What I wanted to come next.
“What are you doing here so early?” I didn’t bother locking the door when I shut it.
In Blackwell Falls, Bram was all the deterrent I needed.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he said. “I thought you opened on Wednesdays.”
“I do,” I said. “I did, but I wanted to pack up some things to take to the Hawks.”
I hated even mentioning them to him, but I hated the fact that I hated it even more, and for the first time in my life, I felt resentful of my big brother.
“What things?” His gaze landed on the cardboard file boxes strewn across my living room floor.
“Mom and Dad’s things,” I said, lifting the box I’d just repacked on to the stack of the ones that were ready to go to my rental car.
His expression darkened, and the scar on the left side of his face creased deeper into his skin. I couldn’t look at it without thinking about what had happened to him on the mountain when he’d been just a teenager, especially now that I’d been through something like it.
“Why would you do that?” I only saw pain in his eyes but I understood why they scared people.
Whyhescared people.
His eyes were so dark they were almost black, and the energy I read as anguish everyone but Maeve seemed to read as danger.
And to be fair, Bramwasdangerous. So there was that.
“Because I’m still trying to figure out who killed them,” I said. “Who tried to kill me.”
“I told you,” he said, running a hand over his short dark hair. “I’m taking care of that.”
They were the words he’d murmured when I’d opened my eyes at the hospital after my surgery:I’m going to find out who did this to you.
But he hadn’t said a word after that and I’d left it alone because the last thing I wanted was Bram on a tear, putting himself in danger because of what had happened to me.
Whoever had killed my parents had already taken a shot at doing the same to me. I didn’t know if I’d survive losing Bram.
“How?” I asked.
“I’ve got people inside BPD,” he said, looking out the window like he was tracking a stalker.
“I’m not sure the Blackwell Police Department knows anything about the international sex trafficking ring Mom and Dad were investigating when they were murdered.”
“You’d be surprised,” he said without looking away from the window.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Never mind.” He turned to look at me. “The point is, I don’t want you mixed up in this shit.”
I sighed. “Let’s not fight about this again. You asked why I wanted to bring Mom and Dad’s stuff to the Hawks. And since Travis Dorsey said someone hired him to run them off the road and I’m still trying to figure out who that is, I need to bring the boxes home.”
The nerve in his eyebrow jumped like it did when he was trying to control himself. “Home?”
My cheeks heated and I busied myself throwing papers and file folders into one of the open boxes. “It’s home for now.”
I was almost relieved to be off the subject of the people who had killed my parents, although I didn’t know what was worse, talking to Bram about that or about the Hawks.
Honestly, it was starting to seem like it was the talking part that was the problem.
Bram didn’t know how to communicate without breaking things, and while I knew Maeve was working on it with him, it probably wasn’t easy for him to unravel a lifetime of using knives and fists as his only conversional tool.
