“How did you know about the coup?”
Surprise tugged up on Vandekamp’s left brow. “You haven’t figured out your mistake yet?”
I’d spent my time alone in that concrete cell going over every decision I’d made as the de facto manager of the liberated menagerie, trying to figure out how I’d failed the very people I’d been trying to save. I’d come up with a thousand small mistakes, but nothing I could pinpoint as our downfall.
“I found out from the Metzgers.” Vandekamp watched carefully for my reaction, but I had none to give him, except confusion.
“The Metzgers don’t know.” Raul and Renata had flawlessly covered our tracks with the former owner’s family.
“The Metzgers found out from old man Rudolph himself.”
“But Rudolph Metzger is...” I let my words fade into silence short of a confession.
“Dead,” Vandekamp finished for me. “Which is the inevitable result of dismembering a man and mailing a piece of him to each of his remaining relatives.”
“We didn’t—”
He shook his head, still watching me closely. “No, that didn’t seem like something you would do, after all the trouble you went through to hide the takeover.”
Sultan Bruhier.Adira’s father got his final revenge on us by exposing the coup that had cost his daughter her life. But the sultan couldn’t have shipped pieces of Rudolph Metzger all over the country if I hadn’t given him the old man in the first place.
Vandekamp’s viewing of my reaction seemed part entertainment, part clinical observation. So I swallowed my guilt to deny him the pleasure.
“What did you do with Gallagher?” I demanded, and his fleeting frown made my stomach flip. He didn’t recognize the name.
Gallagher wasn’t at the Spectacle. He’d been sold to someone else or sent to a cryptid prison or—worst-case scenario—given to a research lab.
A cold new fear overtook me. No matter where he was, he would fight to get to me.
I stared at the floor, struggling to control my horror at that thought. Or at least hide it from Vandekamp.
“Until we know what you are, you’re a financial liability,” he said, and I forced myself to focus on his words. “You can enlighten me, or I can let my lovely wife pull the information out of you. But I don’t think that’s what you want.”
No use denying that. Tabitha Vandekamp was scary in a way no thick-fisted roustabout had ever been. But she couldn’t change the facts.
“I’ve told you.” I shrugged, mentally tamping down the fear that he might recognize my half-truth. “Run the test again. The results will be the same, and no amount of torture will change that. I’m human.”
Vandekamp crossed his arms over his shiny blue button-down shirt. “I’veseenyou turn into a monster, Delilah.”
“The two are not mutually exclusive.” I shrugged and held his gaze. “You and I have that in common.”
Willem
Willem Vandekamp watched the office door close behind his latest purchase, and for a moment, he sat lost in his thoughts. After more than twenty years in the cryptobiology field, he’d long been convinced that nothing could surprise him.
Until Delilah.
A cryptid who went to college.
A cryptid who’d takenhis seminar.
She understood too much, but the real problem Delilah represented wasn’t how much she knew about him, but how little he knew about her.
Delilah would make the investors nervous. She would terrify his friends in Washington.
Speaking of whom...
Willem glanced at his watch, an obsolete device in the age of cell phones and handheld tablets, but one that gave him comfort in its simplicity. He was two minutes late for the conference call, but had no intention of actually picking up the phone for another three. Punctuality might give those congressional blowhards the mistaken impression that his time was less important than theirs.
