“Tell me something.”
“How much do you know?”
“The last time I spoke to you was two weeks ago when you were flying to San Francisco.” He guided me to the chair Logan had previously been sitting in, then took Tyler’s former seat for himself. “I waited about two days since I knew you were on council business and I didn’t want to interrupt anything at the wrong time, but when you hadn’t called me in over forty-eight hours, I started to worry. I tried calling you, and I tried calling Holden since I knew he was with you, but neither of you were answering. So I called Lucas.”
I’d almost forgotten seeing Lucas at the hotel. It felt like a different lifetime now, him kissing me in the hall while his famous girlfriend waited inside the restaurant. I longed for a time when dealing with my messy love life was the worst of my problems.
Desmond continued, “He told me a bit of what happened, but I gather he was leaving some details out. He did say you were upset when you left him.”
“Me? Upset with Lucas Rain? Never.” I smiled and pulled my legs up under me. I’d been sitting in these uncomfortable metal chairs for hours, but it sounded like Desmond was just getting started on his story.
“I thought you’d bolted.”
Ah, yes. It wasn’t the most absurd thought he’d ever had because I had run from my problems in the past. “I told you I’d never leave without telling you. I promised you,” I reminded him. In the supernatural community a promise meant a lot more than your word. It usually represented a solemn oath. I was a bit offended he believed I’d go back on mine so easily.
“I know, and I’m sorry for thinking it. But after he told me what he’d done, and you weren’t answering…”
“You thought I ran off with Holden, didn’t you?”
He nodded, not pretending otherwise. “You’re a PI, Secret, tell me what you would have assumed given the evidence?”
He was right. Even a rookie detective would have jumped to the same conclusion. But the fact Desmond was here and I’d been rescued from hell made me believe he hadn’t planned on letting me go without a fight.
“I wanted to be sure. You had promised me, and I believed you intended to keep your promise. It didn’t make sense to me that you’d up and leave. So I called Vivienne.”
“You called Grandmere?”
“I did. I assumed if there was anyone on Earth you would feel you had to tell where you were going, it would be her. She hadn’t heard from you either, which is when I started to really worry. I called everyone. Everyone. I spoke to Callum and Eugenia and half the Southern pack, hoping you might have made contact. I knew you’d gotten close to your sister, and I thought she might have spoken with you, but she hadn’t. She was able to tell me you hadn’t been active on Skype for over a day, which she explained was a sure sign your phone was either turned off or the battery was dead.”
Smart girl. I had no idea how to change my status on the video chat program, so it was always on. And anyone who knew me also knew I wasn’t in the habit of turning off my phone.
“Since your bloody phone is always on, that meant it had to be dead. Your voicemail was full, which meant you weren’t retrieving your messages, and I have my texts set to tell me when the recipient reads them. You hadn’t seen a single one I’d sent. I knew something was wrong.”
“I’m so sorry.” I hated that he’d been worried, but at the same time I wanted to hug him for not giving up. “What happened next?”
“I went to Mercedes.”
Clever. When he exhausted his supernatural resources, he’d gone for a more conventional one. The last time I’d run off, I told Mercedes where I was. Since Lucas had approached her then, I was betting he’d told Desmond about his failed attempt to coerce information from her. I felt a sudden pang of guilt. Oh God, Cedes needs to know I’m alive.
Seeing my flustered expression, he grabbed one of my hands. “Tyler had someone call her. He couldn’t do it himself because she doesn’t know about him. From what I’ve been told, and the thirteen nondisclosure agreements I’ve been forced to sign, none of us are supposed to know about Tyler.”
“How do you know then?” Would Tyler have been stupid enough to let Desmond see him? That seemed like an awfully big risk unless there was more to it than I’d heard so far.
“Tyler was with Mercedes when I went to speak with her. I’ve got to say, he’s got the innocent vibe down pat because he toed the company line the entire time I was there. I even filed a missing persons report to make it official. But Mercedes told me she hadn’t heard from you either. She said she’d make some calls to the SFPD, but I’m betting there won’t be much of a record. Not if Tyler got to it first.”
I couldn’t handle the chair anymore, so I got to my feet and started pacing again, this time in small circles near Desmond.
He went on. “Tyler came to see me that night. He asked me if there were any details I’d left out, then told me he knew what you were. He said you’d claimed him?”
“I’ve marked him as being mine. It’s a vampire thing. It means he’s under my protection.” As his brows knit together I added, “Before you start thinking it means anything, I’d like to point out I’ve also claimed you. And Cedes. Aaand Nolan, Shane, Keaty and a few others.” I smiled at him and shrugged. “I’m a property whore, what can I say? Point is, it keeps you guys safe from other vampires when I’m not around. At least vampires who obey council laws.”“I told Tyler about Peyton,” Desmond said when I finished. “And about your mother. He said he had the resources to help. I didn’t know what he meant, but I was willing to do anything. So I told him.”
I stopped pacing. “Did he find them?” If Alexandre Peyton and Mercy McQueen were somewhere in this complex and no one had told me, I was going to lose my shit in short order.
Desmond shook his head, letting some of the steam out of my rage teakettle. I wouldn’t put it past the government to lie to me. Or lie by omission, anyway. After all, they were keeping a huge secret buried from the general public, so what was one little secret kept from me?
“As far as I know the search never involved them. It was focused on you and Holden. I mean, it’s possible other things happened, but to the best of my knowledge you were the main target of the investigation.”
Because Tyler wanted to keep using me. Because I was his asset. It made sense, in a twisted way, that he’d be dedicated to finding me. You don’t put that much time and effort into something just to let it vanish without a trace. I was his pet project, so he’d fought for me.
Tyler Nowakowski was demented. In a sweet way.
“But if the FBI was responsible for finding me, why are you here? Not that I’m not thrilled.” I sat down again, squeezing both his hands. “But why did they involve you? And why did they throw you in lockup?”
He blushed. “The stockade thing was my own fault. When they brought you back here, they wouldn’t let me in. I’d come with the FBI escort, and I’d assumed I’d be given access, but I was suddenly declared civilian, which in military terms means persona non grata. When they told me hell would freeze over before I was ever allowed into the hospital, I sort of…lost it.”
Desmond was the calm one. He was the cool, level head and voice of reason in my otherwise chaotic life. “Lost it how?”
“I might have turned over a Humvee and destroyed all the furniture in the hospital lobby. That was as far as I got before they tasered me.” He shrugged as if to say, Shit happens. “I can’t be mad. I sort of had it coming. Woke up in a cell, and I’ve been there until today.”
“How were you involved, though?” I still couldn’t understand why they would bring him this far only to shut him out in the end. What part had he played to make it pivotal for him to come across the country?
“I found you.”
“You…what?”
“I told them you were my mate. I explained how the mate-bond functioned.”
So much for my keeping his wolfy nature a secret.
“But we’re not mate-bonded. You didn’t mark me, I would have known.” And more importantly, he knew better than to do it without my permission, which was how Lucas had completed the bond.
“They didn’t know that. I made them believe the only hope in hell they had of finding you was bringing me along for the ride. Turns out I was right.”
“So how did you find me?”
“Well, getting to you was a joint effort, but it helped to have FBI resources on my side. We knew you’d planned on going to the Winchester Mystery House the night you vanished. Tyler confiscated all the park tapes. There aren’t any inside the house, so we didn’t see you being abducted, but we were able to see which of the tour guests were missing when it was all over. You, Holden, the boy you were with—”
“Maxime.”
“Yes. And one other.”
That didn’t take a genius to figure out, since I knew who’d taken me. “The Doctor.”
“Dr. Friedrich Kesteral, yes.”
When I’d first woken in my cell, I had wondered how The Doctor was able to take three vampires by force so easily when he was human. After hearing him tell me about all the experiments he’d run, I hadn’t wondered anymore. Thirty years of research was a long time. Long enough to know vampire weaknesses, and certainly long enough to develop a way to incapacitate them.
No wonder the government was so keen to go through The Doctor’s research. Soon enough they’d know every weakness a vampire had, plus a half dozen we probably didn’t yet know existed.
“I take it the FBI was able to figure out who he was.”
“Apparently face recognition software is real. Dr. Kesteral didn’t have a criminal record, but he was considered a person of interest for quite some time, I gather. I didn’t get a lot of the finer details, but they were able to find an empty parcel of land he owned near Palo Alto. Then they decided to use me.”