Chapter Twenty-Eight

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

J azz hid a yawn behind her hand and blinked to keep her eyes opened. Ever since that embarrassingly short walk on the treadmill, revealing her lack of strength, her body had decided to show her exactly how right Xavier was. Other than sleeping, eating a bit, and then sleeping some more, she’d done absolutely nothing. She would be infuriated if she’d had the energy to feel that much emotion.

For some reason, Xavier had been staying out of her way the last couple of days. Other than sitting down with her at mealtimes, he’d been surprisingly absent. Which, considering the cabin wasn’t all that large, was quite a feat.

She knew she needed to talk to him about Bass’s shooting…about Brody and what she’d seen. The longer she waited, the angrier he was going to be when she finally told him.

“You getting bored?”

She started, somehow surprised he’d come up behind her without her hearing. She shouldn’t be. As large as Xavier was, he could be as quiet as a jungle cat when he wanted. “A little.” That was an understatement, but he wasn’t here to entertain her.

“Serena sent some photos the other day. You feel like going through them?”

Her shoulders straightened. Okay, now he was talking. She’d be able to pinpoint the bastard the moment she saw him. “Yes. That sketch she did was fairly accurate, so there shouldn’t be that many people who resemble him. I’ll know him in an instant.”

“No, not of the guy who abducted you. Bass’s shooter. You’re the only one who got a halfway decent look at him.”

Her limbs stiffened, and her mouth went dry. “But I thought he worked at the restaurant. Did you not get a good description of him from the employees?”

“Nope. The guy apparently changed his appearance almost daily. No one could agree on even the most basic of physical characteristics.”

That didn’t really surprise her. During just the few interviews she’d done with the kitchen staff, each person had seemed to remember something different that often contradicted what another person had said. Even the young girl she’d taken out for coffee couldn’t seem to pinpoint his exact description. Brody must be a master of disguises to be able to make so many changes. Skills like that took years to develop.

A wave of sadness swept through her at the thought. What happened to you, Brody?

Realizing Xavier was waiting for her to dive into this assignment with both feet, she gave him a doubtful look. “I don’t know that I saw him well enough to get a good description either.”

“Maybe not, but you might see something that’ll spark your memory.”

Now would be the time to tell him that she could easily identify the shooter. Had she not lambasted herself while she’d been stuck in that cage about how she should have trusted him with the truth? That she should have come clean with him and the team from the beginning? So why couldn’t she speak up and say, Hey, I’ve already identified the shooter. He’s my brother.

When had telling the truth become so hard?

Instead of doing the thing she knew she needed to do, like a zombie with no knowledge of right and wrong, she took the laptop he held out to her and walked out of the room.

Settling into the thickly padded chair next to the window that looked out over the vast mountain range, Jazz pulled up the file that Serena had sent. Guilt was a complex emotion. She was as human as the rest of humanity and had suffered that feeling for a variety of different things she’d done. Things she’d said that had hurt people unintentionally, bad thoughts about people when she’d later realized she’d been judgmental without cause. And many more things. But this? This was not only blatant and wrong, it went against everything Option Zero stood for. How many times had she judged other team members for ignoring their duties and going off on their own agendas? This was no different. In fact, it was worse because it was a willful intent to deceive.

Without much interest, Jazz went through the photographs. There were some good likenesses, but none was Brody. She closed her eyes and thought back to that day, to those seconds when their gazes had met. Had she made a mistake? Could that man have only resembled her brother and not been him after all? She had told the truth about that. It had truly been seconds. A short blip in time like that could create all sorts of wild errors. Moments before Bass’s shooting, she and Xavier had argued about her search for her brother. Could she have subconsciously combined those two events and come up with a wild scenario that really hadn’t existed at all?

What had she seen, really? A large, muscular man. He had been covered from head to toe. The skullcap he’d been wearing had exposed nothing of his face. So what if she had spotted a dark gold strand of hair sticking out from the bottom of the cap? Lots of people had that hair color. And so what if when he’d opened the door to his SUV, the shirt sleeve on his right arm had moved up just a few inches, exposing a scar on his wrist? Lots of people had scars. She definitely had more than her share.

But the damning part, the part that she could not talk herself out of, no matter what excuse she came up with, had been the eyes that had stared at her. Light green eyes.

Yes, Brody had dark, golden-blond hair. And yes, Brody had a scar on his right wrist.

About a year after her mother married Connor McAlister, he and Brody had been working on a wood project for a school assignment. Brody had moved too quickly with the saw he’d been using, and it had sliced his wrist to the bone. She remembered crying when she’d seen the blood, and even though they’d gotten him to the hospital and he’d received the stitches he needed, she’d never forgotten the terror of seeing him hurt. The stitches had come out a week or so later, but the injury had left an impressive scar. But Brody couldn’t be the only man on the planet with that kind of scar in that location.

The eyes weren’t so easily explained. Brody’s eyes had come from his mother’s side of the family—startling green, so vibrant and penetrating that they could mesmerize. Her mama had described them as bottle green. And she clearly remembered how the older girls in school had sighed over him whenever he’d come to one of her school events.

The shooter’s eyes had, without a doubt, been Brody’s.

Slamming the laptop closed, Jazz jumped to her feet. She was in the den, walking toward Xavier before she knew it. She still had no idea what she was going to say, but she could no longer live with this on her conscience.

She opened her mouth, about to call out his name, and then came to an abrupt halt. He was asleep. A book lay open on his chest. A smile lifted her lips at how relaxed he looked. Whenever Xavier was awake, the fierceness of his personality always made her think of a predatory animal, like a tiger on the prowl, ready to strike at any moment. But now, he looked peaceful and calm.

Taking a step closer, she tried to see what he’d been reading that had apparently been boring enough to put him to sleep. When she saw the title, her heart melted. He had told her he was trying to improve his cooking skills, and she had to admit the last few meals had been much more edible. And now she knew why. In between taking care of her and digging for intel on who had abducted her, he’d been reading cookbooks.

How could she not trust this man with her secrets? He had done nothing since she’d known him to make her believe he’d be anything but supportive, no matter what she told him.

Vowing that the instant he woke, she would spill the secret she’d been keeping, she took a step back, not wanting to disturb him. The floor creaked beneath her foot, and in an instant, Xavier’s eyes popped open.

Instantly alert, he sat up and said, “Jazz? Everything okay?”

“I…” She swallowed past her now sandpaper-dry throat and tried again. “I have something I need to tell you.”

“Okay.” His eyes went to the laptop in her hand. “Did you find something?”

“No, it’s not that. Well, it is that…but not really.”

Confusion furrowing his brow, he said, “Okaaay.”

Sometimes not having a filter worked to her advantage because if she had to think about what she was going to say, she might never get it out. Instead, like a pressurized water spout, the words spewed forth. “I know who the shooter is.”

“You do? Who?”

“Brody. My brother. He’s the one who killed Franco Bass.”