“Are you better now?” he asked.
“Yes. Yes, I’m better now.” That was a vast oversimplification but summed it up well enough for this young boy. Shewasbetter now.
He took a moment to stare into her eyes before nodding. “That’s good. Bad stuff happened to me too.”
“I know,” she said. “And we’re going to help you get answers.” She wanted answers as well. Her panic had turned into relief, and now that relief was melting into anger. Who had put them through this? And why?
“I saw the interview with my birth father too,” he said. Cami blinked, surprise rendering her mute. “The one who was your boyfriend at the time.”
“I ... he ...” She breathed out an incredulous laugh that quickly died. Hollis had denied his own fatherhood, all but calling her a liar to her face. He never once checked back. She’d hidden from the media, and the town around her had assumed what she’d let them. Even the friends she’d considered her closest had believed Hollis when he’d told them he wasn’t the father. His parents had made sure that lie had been repeated as truth in their circle as well. So many people had looked at her with pity and, in some cases, barely contained revulsion. And yet this child had gleaned the truth in a five-minute interview. Maybe he’d even done the math, an easy fact-check that seemed to escape everyone else, who apparently preferred to believe the baby had come early but was still over eight pounds. “Wow, Cyrus, you’re ...”
“Too smart for my own good?” he asked very seriously.
She took in his solemn face. She wondered who had told him that. She shook her head. “No. Just smart. Perfectly smart. And amazing.”
Cyrus gave her a shy smile, and she noticed that small dimple just below his lip. Elle’s dimple, and the one she’d seen on her newborn. “Thanks,” he said.
“Can I ... can I give you a hug?” she asked, her voice wobbly with the need to hold this child who was certainly hers.
Cyrus didn’t hesitate—he stepped straight into her open arms and hugged her back. Cami closed her eyes and lived right there in the moment, basking in the relief and feeling this wondrous sense of wholeness.
When she finally let go and stood, Rex met her teary eyes. “We have to call the police now. I doubt the men who were on their way will still be going to the cabin.” He glanced at Cyrus as if deciding whether to talk in front of him. But Cyrus had just survived a kidnapping. He’d been privy to what was happening, and he’d been clever enough to escape. And he now had someone to hold him if he was scared. “Whoever put that video up will have alerted them. But just in case ...”
“I agree,” she told him as she swiped the moisture from her eye. Perhaps the dead man’s identity would provide answers. She’d been cautioned not to call the police, but that was with the threat that the video of Cyrus would disappear, and she’d have no way to find him. Now ... now there was no reason not to alert the authorities.
She took Cyrus’s hand in hers, and they walked up the stairs to the porch. Cami reached for the laptop to take it inside. “Rex,” she breathed.
He came up next to her and looked at the screen. “It’s gone,” he murmured.
The video of the empty room was gone. It’d disappeared entirely.
Chapter Thirty-Four
1994
Ever since she was a small child, Josephine “Posey” Kiss had been well aware that her father was in the business of ending lives. Some considered him a villain, she knew. But even so, she loved him fully and completely.
He was the only one who both attempted to understand her and made her feel special. Or more to the point, the only one who made her feelnormal.
Because seventeen-year-old Posey was so brilliant, sometimes people considered her more computer than girl. And so quiet that most forgot she was even in the room. And that was fine with her because Posey found the majority of humans utterly boring and thoroughly tedious.
They engaged in entire conversations about the most mundane things. Topics that had no consequence whatsoever.
Her father never leaned toward banality. And he was content to let her be as quiet as she wished. He didn’t attempt to fill the space. When he spoke, it held meaning. He asked for her thoughts about his business. He considered her ideas and even allowed her to advise him on occasion. He appreciated her rational mind. And he liked that she was fully in control of her emotions. Feelings simply didn’t serve, and so, more often than not, Posey chose to set them aside.
But regardless of emotion, her father was discerning about the lives he ordered to be disposed of. He took care to consider all angles of a person’s value, and any alternatives that might overcome a client’s obstacle.
“What do you think of this situation, Pose?” her father asked her one rainy Monday.
Posey nudged her glasses higher on her pert nose and leaned in to see the computer on the desk in front of her, scanning the details in the file. Not all the relevant information was spelled out, but Posey knew the business well enough to read between the lines.
It was the reason the Kiss Operation couldn’t be trusted in just anyone’s hands. It was imperative that it remain in the family.
The case—for that’s what her father called them, hiscases—featured a prominent, long-serving politician who was about to be exposed for docking his yacht in a neighboring state in order to save heftily on taxes.
Taxes that he’d imposed under a platform that championed the wealthy “paying their fair share.”
Except him, apparently.
