“You believe he’s on our side now?” Logan wanted her to trust him so badly, the ache was a hollow craving deep inside him. He swallowed, fingering the delicate heart-shaped choker at her throat. Unlike the heart in her chest, this one he could touch easily, hold in the palm of his hand, protect and adore. She’d give him this one, if he asked. He wished like hell that she’d gift him with the one that mattered most.
“Obviously if they’ve hurt him, he’s not on their side, but we don’t know that anything like that has happened.” She sent him a compassionate smile that only made his chest tighten more. “You believe Xander tried to help us, and for your sake, I want you to be right.”
He closed his eyes. Her words hurt, but even though she couldn’t quite trust, the fact that she was willing to comfort him meant so much.
No way was he letting this woman slip through his fingers again. When they left here—if they left alive—he’d move heaven and earth to unmask the motherfucker threatening her and silence him forever.
“You going to be okay?” she asked softly.
Compartmentalize. It was something he did well on missions. Having Cherry here was messing with his head some. He needed to focus on getting the job done.
“Fine. We’ll see Chaz in a few hours. Maybe he knows what’s happened to Xander.”
Tara held up the access card they’d used to sneak into Kantor’s office. “Or maybe he’ll come by himself for this. In the meantime, I need to ship all the data we collected to Bocelli and let the analysts plow through it.”
“Yeah, if we tried ourselves, it would take days.”
“That we don’t have.”
Logan didn’t have days left with her, either. Two at most. Forty-eight hours was not a lot of time to mend broken trust and allay all her fears. If he had weeks or months—years, even—to prove his constancy and devotion, he’d use them. But he had two fucking days before she might be out of his life again forever. Dominion had been his lifeline for years, but losing his membership and status there was nothing compared to losing Cherry. As a teenager, he’d dealt with the loss of his mother. As a man, he wanted that tight family unit again. He wanted to create one with Tara. By not taking her birth control pill, it told him that at least some part of her subconsciously wanted that, too. What would it take for her to give him a chance?
She turned away to prepare for the data upload. Logan handed her his digital camera so she could upload those images, wishing he had the answer to his question.
With a sigh, he sat back on their bed and pulled out the photo he kept in his wallet of his family. This had been their last Christmas together. Hunter hadn’t had his driver’s license for long and had nearly killed everyone in the car on the way to the photographer’s. At six, Kimber had been the only one whose life hadn’t flashed before their eyes. They’d all been fighting like dogs when they walked in—then his mother had burst out laughing. Everyone else had joined in for one of those priceless moments of family harmony captured as the photographer had snapped the picture.
A few months later, his mother had sought a divorce. She’d been murdered a year after that. His father had spent a decade and a half as an angry recluse. Hunter had been so bitter that Mom had left—and Dad had let her. He really hadn’t spoken much to either of them until Amanda Edgington had been cruelly murdered. By then, it had been too late.
Logan had never understood his brother’s behavior. Whether she’d remained married to his father, Amanda had always been and would always be his mother. He still missed her. She’d had a soft spot for him, and he’d milked it as a kid. Times like now, he also missed her sage council. He wished she could have spent more time with Tara, given him some insight to the female mind. In fact, the day he’d found Amanda’s body, Logan had gone to see his mother to tell her that he was in love.
Everything in his life came back to the fateful day that had changed everything.
Logan rubbed his thumb over his mother’s image. He hated the thought that, if he managed to convince Tara to trust him again with her heart, his mother wouldn’t be there to see him get married, have children, grow middle-aged with the woman he loved. Another fucking hole in his heart.
As he stared at the photo, a bit of gold caught his attention. He pulled it closer to his face, staring hard. He wondered if his eyes were deceiving him.
They weren’t.
“Okay,” Tara said as she rose from the laptop, fingers clutching the heart pendant. “Data is uploading. It’s going to take a while.”
Now he knew why that little charm was so fucking familiar.
On wooden legs, his heart pounding, he rose and crossed the room.
“What is it?” Concern spread across her face.
He swallowed, trying to moisten a suddenly dry mouth. When he got close enough, he nudged her hand aside, cradled her heart pendant in his fingers, and turned it over. Exactly where he expected to see it, Logan spotted a familiar little dent in the gold.
“You keep looking at that. Are you worried that Brad or some boyfriend gave it to me? It isn’t like that. I’ve had it for years. My stepfather gave it to me—well, I found it, and he said that he’d intended to give it to me—to serve as a reminder to be careful with my heart.”
“When?” he barked the question at her.
“Sh-Shortly before we broke up.”
“How shortly?”
“The night before.”
Logan could barely control his rage. All this time, he hadn’t understood . . . He still didn’t know why—but he’d find out. At least he now he knew who. But one thing he knew as well as his own name: Tara could only be wearing his mother’s necklace if Adam had ripped it off of Amanda’s broken neck while killing her.
Chapter Sixteen
THE enormity of his realization made Logan stumble back to the bed. Almost blindly, he sat, thoughts whizzing through his head. Maybe there was another explanation. Maybe the killer had taken it off his mother’s neck not as a trophy, but for its monetary value. Maybe he’d pawned it. And maybe Adam had simply purchased it.
Maybe. But that was a pretty big coincidence.
His mother’s murder had been a crime of passion, not greed. That necklace wasn’t worth more than a few hundred dollars and had been the only item missing from Amanda’s apartment. The killer had left her old wedding rings, worth thousands more. The police—along with his father—had watched the local pawn shops for the pendant, but it had never appeared. Besides, upscale Adam had always loved his little princess. Why would he buy her a token at a pawn shop?