“Joe,” I said. “They’ll find who killed Joe and you can go back to your life.”
She turned her hands, laced her fingers with mine. I thought she was going to say something, but the door opened and Ash was there, watching us silently from the across the room.
I pulled away and stood, watching as Ash approached Kate.
“How are you, Miss Thompson?”
She sat back and glanced at him, but then her eyes went down to where her hands were clutched in her lap. “How would anyone be after being yanked out of their bed in the middle of the night?”
“I understand that this process can be frustrating, but your father hired us to keep you safe and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do.”
“I understand that.”
Ash glanced at me and I offered him all I could: a little shrug.
“If you’ll excuse us, I need to speak to Donovan for a second.”
“Whatever,” Kate said as she drew her legs up underneath her, busy working on a torn cuticle now.
Ash gestured for me to follow him into the kitchen.
“I want to apologize for what you saw on the monitors,” I began the moment we were out of earshot. “I realize it’s hardly professional—”
“We can talk about that when this is over,” Ash said. He looked me over for a long second as though checking for wounds. “Did you hear or see anything when you were getting her out of the house?”
I shook my head. “Not a sound.”
“The advance team found tool marks on her bedroom window. They think someone was trying to jimmy the window open.”
My heart sank. I was really hoping the alarm had been a false alarm, that a neighborhood cat or a raccoon had set it off. But now…there was a real threat against Kate.
“Do you have anything else? Fingerprints?”
“Not yet. I’ve called Emily and she’s on her way here.”
“Good.”
I turned and glanced into the living room, making sure Kate was still sitting where we left her. She was, her attention caught quite soundly by that pesky cuticle.
“Do I need to arrange for someone else to take over here?”
I turned back to Ash. “No, sir. Like I said, what happened before—”
Ash laid his hand on my shoulder. “I’m not worried about the appropriateness of it. I’m concerned about you. With your history with Kate, I just—”
“It won’t happen again.”
“Can I ask a private question?”
I was a little surprised that he would ask such a question. Ash was the closest thing I had to family, Ash and David and the others back at Gray Wolf. My parents were never really parents. I went to see them once a year out of a sense of obligation, but my true family was at Gray Wolf.
“You know you don’t have to ask.”
Ash glanced toward the living room, then focused hard on me. “Why do you let her blame you for what happened to her brother? I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but David showed me the police reports on the attack and there’s nothing—”
“I’ve seen them.”
Ash nodded. “It wasn’t anything you did. It was Joshua’s attempt to defend his sister’s honor that set the whole thing in motion.”
“Yes, well, it is partially my fault if you look at that way. I was, after all, the guy she was sneaking around with in the weeks leading up to graduation.”
Curiosity danced in Ash’s eyes, but he didn’t ask.
“Why not tell her the truth?” he asked instead.
“Because it would crush her if she thought that it was in any way her fault. Because I can’t put that burden on her.”
Ash shook his head. “So much damage from one kid’s stupid actions.”
I knew he was talking about John Kyle, the teenager whom police determined was the instigator of the fight and the perp who wielded the rock that took Joshua’s life after two days in a coma. But it felt like a comment aimed at Joshua—and that made my spine stiffen a little.
“He was supposed to be a doctor. Can you imagine how many lives he might have saved if he hadn’t died?”
Ash focused on me, his eyes filled with a sort of compassion that wasn’t quite pity, but wasn’t quite not pity either. Coming from anyone else, I would have resented it. But this was Ash, the guy I’d been to hell and back with. This was a man who deserved as much pity as anyone, what with the disappearance of Alexi. So I didn’t resent it.
“Things change. He might have changed his mind.”
“No. We were both planning on leaving for Stanford a week after graduation. We had a fellowship his dad had arranged for us through a friend. We had our whole future outlined for ourselves. Premed, medical school. Hopefully we’d match at the same hospital for our residency and fellowship.”
“You were going into medicine, too?”
I shrugged. “Ironic that I chose explosives instead, isn’t it?”
Ash again patted my shoulder. He was about to say something when Kate called out, fear in her voice.
“Someone’s here!”
Chapter 12