“Oh, no. No, it was a car accident, I believe.” The governor shrugs. “Unfortunately, these things happen.”
Lowe’s stare is so intense, I suspect he’s going to confront him. But after a moment, it relaxes, and the entire room breathes out in relief. “Too bad. My mother talked of him fondly.”
“Ha.” The governor downs the rest of his wine. “I just bet she did. I heard he got around.” Of all the things he could have said, this one is the most wrong.
Lowe calmly dabs his mouth with his napkin and rises to his feet. He unhurriedly walks around the table, toward the governor, who must realize the error of his ways. His chair screeches against the floor as he stands and begins retreating.
“I meant no offense— Ow.”
Lowe slams him against the wall. The governor’s wife screams, but stays put in her chair. I run to Lowe.
“Arthur, my friend,” he murmurs in the governor’s face. “You stink like you’re made of lies.”
“I’m not— I don’t— Help! Help!”
“Why did you have Thomas Jalakas killed?”
“I didn’t, I swear I didn’t!”
Four Human agents storm inside the room, weapons already drawn. They instantly point them at Lowe, shouting at him to let the governor go and step back. Lowe gives no sign of noticing them.
“Tell me why you killed Thomas, and I’ll let you live.”
“I didn’t, I swear I didn’t—”
He leans in. “You know I can kill you faster than they can kill me, right?”
The governor whimpers. A drop of sweat trickles down his red face. “He— I didn’t want to, but he was talking to journalists about some embezzling my administration was involved in. We had to! We had to.”
Lowe straightens. He dusts himself off, takes a step back, and turns to me as though we are the only two people in the room and four firearms are not still trained on him. His hand leisurely finds my elbow, and he smiles—first at me, then to the guards.
“Thank you, governor,” he says, leading me away. “We will see ourselves out.”
* * *
“I have several people tailing him,” Lowe informs me once we’re in the car. “And Alex is working on monitoring his communications. He knows we’re onto him, and we’ll be alerted as soon as he makes the next move.”
“I hope ten wolves are currently shitting in his backyard,” I mutter, and Lowe half smiles and puts his hand on my thigh in an easy, absentminded way that would only make sense if we’d been driving places together for years.
“It just doesn’t add up,” I vent. “Say Serena really did just interview him for a financial crime story. Maybe she was the journalist he was talking to. Where does Ana’s name on her planner come from?” I guess it could be unrelated. But. “There is no way she coincidentally met with Ana’s father and found out about Ana through other channels. No fucking way. Did someone plant the name? But it was in our alphabet. No one else knew about it.” We’re silent while I churn on it, staring at the streetlights. Then Lowe speaks.
“Misery.”
“Yeah.”
“There is another possibility. Regarding Serena.”
I look at him. “Yeah?”
He appears to painstakingly line up the words. When he speaks, his tone is measured. “Maybe it wasn’t Thomas who told Serena about Ana, but the opposite.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe Serena found out about Ana from another source, and then used the information to blackmail Thomas over his relationship with a Were and force him to tell her about financial crimes he might know about. Maybe she wanted to break the story, but changed her mind when she realized that she was in danger of being targeted by Governor Davenport. Unlike Thomas, she wasn’t a public individual, and she had the option to disappear.”
I shake my head, even as I realize that some of this is a distinct possibility. “She wouldn’t have left without telling me, Lowe. She’s my sister. And there are no digital traces. She wouldn’t know how to avoid them. She’s not me.”
“She’s not. But she did learn from you for years.” He looks deeply sorry to have to say this.
I let out a laugh. “Not you, too, trying to convince me that Serena didn’t care about me as much as I cared about her. She wouldn’t leave me here to picture the worst. She always told me everything—”
“Not everything.” His jaw tenses. Like this conversation is painful for him, because it’s painful for me. “You mentioned that you had a fight before she left. That sometimes she’d leave for days on her own.”
“Never without saying.”
“Maybe there was no time. Or she didn’t want to put you in danger.”
I wave it away. “This is ridiculous. What about Sparkles? She abandoned her cat.”
“Tell me something,” he asks. I hate how measured and rational he sounds. “Did she know you well enough to predict that you’d go looking for her and find the cat?”
I want to say no so bad, my lips almost hurt. But I can’t, and instead I remember her last words to me:
I need to know that you care about something, Misery.
And she did leave something behind. Something that needed caring for. The damn fucking cat. God, what a wacky plan this would be.
A Serena plan.
“Maybe you’re right, and she doesn’t want to be found. But she wouldn’t put the life of a child at risk, not even in exchange for the biggest, juiciest story of her career. I know Serena, Lowe.”
And that’s the problem with Lowe’s theory: it would mean that Serena is safely tucked somewhere, but also that she wasn’t the person I believed her to be, and I can’t accept it. Not for a minute.
Lowe knows this, because he opens his mouth to say something else, something that undoubtedly will make impeccable sense and feel like a punch in the solar plexus. So I stop him by asking the first thing that comes to mind:
“Where are we going?” We’re headed south, toward downtown. Toward Vampyre territory.
“To meet your brother. We’re nearly there.”
“Owen?”
“You have others?”
I frown. “I thought he’d come to us.”
“Were territory is more tightly patrolled and harder to infiltrate. Since we don’t want to attract attention and turn this into a formal summit, it’s safer to meet with him at the Vampyre-Human border.”
I’m well familiar with this road. I took it for the first time at eight years old, on my way to the Collateral residence, and I still remember that drowning, sticky feeling low in my throat, the fear that I’d never get to go home again. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to redirect my thoughts to the last time. Shortly before the wedding, I imagine. Maybe when I was asked to choose between flowers that all looked the same, white and pretty and ready to wither. A handful of days and a million lifetimes ago.
“Are you okay?” Lowe asks softly.
“Yeah. Just . . .” I’m not usually sentimental, but something about being with him softens me. My guard is down.
“Feels weird, huh?”
I nod.
“We can always turn around,” he offers quietly. “I’ll figure out a way to have Owen come south.”
“No. I’m fine.”
“Okay.” He turns into a small side street. When I glance at the GPS it’s not on the map, but we come to a stop at the edge of a cultivated field.
Lowe’s expression is bemused. “I’m actually curious about this.”
I glance around. All I can see is darkness. “About the wholesome experience of picking your own tomatoes?”
“About meeting your brother.”
He gets out of the car, and I immediately follow him. I thought we were alone, but I hear another car door clicking, and—there he is.
Owen, sneering at the soil sticking to his loafers, swatting away bugs. It’s shocking how happy I am to see him. That jerk, climbing up my good graces uninvited. I’m tempted to yell some insults at him, just to make up for it, until I hear another click.
Owen didn’t come alone. There’s a woman with him. A woman I’ve never met. A woman whose blood smells a lot like a Were’s.
Lowe’s mate.
CHAPTER 24