“Let’s get real, here. He hasn’t been my best friend in a long time. Not since we met you.”
A cold chill rocked me. “Get out,” I demanded, clinging to Holden’s arm to keep my composure. “You have no right coming here.”
“You shouldn’t be here either,” he said coolly.
“Why? It’s not like I have anyone else in my life anymore.”
Lucas moved suddenly, grabbing Holden’s nightstand and flinging it across the room where it shattered against the brick wall. “You are my wife. Don’t you forget that.”
Holden stiffened, waiting for my reaction. I sucked in a breath through my nose and looked at the person I’d once loved. I tried to feel something, tried to remember what he’d meant to me. But all I saw was a villain who’d broken my heart and taken away the man I loved.
In spite of the connection through our mate bond, the one that told me he was blind with rage and desperate for me to listen to him, I felt no love. There was no sense of hatred either, though, in spite of how much I tried to will the hot, bitter taste of it up. I wanted to hate him almost as badly as I’d once wanted to truly love him.
All I felt was contempt and sadness.
“What do you want?” I asked, choosing not to quibble with him about our marital status. I’d have time later to find out the finer points of getting a werewolf divorce. We couldn’t be unbonded metaphysically—one of the less-fun aspects of a supernatural love match—but I’d be damned if I was going to stay his were-wife forever.
“Can we speak alone?”
To answer his question, I parked my ass on the rumpled sheets of Holden’s bed and pulled the vampire down next to me. “He’d hear us anyway. Not to mention it’s his apartment you broke into. He gets to stay.”
The typical Lucas response would have been to insist we speak alone, but what he had to say must have been pretty important if he’d barged into a vampire’s loft at nightfall to haul me out of bed. He pretended as if Holden weren’t in the room with us.
“It’s Kellen.”
My blood ran cold. It was as if my whole body had been submerged in ice water, and all the sarcasm and loathing seeped out of me, replaced with sharp, urgent fear.
“Did someone hurt her?”
Lucas shook his head. “I don’t know.” The three words sounded heavy and defeated coming from his mouth. This was a man who didn’t understand what it meant to fail, and he was talking about his younger sister like he’d already lost her. My fear ratcheted up ten notches.
Obviously able to sense my discomfort, or just showing a rare sign of being a gentleman, Holden slid his hand over mine and gave it a gentle squeeze. I didn’t push him away, accepting the kindness without a word.
Looked like we were all going to pretend to be grownups for once.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know.” This time the anger he’d been unable to mask before when shouting at me was more subdued, but I didn’t miss it. “Have you…? Has she talked to you at all?”
I took a brief mental inventory of when I’d last spoken to Kellen. She and my vampire protégée Brigit had been practically glued to my side for the week following Lucas’s…mistake. I’d seen more of Kellen than I had of my own half-sister Eugenia in that time. Not that I blamed Genie. She had responsibilities of her own to deal with in Louisiana, and Kellen’s only responsibilities were what parties she was meant to attend on any given night.
But after a week of heavy girl-bonding, I’d needed to be alone. I’d spoken to her on the phone, but not for several days.
“I’m not sure, maybe Sunday?” It was now Wednesday.
Lucas began to pace the small open area at the foot of the bed. I noticed for the first time how disheveled he looked. His normally tidy blond hair was a mess, and he had a good two days’ worth of stubble on his jaw. The clothes he wore were designer, but considering he was a billionaire, that was a default rather than a fashion-conscious decision. His shirt was wrinkled and buttoned improperly, and there was a coffee stain on the upper thigh of his jeans.
This wasn’t the Lucas I knew.
My Lucas was strong, levelheaded and hardly ever showed a sign of weakness. The man in front of me was frantic and letting it show. I wanted to stage a Moonstruck-style intervention and smack him across the face, hollering, “Snap out of it!” But he looked too far gone for that to help.
He was more than worried. He thought she was already dead.
“How long has it been since someone talked to her?” I asked.
If he heard me, he made no sign of acknowledging it. He continued to pace the floor until Holden finally chimed in. “Hey, Fido. The lady asked you a question.”
Normally Holden’s dog jokes rankled Lucas in the worst way. Tonight he merely stopped his caged-animal back-and-forthing and stared at us both as if he’d forgotten where he was. “What?”
“How long has it been since someone spoke to Kellen?” I repeated.
“Jackson was with her last, and that was Monday. None of her friends have talked to her since then. No one in the pack has heard from her either.” This wasn’t entirely surprising since Kellen was not a werewolf, but it was interesting she hadn’t talked to her human friends either.
I immediately shifted gears from worried-friend mode to PI mode. “Where was she when Jackson saw her?”
“He dropped her off in Chinatown on Monday night. He was supposed to pick her up later that night, but she texted to say she wouldn’t be needing him. That was it.”
Chinatown? What was Kellen doing in Chinatown? I could understand her blowing off Jackson, one of Lucas’s young werewolf lackeys, especially if she thought another plan would be more fun. Kellen was constantly in search of the better party. I was no stranger to getting a text-message blow off from her at the last minute. But text messages were also easy to fake. And if someone knew her habits, they’d know a text wouldn’t be questioned by anyone familiar with Kellen’s laissez-faire attitude when it came to polite behavior.
I pursed my lips together, mulling over what little information he’d given me.
“You could have called me to ask this.”
“Maybe I would have if you’d answer my goddamn calls,” he retorted. There was the bristling anger I was more familiar with from him. Good, I needed him angry. Just like Holden couldn’t handle me being a simpering wussy, Lucas was useless to me—and more importantly to his pack—as an unstable, worried brother.
“It’s probably nothing.” Once again I ignored his rage. Point two for me. Aside from the huge coolness deduction I’d lost when I kicked him, I was definitely looking like the more emotionally stable of the two of us. Perish the thought.
“She has never, never ignored my calls, Secret. Not since…not since our parents died.”
So even the media-darling wild child still had a responsible side when it came to family. I loved Kellen and thought of her like a sister—before I’d known I had one of my own—but I never stopped learning things about her that surprised me. I assumed she’d be flighty and unreliable, especially with Lucas. This new tidbit was making my It’s cool, don’t worry argument harder to stand behind.
“There are a dozen reasons she might not have called. You know how Kellen is.” It didn’t take any wild stretches of imagination to come up with a plausible story to explain her absence. “She could have gone on a last-minute vacation, probably to Cozumel or something. Her phone got wet, she hasn’t realized she’s missed any calls, so she doesn’t even know you’re worried. It’s only been forty-eight hours. It’s hardly time to send out the National Guard.” I held my hands open in front of me and raised both eyebrows, trying to convey a certainty that said, See, see how easy this is to believe?
“I don’t know.” Hearing him say those words so often in such a short span of time was making me both nervous and annoyed. My desire to slap some sense into him made my fingers burn.
“We both know her,” I reminded him. “She is a sweet, well-meaning girl, Lucas, but she isn’t always the most…considerate of how her actions impact others.”
He nodded, and I could see I was getting somewhere. Which was good, because the sooner he accepted the wisdom of my words, the sooner I could get him the hell out of Holden’s apartment.
“I’m worried,” he said. “I have so many enemies. And if they can’t get to me or to you… I’m worried someone might have done something to her. Something bad.”
The stupid part of me that once loved him wanted to go to him. I wanted to hold him and tell him everything would be okay.
Instead I internally Moonstruck-ed myself.
“Would it make you feel better if I looked into it? Keaty and I have contacts. I can ask around, make sure nothing bad has happened to her. I’ll get Mercedes to run the usual checks, and we’ll put your mind at ease.” My friend Mercedes was an NYPD detective, and one of these days she was going to get sick of doing under-the-table favors for me. I wouldn’t blame her, either, considering how many times her life had been put in danger because of her friendship with me. But for now, at least, I knew running some checks wouldn’t kick me out of her good books just yet.
Another bonus of being the jilted bride was people were willing to be extra nice to you.
Being a woman scorned and almost killed at a wedding covered by the international press meant I also got a lot of cool free designer stuff mailed to me. But that was beside the point. My new Hermes bag wasn’t going to make Lucas feel better about his maybe-but-probably-not missing sister.
“You’d do that for me?”
Holden huffed out a disgusted grunt but said nothing.
“No. I’d do it for Kellen. For you I’m going to say go take a shower and shave. Don’t let any of your pack, or God forbid my uncle’s pack, see you looking like a homeless grad student. You’re a king, for fuck’s sake. Start acting like one.”