of make-believe, and he knew his parents blamed that fascination with monsters on the stories she’d told about Hannah. Sometimes, Connor worried Jenna was disappearing further into a fantasy world of her own making more and more every day. But in the end, the stuff made Jenna happy. He tried to tell himself that was the only thing that mattered.
His sister’s face lit up all over again as she told them about the makeup and special effects she’d been doing over the past few years for the fancy company where she worked. Connor listened and nodded his head at the appropriate moments, but Kat mostly asked questions and guided the conversation. She was exceptionally good at getting his sister to open up, and within minutes, the two of them were deep in conversation about the TV shows and movies Jenna had been working on. Connor was shocked to realize he recognized many of them. Some part of him always assumed Jenna worked on those obscure sci-fi shows involving flying sharks and face-sucking aliens, but now, he realized her job was much more than he’d ever expected.
“The rapid growth of the various streaming services has really opened up new demand for special-effects talents,” Jenna said excitedly. “My company is hiring people left and right and still has to turn down major contract work every week. I’ve made more in commissions and overtime in the past year than in the three previous years combined. My salary has been bumped up half a dozen times in that same period because my boss is worried someone’s going to poach me.”
Connor wasn’t sure why he felt the need to interrupt, but he was going to do it anyway. “If work is going so well with all the overtime and everything, I’m a little surprised you found time to slip away and come all the way to Dallas to visit me.”
Jenna stared at him like a deer caught in headlights. She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again.
“There was a lull in work, and I decided to do something spontaneous,” she finally said, breaking eye contact with him and looking away. “So I jumped on a plane and here I am.”
Some of his pack mates could read people well enough to know when they were lying. Unfortunately, Connor didn’t possess that particular ability. But in Jenna’s case, he didn’t need to. His sister was the worst liar he’d ever seen.
“Jenna, I know there’s something else going on you’re not telling me,” he said. “The fact that you’re scared to even talk about it means it’s serious. I can promise you that delaying won’t make it any easier. Why don’t you just tell me what it is so we can at least discuss it?”
His sister’s shoulders sagged and for a moment, he thought she was about to cry. But then she took a deep breath, determination seeming to surround her.
“I saw her,” Jenna finally said, her voice so low that both he and Kat had to lean forward to hear it. “Three days ago.”
From the corner of his eye, Connor saw Kat glance at him, clearly confused. He wished there was something he could say that would help, but he was as lost as she was.
“Who did you see?” he asked his sister when nothing else seemed forthcoming.
“Hannah,” his sister said, voice a little stronger now. “I saw her three days ago, in an unhoused camp near Skid Row. I was out late at night and saw her darting through the shadows. I called out to her, and she turned to look at me. I could see in her eyes that she recognized me, but then she turned and ran away.”
Connor set his plate on the coffee table with a sigh. “Oh, Jenna.”
This was so much worse than he’d ever imagined. It wasn’t simply that Jenna thought she’d seen their dead sister. It was with the fact that she’d obviously been wandering around some of the worse parts of LA in the middle of the night looking for her in the first place.
“It was her,” Jenna practically shouted, hands clenched tightly around the plate on her lap. “I chased her for three blocks, but when I finally got close, she turned down an alley and disappeared down into a manhole in the ground.”
Crap, this was getting worse by the second. Connor knew there was no one to blame but himself. He should never have left Jenna alone in Los Angeles by herself, with no one to be there for her but the awful nightmares that wouldn’t let her heal. This was all his fault.
“Jenna,” he said softly. “I’m sure you think the woman you saw was Hannah, but it’s been a decade since she went missing. It’s unlikely you’d be able to recognize her, even if it had been her.”
