A vision of aqua eyes and tumbled curls flashes across my mind.Rebecca.“Where’s my wife?” I grind out, choosing to remain defiant despite the weakness I currently feel.
“Look, there are things we need to discuss—”
“No! Where is my wife, Nate?” I shout out before descending into a coughing fit, the dryness of my throat scratchy and irritated. “I want Rebecca!”
The door opens, and Eric comes in, closing it behind him. He tosses a grin my way and runs a hand through his dark curls. “Sleeping Beauty is awake at last!” he jokes with a smile, his grey eyes twinkling. “About time. Nate, have you filled him in yet?”
“I keep trying to,” Nate replies, shaking his head. “I can’t get him to shut up long enough to do so.”
“Motherfucker,” I say as another coughing fit wracks my chest.
“Back atcha, Unseen. Now, are you going to listen?”
“Once you tell me where my wife is! She better be here, assholes. So help me God, if you left her abandoned and alone with no money and no way to survive—”
Eric and Nate exchange glances, then Eric steps forward, crossing his arms over his chest. “She’s in New Beginnings Psychiatric Treatment Center.”
My brows lower as my eyes narrow at him. “What the fuck is she doing in a place like that? How did she end up there? Who—”
Eric glances at Nate and quips, “I see what you mean. He just doesn’t shut up.”
Snapping my mouth closed, I growl behind my teeth, glaring daggers at the two imbeciles that are going to wind up gutted the first chance I get if they don’t start talking in the next five seconds.
Luckily for them, it only takes two-point-three.
“Rebecca is—no. Let’s go a little further back. How much of Tessa’s story do you know?”
“What the fuck does Tessa have to do with anything?” I say with no small amount of exasperation. Although I once spent twelve years obsessing over her, that seems like a lifetime ago. I still harbor a soft spot for her, but Rebecca is my life. So no offense to Tessa, but right now, I don’t give a shit.
Eric drags a spare chair across the room, taking a seat next to his brother. And then he proceeds to fill me in on things that I already know. Mostly. I may have stalked her for all those years, but I mostly saw her at the Catholic school she attended, where I masqueraded as a priest to keep a watchful eye over her. I didn’t have eyes inside her house, although I hadn’t been fully in the dark of what was going on back then.
She came to school with bruises far too often.
As Eric talks, I realize that I wasn’t aware of the full extent of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents and uncle. I witnessed some of her revenge against them, though, thinking back to the graveyard and watching her bury her mother within the coffin of her decaying father.
The corner of my mouth twitches at the memory of pissing over the grave. It was a fitting way for that bitch to die.
“So Tessa’s uncle, being a pedophile, had definitive links with this international trafficking ring?” I ask, working things out.
Nate nods. “There’s an FBI agent, Susannah Gerhardt—”
“I know who she is,” I interrupt him. “She was working the case in Arizona.”
“Okay then. Well, she’s from Chicago. Although we’re not exactly sure why, she warned Tessa that the FBI was looking in our direction for the murders of her parents and uncle. We wrapped things up and faked our deaths with a car crash, then made our way to Canada.”
Eric butts in, continuing the story. “To balance the scales a little, even if she never knew about it, we decided to go after the international ring. To help out Agent Gerhardt as she did us. But then, you went and got yourself into the FBI’s ViCAP system with that DNA evidence you left behind.”
Nate snickers. “Rookie move, Trey. I would have expected better from you.”
My eyes narrow at his teasing. “Yeah? How about you walk into a house and see the woman you care for sitting in a puddle of blood with a severed head in her lap. Then discover bodies littering the house, several of them children. And then tell me that you wouldn’t have forgotten it too.”
Eric grimaces at the thought. “Fair enough. Sorry, man. Anyway, we discussed things, and thought, why not? This trafficking ring is a fucking nightmare. There are at least fifty-six top members. We need help, so we thought you’d maybe like to join us.”
“Join you doing what, exactly? And why do I feel like there’s more?”
Nate says, “He skipped a bit. Tony and Dolores D’Angelo murdered Rebecca’s parents, did you know that?”
I nod.
