“Me?” I could see his pain. I couldfeelit, just watching him. But I wasn’t sure what I had to do with any of that.
“You didn’t know Yvette. You never met her. You exist outside of my life before all this, and for just a second there, having a normal social interaction with a normal person made things feel, well, normal. I felt like the man I used to be, before…all this.” He exhaled slowly, finally looking up at me again. “Which is just my whiny, bullshit way of saying I didn’t mean to hit on you. I just…reacted.”
“Really. It’s fine.” In fact, that was probably the healthiest reaction I’d seen from either him or Bishop in two days. “Heads up.” I tossed the bag, and Austin caught it in one hand.
A southpaw.Interesting…
“Thanks for this,” he said as he set the paper to-go container on the coffee table next to his laptop. “I really do appreciate it.”
“No problem.” I dropped into the old leather armchair, which used to be in the guest room at my mom’s house, and leaned forward to snatch a fry. “So, any progress?” I asked with a glance at his screen.
“Not a lot,” he admitted as he plucked a pickle slice from the bottom of the food container. “It turns out that women don’t routinely die in their twenties and early thirties.”
“Thank god.”
“I did find a couple though. Their causes of death weren’t listed, so I had to cyber-stalk them, and I eventually ruled them both out. One was a car wreck. The other was ovarian cancer in a thirty-four-year-old.” He lifted his burger from the container. “What about you? Any luck?”
“None. I only searched three counties though. And I only went back twelve months. I’ll widen that search tomorrow. And Titus has promised us an update from his enforcer who’s a nurse. Turns out he works for the largest hospital network in the state of Mississippi, and he has access to all of those files. Might take him a while, though.”
“And if we find nothing?” Austin’s knee bounced against the edge of the coffee table. “If it’s just Yvette?”
I stole another fry instead of answering.
His leg went still. “You don’t believe that, do you?”
“It’s just a gut feeling. Nothing I can quantify. Nothing I can even justify. But if there are other victims out there, I have to find them.” I had to know. “And Iwillput the guilty party in the ground. You have my word.”
“You’ll have to fight Bishop for the honor.” His voice lowered into a soft but intense growl. “And me.”
Something twisted deep in my gut as I looked at him. As he looked back. I found my grief and trauma mirrored in his gaze, and beneath that, I saw a desperate, unacknowledged, and embarrassingly familiar need for…something. For justonemoment free from—
I popped up from my chair, shattering the sudden intensity of the moment. “Do you have beer? Tell me you went shopping.”
“Yeah. Second shelf.”
The refrigerator door opened with the soft sound of broken suction, and the cold air felt good on my overheated skin. I closed my eyes, and Austin’s face hovered there behind my eyelids. There was something about him. Something compelling in the quiet intensity of his pain and his drive for justice.
“Find them?” he called.
“Yeah.” I grabbed two bottles and popped the tops off on the countertop on my way back to the living room.
Austin thanked me when I set a bottle in front of him, wiping a smear of ketchup from his lower lip with a paper napkin. He chewed for several seconds, taking his time, and I realized that was intentional. Either he didn’t want to answer my questions, or he was trying to figure out how to ask one of his own. Finally, he washed his bite down with a swig of beer, then he turned that intense gaze on me again. “So…why didn’t you tell us your sister lives here? In the complex.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did you need a list of all the residents?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Should I ask Stuart for a directory?”
He chewed slowly, making me wait for his response. “Sarcasm is your tell,” he said at last. “If I were you, I wouldn’t play poker.” He smiled, and somehow that lightened the weight of his gaze.
“And what did my ‘tell’ tell you?”
“It’s a shield. You use it when you feel threatened.”
I snorted. “I’mnotafraid of you.”
Silence. More chewing. Then, “I know. You’re not afraid of much, are you?”
No reason to dignifythatwith an answer.
“But you’re afraidforDavey.” Another slow bite. “I swear to you that we’re not a threat to her. Or to anyone who didn’t kill my sister.”
