Page 24 of Heartless

Darkness gave me a dazzling smile at that, and with a last brush of his knuckles over my head, was gone.

I waited until the sound of the snowmobiles had faded away before I glanced at Jasper. He had a small smile on his face, despite the fact my foster brother had pretty much threatened to bury him out here if he screwed up. Yup. Not sharing the trials of the Hunter Moon Academy’s dud program with Darkness was probably for the best.

“What?”

“You did good, pretty wolf.”

I turned sharply, deciding caffeine was needed. Placing the key Driftwood had given me on the counter as I poured, I cast a few dark looks in its direction. I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of unearthing more secrets, but when the coffee was ready, I took a torch from the top drawer and set it beside the key. “I get he was pissed about school, but he forgave Darkness pretty quickly.”

I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud until Jasper said quietly, “He wasn’t angry. His scent was worried. Maybe a little guilty.”

I shrugged that off, disturbed by a darker train of thought. “What if Rhona’s asshole boyfriend really is feral? Or if the Denners have tracked us here, and go after them instead?”

“I’ll get Liam to send one of his guards.”

“How? You got some kind of pack ESP?” I snarked as I handed him a cup of coffee.

“Nope, but he’s right outside the door.” He gave me one of his sunshiny smiles, then headed out to confer with his enforcer. I didn’t want to stay around for that conversation, but the key was weighing too heavily in my hand for another random search of my dresser drawers. When Jasper came back, I’d rolled the rug off the cellar trapdoor, and had the pull ring hooked around my finger. I hesitated, and his hand came to rest on my shoulder again. “You okay with this?”

“Nope, but it’s not like we’ve got anything better to do, is it?”

Jasper gave a dark laugh, his fingers drifting to the back of my neck. “Alone in a remote cabin with a storm closing in? Where’s your imagination, sweet thing?”

Calling me pretty wolf might have made me panic, but sweet thing hit me straight in the feels. Back when we’d barely known each other, Jasper had used it so often, I’d once asked him if he knew my actual name. But I bit back a shiver at his warm touch. “Right now,” I murmured, fitting a toe on the top rung of the ladder, “it’s at the bottom of a spooky cellar.”

With a last swipe of his finger, he picked up the powerful torch and pointed it down the hole. “I’m right behind you.”

I nodded, descending slowly. When you lived this remotely, you took extra care even on the simplest things. Like our pregnant neighbor was finding, help was a long way off, and even a small injury could become a problem. But Jasper’s hand steadied me all the way to the bottom, and soon we were standing side-by-side in the chilly cellar.

It was mostly a boiler-room and storage space, since we didn’t have a lot of real estate upstairs. The shelves were stacked with canned goods, although most would be well past their use by date, and there were random boxes and crates pushed back against the wall. Driftwood had brought most of my things down to his place when I moved in, but I recognized a few goodies he’d forgotten to grab. When I saw a New York City skyline sticking out of a box, I scooped up the jigsaw and handed it to Jasper. “For when we run out of better things to do,” I told him.

He made a growly sound, but tossed the box back up through the trapdoor. I was already moving towards the boiler, the key suddenly slippery in my hand. Creepy-crawlies weren’t such an issue at this altitude, but I still waited for Jasper to swing the torch my way before I stepped into the shadowy alcove. “It’s okay,” he told me, as my hand trembled against the keyhole. “I can only smell paper. Candle wax. A little leather, and some iron or steel.”

“Everything you’d need for a torture chamber,” I mumbled, before turning the key and shoving the door open. Jasper swung the torch over my shoulder and I saw that Driftwood hadn’t been kidding when he called it a crawlspace. My dad’s secret room was no bigger than a broom closet, and mostly taken up with shelves. I ducked inside, but it was harder for Jasper to navigate the low roof, and I wondered how many hours my dad had spent hunched over in this space. Because it didn’t just look like storage. There was a metal table pushed up against the back wall, and a wooden stool tucked underneath. Barely a work desk, but the lamp on the floor and the pens in the cupholder said different.

But it was the wall of books that made me catch my breath.

As far as I was aware, my dad had only even read his medical books, and the odd newspaper that made it up the mountain. But he’d split the bookshelves into two sections – on the left wall were notebooks, all with the same faded, black cover. On the right were more formal books of all shapes and sizes. Jasper ran the torchlight over their spines and I realized they were old, obscure, and mostly hand-written. It reminded me of Theo’s rare book room in a way, and I pulled out one at random. The Mating Habits of Territorial Creatures quickly made its way back to the shelf, but not before Jasper gave another dark chuckle.

But I felt like the kid who unwraps a big box on their birthday, only to find another box inside. What did any of this mean? And why couldn’t I remember my dad disappearing down here when I was younger? One theory might be that you become used to blocking out the particular movements of another person when you’re sharing a small space. Maybe after I was in bed, he came down here to sit at his little desk and write things in his notebooks. It made me uncomfortable, like I hadn’t known him at all. But then, he’d managed to set up a whole new life without me noticing. How hard would it have been to hide a few weird books under my feet?

“There’s a drawer in the desk.”

I looked at Jasper in surprise, but he was ducking past me to pull it away from the wall. As he turned it around, I saw there was a tray attached, and at my nod, he eased it out. I took a rapid step back, not sure what to look at first.

Because while I was itching to grab the photo album with the wedding bells stitched on the front, I couldn’t tear my gaze from the containment collar lying on a bed of black velvet.

Chapter Thirteen – Jasper

Vail was out of the secret room and back up through the trapdoor before I’d eased the desk drawer closed. I couldn’t blame her for bolting. The whole setup looked like a psychopath’s lair, and although that fit Michael Warren to a T in my opinion, it didn’t seem to gel with Vail’s version of her father. I didn’t care if Parker West was the name on her birth certificate; I’d watched her gaze around her family home with happy memories dancing in her eyes. The place was rustic – probably the reason Chastity had struggled to picture Vail here as a kid - but like Driftwood’s cabin, it was full of little touches that drew your gaze. I, for one, was taking the sketches taped to Vail’s bedroom wall, even if I had to smuggle them out behind her back.

Nope. No more secrets. I couldn’t do that to her, especially when every turn she took seemed to run her up against another lie.

Still, the temptation was strong to open the drawer again and peek inside the album. Would it confirm what she thought about her parents, or add more confusion to the mix? Driftwood, who’d been as stiff and impassive as his name, hadn’t given away much, but I wasn’t wrong about his worry and guilt. And she’d missed the way he looked at her when her back was turned. Like she was a puzzle piece that wouldn’t fit, no matter how much he rearranged the rest of the picture.

Like Vail, I still had a lot of questions for Driftwood Chance. My investigators had tracked his property deed to a shell corporation, which explained why he was mortgage free without any visible income. My money was still on the Barakats, who seemed to be the head of the beast in these parts, but even if he was mixed up in something shady, he’d gone out into a storm to help a neighbor in need.

I wanted to believe he was a good man. But he’d told Vail there were answers in the cellar. And while a light had sparked in her eyes at the sight of the album, the other item in the desk drawer had dimmed it just as quick.

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