“God. I was there. I was fucking there.”

“You were. We were making progress.”

“What pulled me out?”

“You pulled yourself out. Normally I would bring you out slowly. But remember what I said the first time we tried this? That you would be able to come out anytime if you needed to? That’s what happened. So now you know that you can.”

I breathed in and out rapidly, panting like a damned dog. I had been there like it was fucking yesterday. That motherfucker, the low-voiced one who I had no memories of. He was right there, over me, and I was focusing on his forearm, his blank forearm.

Nothing. Nothing stood out. At least not yet.

I had to go back.

I didn’t want to, but I had to.

“Take me back, Doc.”

“Are you sure?”

I nodded. “I have to. There has to be something.”

 

No beach this time. I was back in that dank cellar, Low Voice over me.

Still detached, seeing the bird on his blank forearm…

Look around, an inner voice said to me. Look around and see what’s here.

His left forearm was blank. He was wearing all black. Black short sleeves, like always. Always black with black masks. The only one who sometimes wore something different was the third one, the follower, the lemming.

I’d never seen the other two in anything but black. Sometimes T-shirts, sometimes wife-beaters. T-shirt today.

Though it pained me to do so, I forced my gaze from the invisible fiery bird on his left forearm. I couldn’t see much. He was on top of me, so my visual field was limited. His hands. Fingernails oddly clean and well kept. Long thin fingers, but nothing unusual. I looked over to his other hand, his other arm on the right side.

“Yeah, bitch, I’m getting ready. I’m getting fucking ready.”

“Lube him up good for me,” Tattoo said again.

Bile rose in my throat, but I swallowed it down. I didn’t want to get beaten for throwing up.

I’d throw up anyway. I always did. But I was usually able to wait until they left.

His right hand looked the same. Long fingers, clean fingernails. Forearm was also blank. I let my gaze wander up to his upper arm.

And now he wasn’t wearing a T-shirt anymore. He was wearing a black wife-beater. How had that changed?

I was going crazy. Bat-shit crazy. My mind didn’t know what was real and what was unreal anymore. Walls closed in on me at night, the bird emerged and taunted me. It all seemed very real.

So it made perfect sense to me that the T-shirt had turned into a wife-beater. His upper arm was right at my eye level.

And then I saw it.

A patch of darker skin. A birthmark, on the inside of his arm, very close to his armpit.

It was shaped like something I’d seen before.

An odd shape. Where had I seen it?

“Ah!” He groaned, thrusting.

And then relief.

It still hurt, and I knew it would only be mere seconds before someone else was abusing me, but for these few sacred seconds when he slid out of me, I actually felt relief.

He was gone.

The shape… Where had I seen it before?

Where had I seen it before?

And then the pain was gone. As if it had never been there. I was back lying on my soft beach towel under the California sun. In the distance, my brothers laughed, splashing each other. I opened my eyes and looked next to me. My beautiful mother sat there, reading a book. Her long brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail out of her face, and she wore a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses.

She was beautiful, my mother. So beautiful.

I turned the other way, and my big strong father was on my other side. He wasn’t reading. He was watching my brothers. My father never took his eyes off us. If we did something wrong, no matter how sneaky we were, he knew.

He watched us constantly.

It was annoying, but I also knew how much he loved us.

We were loved.

I was loved.

I closed my eyes again and let the warmth of the sun envelop me.

 

When I opened my eyes, I was back in Dr. Carmichael’s office, back in the recliner. Oddly, I wasn’t clenching the arms.

I looked over at her. “I remember something.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Jade

After I had finished my morning court appearances, I decided to do a little investigation of my own—not on the Steels as I’d been instructed to do by Larry. After all, Larry was no longer here. He had disappeared, just like Nico Kostas and Colin had.

It didn’t seem possible that Larry and Nico could’ve had anything to do with Colin’s disappearance. I hadn’t heard anything yet from Steve Dugan over at the station about whether my phone call had led to anything. If he didn’t call me by the end of the day, I was going to give him a call.

In the meantime, I had some time available, so I decided to do some investigation of Nico Kostas. But no sooner had I started, than I stopped. I had been so upset about Larry bending the rules and bending his ethics when he was city attorney. Now here I was, acting city attorney, and I was investigating something that had nothing to do with my job at the moment.

Damned if I was going to be that kind of an attorney. If I had to, I would do my research here at the office, but I would do it on my own time, after hours. No one would think anything of it if I stayed late working on cases. For now, I was the acting city attorney, and I would behave as such.

A couple hours later, when I’d finished everything on my own agenda for the day, I went back to the last assignment Larry had given me. To investigate the Steels.

He had started out by giving me folders and folders full of bank accounts. The only thing out of the ordinary that I’d found was a five-million-dollar transfer about twenty-five years ago.

One thing I had learned about the Steels—they weren’t above paying to get what they wanted.

That five million dollars had gone somewhere, and I was going to find out where.

Talon had told me once that something horrible had happened to him. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it might’ve been, but I wondered if it had been twenty-five years prior. What could’ve happened that the Steels would’ve been willing to pay five million dollars to cover up?

I didn’t have any idea, but I could start by trying to find out where that five million had gone.

As much as I knew she never wanted to hear from me again, I decided to call Wendy Madigan, the former National News correspondent who had helped shed some light on the Steels a few weeks earlier. I found her number and picked up the phone.