Page 43 of Mongrels United
“Yes, of course. But don’t you live there?”
“Upstairs. Separate entrance, insulation between.” He smiled. “So it’s silent, up there.”
He glimpsed her quick smile in return.
He finished the chili and put the bowl down. Watched her eat the salad in neat forkfuls for a moment. “My father was more complicated than I thought,” he said.
She swallowed her mouthful. “Most people are,” she said lightly.
“I’m trying to track it out, but I think I’m missing pieces. He was freshly emerged when he joined the Skinwalkers. Trained and worked with them for a year, then the plating was done, the Skinwalkers all retired to life-long pensions and the External Institute shut down. No, I remember it became something else.”
“The Robotics Institute,” Grady supplied.
“Really? That doesn’t even make sense.”
“The waldos the Skinwalkers developed for working outside were found to be useful inside the ship, too. They gradually became smaller and smaller…and then mobile. Then someone thought it would be cute to add AIs to them.” She shrugged. “The Robotics Institute’s full name is the External Engineering and Robotics Institute, but everyone drops the front half, because external work is only ever an emergency thing, these days.”
“Okay, so the Institute moved on. But Nason didn’t move on at all.” Nash looked at her. “Do you think he missed being a Skinwalker? Would that be why he wouldn’t talk about it?”
“Most people who genuinely miss something are more than happy to talk about it,” Grady said. “But I’m going to guess that he had trouble adapting to not being a Skinwalker anymore, and that’s where he picked up the Bellish. That fits with the timeline, too.”
Nash drew in a sharp breath. “Hell…”
She looked at him. In the dark, he couldn’t see if she was raising her brow the way she did when she was silently asking a question. He answered anyway. “When he died, Nason said something…” He frowned, trying to remember the words. He hadn’ttriedto remember them. “He said…” He was suddenly glad of the dimness in here. “He said he was a shitty father, that he didn’t know how to do better.”
Grady didn’t speak.
Nash held up a finger. “It’s what he said after that. He said, ‘I didn’t know how to do better. I was faking it. Faking everything.’” Nash dropped his hand. “Faking his life? Hiding the Bellish?”
Grady sat up. “No, not that. Not directly. You said he never talked about being a Skinwalker. Ever.”
“No.”
“Could he have felt like a fake, as a Skinwalker?” Grady asked. “He was one for a year, the very last one, and everyone would call him that—it’s all over the records—The Last Skinwalker. Maybe, because he had only been one for a year, while the others were all long term Skinwalkers…perhaps that was what he felt he was faking.”
“Which tipped him over into using Bellish?”
“There was a lot of attention and glamour around the Skinwalkers, once the plating was finished,” Grady said. “It might have.”
“And after that, everything he did was fake,” Nash muttered. “If he did start using Bellish straight after that, then all of his life was a lie.”
“Being given a child wouldn’t have helped,” Grady pointed out. “Everyone would have thought it entirely logical and sensible, but if your father was already writhing with guilt about being a fake, and hiding the Bellish, getting you would have made it so much more acute.”
Nash blew out his breath. “We need to find out who he knew, back then. Anyone he had contact with.”
“It will be deserted back in the office, now, so we won’t need the privacy cone.” Grady lifted the pad. “I can use this to dig into records.”
Nash got to his feet and held out his hand to help her up, even though he knew she was flexible enough to get to her feet without effort, probably while holding her plate and not spilling a drop of the fruit juice that puddled there, too.
But Grady took his hand and let him haul her up. She wasn’t as light as he expected someone so slender to be. She had real muscle beneath her conservative shirt and trousers, then.
Then he registered the touch of her hand in his. The softness and the fine fingers. The smallness of it. And the heat.
He made himself let go of her hand, turned and headed for the door, his heart hammering. They were in the Bridge suite, surrounded by Grady’s staff. She was the Chief of Staff. Kissing her, especially here, was a very bad idea.
It didn’t matter that his body was singing an aria, encouraging him to do just that. Too many times in the past, he’d listened to his body. Only Grady would never forgive him for such a lack of consideration, and for the first time since he’d given up on ever hearing praise from his father, earning someone’s good opinion mattered. Not just to his bottom line, or to enhance his businesses. It mattered tohim.
It was a fool’s hope that she might think well of him, anyway. She was far too intuitive about how people worked, and he’d seen the expression in her eyes, over and over, today…she knew exactly what he was made of.
