I met Hart’s worried lavender gaze, and he gave a small nod. He’d expected me to be alone, although why, I wasn’t sure, since I didn’t know where else Elliot would go. Maybe he thought Elliot would be with Noah at Humbolt’s office, or back in the hotel room with the cat?
Beside me, I felt Elliot stiffen slightly when he realized what had happened and why it was Hart hadn’t wanted to tell us anything. “Jesus, Val,” he muttered, skin darkening. “Just fucking say it.”
I pressed one hand to his thigh, and he covered it with his own, fingers tightening around mine.
Hart sighed. “Fine. They found him… hanging in his cell from a strip of bed sheet.”
“Tied with a knot he couldn’t possibly have tied?” I guessed.
“Got it in one.” He sighed again. “God, I miss working with you, Mays.”
It felt wildly inappropriate to smile, so I quashed it. “I miss working with you, too,” I told him. “You’ll just have to move back to Shawano.”
Hart barked out a laugh. “Fuck no. Not that I don’t love you guys, but no. I cannot deal with Shawano fucking Wisconsin for more than two weeks a year.”
Elliot mustered enough good humor to flip him off, earning the flash of a smile from Hart before the elf’s face fell serious again.
“Seriously, though, Mays. I’m sorry about your father.”
I stared at him. “I’m not,” I retorted. “Now I don’t have to go through the hell of a trial.”
Elliot’s hand gently squeezed my thigh.
Hart’s expression was grim. “As my friend, I’m glad for that,” he said seriously. “But it means that someone inside Augusta County Jail killed him or let him be killed. And that’s a problem.”
“Isn’t that your job to deal with? As a fed?” Elliot asked, although his hand was still tight on my thigh. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to reassure me or himself.
Hart’s jaw set. “Raj is already all over that like shit on shingles,” he said, his voice hard. “But I still have questions, and Seth might be able to help me find the answers.”
18
Elliot Crane
Promise me that you’ll be careful.
Seth Mays
I’ll be careful.
If Val is right, there might be others up there.
Noah will be with me.
All the more reason to be careful.
If you’re that worried, come with us.
Can you wait for me?
Sure. How long?
Give me an hour or so?
I was sittingon the hotel bed, my whole leg in a massive immobilizing brace, Sassafras curled up against the side of my other thigh. I’d had surgery on the knee four days earlier and had been released two days later to finish recovering out of thehospital. The surgeon had been happy with how things went. I now had several new tendons, half of my patella was now made of surgical-grade plastic, part of the head of my femur was titanium, and every few hours, I had to put myself through PT exercises that were barely half a step above torture and left me gasping for breath.
In theory, they’d left enough of my own bone for the patella and femur to still be able to shift. I wasn’t excited about testing that, and I was under orders not to even think about it for a full twelve weeks. We’d see how that went later, I guess.
But today was better than yesterday. Yesterday hadsucked. Especially because the pain meds made me feel out of it, and I didn’twantto feel out of it, so I’d stopped taking the hardcore ones. If the Community was going to come after me or Elliot or Noah, I needed to have my shit together, and tramadol did not let me have my shit together. So it was me and my reconstructed knee running on Bayer and some steroid whose name I couldn’t remember, but which the surgical nurse had assured me at least five times wouldn’t kill me. It hadn’t, so she’d been correct.
