“I swear, I won’t tell anyone! I’m a good secret keeper!”
It took all of the energy inside of me to close that door behind me.
“Maveriiiiick!”
I groaned as I shouldered the door closed. Sweat broke out along the nape of my neck and I pressed my forehead against the fucking door. I heard her crying. I heard her sobbing out loud for the first time since we had yanked her off her fucking sidewalk. I wanted to take her into my arms and whisk her up to my bedroom. I wanted to wash her hair. I wanted to clean the piss off her legs. I wanted to run those soapy bubbles all along her skin while I listened to her sigh with relief.
What we were doing to her was wrong.
We have to let her go.
“Goddamn it,” I grunted, pushing myself away from the door.
This couldn’t go on. We had the wrong girl. I knew we did. I didn’t need a fucking church meeting to tell me that. Her eyes told me that. Her voice told me that. The desperation and the lack of psychopathic emptiness in her startling ice blue eyes told me that. It didn’t take a profiler like Dante to look at that girl and realize we had the wrong person.
I made my way to the top of the clubhouse before emerging with only one question on the tip of my tongue.
“So,” I said as I strolled in and extended my arms out to either side, “we’ve got the wrong girl, don’t we?”
Axton pointed to my chair. “Sit your ass down and shut up.”
I grinned as I walked by Wolf, our latest prospect. He held out his hand behind his back and I managed to clap mine against his.
“Now,” Axton glowered.
Wolf leaned back and lowered his voice. “Told you something was off about all this.”
Axton leveled that man with a death stare. Or at least tried to while Wolf cheekily smiled at him like a little boy who had gotten away with stealing a cookie from the jar before dinner.
“Church time,” Axton said, planting his hands into the wooden table in front of us. “Sit.”
All of us sat. Except for Dante, of course.
“You have the floor,” Axton, our President, murmured before he flopped down into his chair.
The distress on his face told me everything I needed to know about how he felt.
“Right, so,” Dante started as he slid one hand into his pocket and used the other to rake through his hair. “Went to the hospital. Tracked down my contact. Of course, he was wildly happy to see me.”
A chuckle reverberated around the table, but it did nothing to lighten the mood.
“He got me documents he didn’t give me before and—”
“Why?” Wolf asked as he interrupted Dante.
Dante pointed at him. “Good question. When I first asked him for all of the information he had on Rachel Ludick, he originally didn’t have any information. That started our runaround for—”
“Just get to the point,” Axton groaned.
Dante licked his lips. “I went back and asked him to give me everything he had on the woman, including information from her birth. He didn’t understand why that was relevant, so when we finally figured out who we were looking for and tracked down her medical records for information, it didn’t make sense for him to give us her birth records. We assumed, originally, that it was because she wasn’t born in this area. Easy enough to accept.”
I nodded slowly. “Something we all accepted.”
“We shouldn’t have,” Axton spat.
Rocker wiggled his fingers, as if to haphazardly raise his hand. “How do we know that woman downstairs isn’t who we’re looking for?”
“Yeah,” Locker said. “She’s the spitting fucking image of The Grim Reaper.”
