He was just a missing person.
Jon brushed the hair from her eyes, tucking it behind her ear. “What happened to your brother, Toni?”
She licked her lips, suddenly dry and stiff, her body tight with unbearable tension. “I don’t know. I never saw him again after that. But Stas did leave me one thing back at my apartment to remind me I was better off shutting my mouth.”
She’d hidden out at a sleazy motel one town over for a week, with no luck convincing the cops they had two murders on their hands while she’d researched Stas and his family. It was a week spent frantic, afraid, with almost no sleep, until she finally realized Stas probably had connections to the police she’d never get past.
“What happened next?”
That same bile rose in her throat, hot, pungent, almost making her gag at the recollection. “I went back to my apartment in a stupid disguise, hoping to grab some of my things when I realized the police were never going to take me seriously. There was a box waiting outside my door…”
“Don’t say anymore, milady. I do not need to know,” he murmured against the top of her head.
Her throat was too tight to speak anyway, her stomach hot with that sour acidic roll that hit her every time she thought about the contents of that box.
Cormac’s ring finger, and a phone call from Stas with a warning: Talk and he dies.
Chapter 8
As the snow fell, her head on Jon’s shoulder, his free hand stroking her hair, she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from crying. “I called the police anonymously to report Cormac missing, but they said I had to come in to file a report. I had an appointment with a detective. And I went…”
Jon stroked her arm, his gentle fingers soothing her. “But?”
“But I took a risk, and I went to the police station. I even wore that same ridiculous disguise I wore to my apartment. I asked for the detective I’d spoken to on the phone and the police officer at the desk pointed him out. Thankfully, I wasn’t in Stas’s line of vision, but I saw him. I saw him rubbing elbows with the same damn detective I was supposed to talk to as if the two of them were old friends. I know he showed up there that day because he’d been given a head’s up. I knew it was Stas’s way of sending me a message that no one was going to listen because he owned the cops, too. The detective is dirty, maybe they all are. I don’t know. I just know in my gut, he was a part of covering up what Stas and Andre did,” she whispered fiercely.
“How did you end up at this store you speak of so often?”
“After that, I ran to the farthest part of Jersey I could get to without leaving the state altogether because I wanted to at least be nearby if I found anything out about Cormac. I hate that I ran, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was no good to Cormac dead, and no doubt Stas would have killed me if he could find me. So I took every last bit of money I had out of my savings account and I ran as far as I could get with what I had. I ditched my car in case Stas might have it followed.”
“And then what did you do, milady?”
Toni sighed, her eyes tearing. “My money ran out pretty quickly, but Cormac and I used to camp a lot as kids, so when I began to run low, I camped in the woods for days. I found odd jobs for a little while, stayed in homeless shelters until the dust settled, and then I got the job at the outlet mall, using my dead mother’s social security number, of all things. We share the same name, and it makes me sick to my stomach to do it, but if Stas and his people go looking for me with their connections…Anyway, that’s where I’ve been ever since. But I didn’t stop looking for Cormac. I scoured the internet for any mention, an article maybe, anything about an unidentified body. I kept calling the police from prepaid cell phones. I—”
“This cell phone you speak of, explain. Also, the intor-net, is it? How does one scour a net?”
Toni placed a hand on his broad chest, trying not to relish the feel of his hard pec beneath her palm. “I promise I’ll tell you later all about how much easier it is to live in Jersey in my time. Our forms of communication are superior to the ones here in Shamalot.”
Jon chuckled, the soft rumble reaching her ear as he settled her back against his chest. “So you’ve hidden away all this time with no luck finding your brother?”
Sorrow seeped back into her bones, that ugly helplessness she’d lived with for what felt like forever.
“Not for three years. Nothing. Not a trace of him. I even went back to his house, but there was a new family there. I guess the bank foreclosed…”