Chapter 28

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Dragon

I sit for a few minutes at the table after Diana leaves.

I stare down at the smudges of spaghetti sauce on my plate, at my empty glass of water.

My phone sits next to me. I don’t labor under any delusion that I’ll get a drumming job from that music store I walked into.

Especially not tonight. Especially not from the guy who escorted Diana to bail me out of freaking jail.

No one else really calls me, other than Jesse, and he’s on his honeymoon.

So I’m surprised as hell when it rings.

I don’t recognize the number, but I pick it up anyway. “Yeah?” I say into the phone.

“I’m looking for Dragon Locke,” a low voice says.

“You found him. Who is this?”

“I know where your sister is.”

The call ends.

My heart nearly stops as it drops to my stomach.

The spaghetti I just ate threatens to erupt from my mouth.

What the fuck?

I quickly hit the number to call it back.

It rings, rings, rings…

But no one answers. Not that I expect anyone to.

How do you trace a call? How do you find where a number originated?

I don’t have a fucking clue, but Diana might.

Griffin is screaming.

I’m only nine years old, but I’m so close to my little sister, and our rooms are right next to each other. Mom and Dad’s room is on the other side of the small house.

So I get there first.

I get there first.

“It hurts, Dragon. It hurts!”

Blood.

Blood on her sheets, on her body, her pajamas—her pink flannel pajamas with blue hearts on them. Blood dripping from a cut on her round little cheek.

I can’t speak. I only look.

Something…

Someone hurt Griffin.

Her window is open. That’s how they must’ve gotten into her room.

There’s a cut on her face, right down her cheek.

Another one on her shoulder.

Another one on her belly.

I freeze for a moment. Unsure what to do.

Tears are streaming down my sweet baby sister’s face. “Help me, Dragon! Help me!”

On her nightstand, next to her bed, is a bloody knife.

I pick it up. Look at it.

That’s when my parents walk in.

Griffin went into shock after that. She wouldn’t talk. Couldn’t talk. Went numb, her eyes glazed over.

I screamed and cried and told my parents I hadn’t done it.

But you were holding the knife , they said.

A knife that came from our own kitchen , they said.

Did it? I didn’t know.

The beginning of the end.

Because whoever hurt Griffin that night came back several months later.

And this time they took her away.

I didn’t know that, of course. Not until years after the fact.

Did my parents truly think I had escaped the group home they had forced me into and come back and taken my little sister?

They must’ve thought so, because they didn’t come to get me.

They never reclaimed me.

Griffin disappeared.

This isn’t something I talk about. No one knows about Griffin except Jesse and Tim. So who could be calling? I trust both Jesse and Tim, so how would anyone else know? And why would he be messing with me?

But…

What if it’s true? If this person knows where Griffin is, does that mean they know where her body is? Her tiny five-year-old body, decomposed by now?

Or…

Is Griffin alive?

No.

She can’t be.

They wouldn’t come to me. They’d go to my parents.

But I have no idea if my parents are even alive. I gave up caring about them decades ago.

They forsook me, so I forsook them.

But I have to know.

I have to know if this phone message was real or if it was just a horrible trick.

I walk to Diana’s room and knock.

She opens the door just as she’s ending a call. “Dragon?”

I swallow. “I don’t want to bother you, but I need your help.”

“With what?”

“Do you know how to trace a call?”

She shakes her head. “No, but my family has resources. What’s going on?”

I pull up the number on my phone. “I just got a call from this number. I need to find out who it belongs to. Where it came from.”

She takes a look at it. “It’s a Denver area code, so it couldn’t have come from far. Unless of course it’s someone with a cell phone with a Colorado number who is now living somewhere else.”

“Fuck.” I rub my forehead. “You’re right. It could’ve come from anywhere.”

“I can call my dad. He has investigators he uses. Maybe they could figure it out.”

I shake my head. “I’m sure I can’t afford that.”

She holds up a hand. “My dad has them on retainer. They probably wouldn’t mind doing it as a favor.”

“I’m not in any situation to ask anyone in your family for another favor,” I say. “I’m already living here.”

She frowns. “Dragon, what is this about? What did that person say to you?”

I close my eyes for a moment. When I look at Diana—at her beautiful caring eyes—I almost want to tell her everything. I could so easily vomit out the entire story. More than I’ve even told my therapist. More than I even told Jesse.

But can I trust Diana Steel?

Better yet—do I want to trust Diana Steel?

Because I don’t trust anyone. Besides Jesse. I’m not even sure I trust my therapist, though he hasn’t done me wrong yet.

“I just need to know where the call came from. If it’s legit or not.”

“Dragon, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” She places a hand on my shoulder. “But if I call my father and have him get in touch with our investigators, you will have to tell them .”

I ignore the jolt of electricity coursing through my body at her touch. “Why would they need to know what was said? Can’t they just figure out where the call came from?”

“It’s not that simple. They need all the information to do a thorough investigation. Whatever they said to you might be some clue as to where they are, what they want, why this even happened.”

“They didn’t say they wanted anything.”

“Fine.” She looks me dead in the eyes. “But if I call them, if I get our investigators to help you, you have to tell them everything. You get it?”

I heave in a deep breath. “Fine. I wouldn’t even ask except…”

“Except what?”

“Except…nothing.”

“This is important to you,” she says.

“You think?”

She frowns.

I run my hands through my hair, sighing. “I’m not trying to be rude, Diana. This… This…” No more words come.

She removes her hand from my shoulder and cups my cheek. Her touch is soothing. More soothing than it should be.

“Something is inside you,” she says. “I don’t think you’re as dark and sinister as you claim to be.”

I shake my head. “You don’t know me.”

“You’re right. I don’t. I know next to nothing about you.” She looks into my eyes, narrowing her own. “But I can see that this is important to you. I see it in those eyes of yours. I see emotion in their depths. Emotion I wasn’t sure you had until…”

“Until what? Tonight?”

She bites her lip. “Until this morning.”

This morning? Is she serious? What happened between us had no emotion whatsoever. I open my mouth to say so, but no words come out.

She drops her hand from my face and then reaches into her pocket to grab her cell phone. “I’ll call my father. He’ll know what to do.”

All I can do is nod and leave Diana’s room so she can make the call in private. I saunter over to her living room and plant myself on her couch.

A few moments later she comes back out.

“An investigator is coming over,” she says. “He’s going to need to look at your phone. I’ll leave the room if you want me to, but you’re going to need to tell him everything.”

I nod. “Thank you.”

A smile spreads over her face.

“What?” I demand.

She slaps her hand over her mouth. “The smile isn’t because I’m happy you’re going through something difficult. I’m not, Dragon. I can see that you’re hurting, and I don’t like that one bit. But you said thank you.”

With a slow exhale, tension draining from my shoulders, I meet her gaze. “Yeah, I have a hard time with that.”

She crosses the living room and lowers herself onto the love seat. “I know you do. Why?”

I take a deep breath. “I’m not used to people being nice to me. I’m not used to people doing something for me out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s usually because they want something in return.”

Her eyes soften. “Why do you think that?”

I can’t answer that question because someone raised the way Diana was raised will never understand. She was raised with everything she could ever want, with two loving parents who would never think of sending her away.

She was raised with enough money to have everything she desired. Enough food. A life without bullies, without evil, without horror.

“You going to answer me?” she asks.

“I can’t. It’s beyond your comprehension.”

Her hands whip to her hips. “Excuse me?”

“I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just mean there’s no way you can ever understand why I have a problem with gratitude.” I place my hand over my heart. “It’s not that I don’t feel it.”

She frowns. “You just can’t say it.”

I drop my hand to my side. “Seems that every time I said it in the past, it came back to bite me in the ass. Bite me hard in the ass.”

“I’ll never bite you in the ass.” Her eyes brighten. “Unless you ask me to.”

My cock responds to those words.

And that’s the last thing I need.

This—whatever it is—between Diana and me has to go on the back burner. It needs to be taken off the stove altogether. The phone call… Griffin… I need to find out what it all means.

Damn, I could sure use a fucking drink.

All these years, I assumed Griffin was dead.

She probably is. This could just be some cruel prank.

But no one knows. No one but my parents. My therapist. And Jesse.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she says.

I cross my arms. “Diana, I am no good for you, and we both know it.”

She gets up off the love seat and sits next to me on the couch, thumbing the stubble on my cheek. “Maybe. Maybe not.” She sighs. “I start that new job tomorrow, and I won’t have time for any of this anyway. So once we talk to the investigator tonight, you’re on your own.”

“No different from any other time in my life,” I say.

She checks the time on her phone. “He’ll be here in about ten minutes.”

I open my eyebrows. “That quickly?”

She nods. “My family pays this company a lot of money. They’re on call twenty-four seven.”

Damn. Is there nothing that money can’t buy?

Happiness, I suppose.

Diana’s happy, though. All the Steels seem to be.

Who wouldn’t be with riches beyond anyone’s wildest dreams?

But then I think about that bomb Diana dropped on me about her brothers and her father. They were victims of human trafficking. She didn’t give me any details beyond that, but I can’t imagine it was anything good.

Money can get you a lot of things, but I’m not sure it can fix something like that.

And I’m not sure it can fix my current problem, either.

“You want me to sit with you while you talk to them?”

“No.”

I don’t mean to be so forceful, but if she sits with me, she’ll learn the truth. That my own parents believed the worst of me.

That I learned to believe the worst of myself.

I’ll have to make sure this guy who comes over here will hold what I say in confidence, even from the people who pay his bills.

I open my mouth to say as much when someone buzzes the intercom.

Diana walks toward the door. “That’ll be him. Let’s go.” She presses the intercom button. “Yes?”

“Hi. It’s Alayna Johansson from Infinite Security. Mr. Talon Steel sent me over.”

“Yeah, thank you. I’m his daughter Diana. Come on up.”

“Not a him after all,” I say.

“I guess it’s a her.” Diana’s cheeks flush pink.

A few moments later, a knock on the door. Diana opens it.

Alayna Johansson is gorgeous. Blond and blue-eyed and totally stacked.

Doesn’t even get my blood moving.

“Diana?” She holds out her hand. “I’m Alayna Johansson.”

Diana shakes her hand. “So nice to meet you, and thank you for coming over so quickly. Come on in.”

She steps inside.

“This is Dragon Locke,” Diana says. “He’s the one who will be talking to you.”

“Great.” She extends her hand again. “Nice to meet you, Dragon.”

I take Alayna’s outstretched hand. It’s warm. Inviting. Still doesn’t do a thing for me.

Alayna scans the room. “Where should we speak?”

Diana smiles. “I think Dragon wants to talk to you in private. I can go to my bedroom. Feel free to use the kitchen table. Or the living area if you’d like.”

Alayna nods. “Okay. Thank you, Diana.”

Diana disappears into her bedroom.

Alayna gestures to the small kitchen table. “Sometimes it’s easier to talk when you’re sitting.”

I take a seat across from her.

Alayna sets her phone on the table. “Mr. Steel didn’t tell me much, other than that you received a phone call that distressed you a bit. And you want to know where and who it came from.”

I nod slowly. “That’s about the gist of it.”

“May I take a look at your phone?”

“Yeah.” I unlock it and hand it to her.

She taps on the screen, looking up my recent calls. “So this is the number.” She pulls an iPad out, sets it up, starts typing on it. “Looks like you called the number a few seconds after the call ended. I’m assuming it just rang and didn’t go to voicemail?”

“That’s correct.”

“All right. Let me take a look here.” She types several things into her iPad. “Nothing’s coming up right away, which is per usual, but we have to try all the standard avenues first. Can you tell me exactly what the person on the other line said?”

“It was a low voice. A man. And he said my name. And then he said, ‘I know where your sister is.’”

She looks up. “Is your sister missing?”

I lower my voice. “This is confidential, correct?”

“Of course.”

And I begin.