“Is that it?”
“I told her about you breaking into my house,” I said around the lump in my throat. Was I selling out my best friend? Or protecting her? I didn’t know anymore. “And about you breaking into Brayden’s.”
“I didn’t break into Brayden’s house.”
“You said somebody had.”
Dane heaved a sigh. “That wasn’t me. What else did you tell her?”
“Just that Alling was being creepy about me and Brayden. Nothing about moths. I didn’t know about them until last night, and you should see by my phone logs that I haven’t spoken to her for at least a day.” Or was it two days? I couldn’t tell after having been drugged.
“So you’re saying Swann could make some noise, but hasn’t much to go on.”
Swann would make a very big noise for me, and look what I’d done to her. I hated myself. “Yeah.”
“And your mother?”
“I told her that I liked a boy named Brayden, and that he’d ghosted me. Which is true and pathetic, but it shouldn’t get my mother into trouble with you. She knows nothing about the glove or my hand or the moths.”
“Okay,” Dane said, rising. “I’m going to check this out, cover my bases.”
Purple haze colored my vision. My left hand burned, wrist to fingertips. “You do that.”
Carlo dragged the chair—with me in it, pinned like a dead butterfly—backward into the little bedroom and shut me inside. In the upper corner of the room was a nanny cam I hadn’t noticed when I’d awakened before. They were watching me.
I sat there, the daylight fading though the single dirty window, feeling cold and small. But yeah, after a while, my hands and arms did go numb. So Dane had been right about another thing.
He came in after a long while. “Ms. Singh is in custody. We’ll question her, and if she doesn’t pose a threat, then we’ll let her go.”
Oh,mySwann would pose a threat. I was pretty sure she’d set the world on fire for me.
“And my mom?”
Dane’s gaze slipped away as he turned back to the door. “She’s in custody, too. I’ll see about getting her released as soon as possible.”
“When will that be?” I said between clenched teeth. “She has terrible back pain. Stress is bad for her.”
“As soon as this is over,” Dane told me, and he shut the door again. He was such an arrogant asshole that he didn’t even have to gloat.
I’ve never been good at waiting. Waiting with all this guilt was worse. It choked me from the inside, my eyes burning with tears, my breath wheezing in my chest. It was one thing to fuck up my life—I seemed to be a genius at that—but to fuck up my mom’s? And Swann’s? And really, Jacob was just trying to help me—and I’d fucked him over too.
Sitting there, miserable and alone, I considered what I could’ve done differently, and, yeah, there were some obvious bad choices. One especially. Alling could’ve solved everything for me right from the beginning. Except I’d run from him.
What was wrong with offering cookies to someone in trouble, anyway?
Nothing. I wanted one now.
Cookies=good. Why was that so hard to understand? Every two-year-old knew it. But I had to go and trust the mysterious bastard in the black suit with no cookies and a bad attitude.
My instincts were all wrong. That was my problem. Or, rather, one of my many problems. I’d add it to the list. Not that it mattered.
I just hoped they let my mom and Swann go free.
It wasn’t long before Dane’s goons came in and frogmarched me to the big SUV. Jen was driving, Dane in the front passenger seat. Carlo sat in the back with me. The light pollution out here was minimal, so with the sun down, the moonless night sky was big and sparkling with stars. Reminded me a little of Legendelirium. Except I was a prisoner, not a hero on a quest.
After we got out onto Hunt Highway, I asked, “So what’s going on? Is this the trade?”
“Yes, and it’s exactly what we planned,” Dane told me. “You’re bait, as you agreed. They think I’m the bounty hunter who found you.”
