“If I could make this better for you, I would.” Dean’s voice caught slightly on the last word. He had dark places and horrible memories of his own. He had scars—visible and invisible—of his own.
I brought my hand to the side of his neck, felt his pulse, slow and steady beneath my touch. “I know.”
I knew that he would feel this for me if he could.
I knew that he knew “better” wasn’t even a blip on my radar.
Dean couldn’t erase the marks my past had left on me, any more than I could do that for him. He couldn’t take away my pain, but he saw it.
He saw me.
“Dinner?” Sloane popped into the room, oblivious to the depth of emotion on my face, on Dean’s.
I dropped my hand to my side, held Dean’s dark eyes for a moment longer, and nodded. “Dinner.”
As the hostess led us to our table at the Majesty’s five-star sushi restaurant, I tried to keep all hints of my conversation with Dean off my face.
Lia was the first to claim a chair at our table, her fingers drawing lazy rings around the base of an empty wineglass. Michael helped himself to the seat next to her. They both had a natural aura of fearlessness and self-
possession, like if someone dropped a cobra in the middle of the table, they’d both just sit there, Lia continuing to circle her wineglass and Michael artfully slumped in his chair.
I took a seat across from them and hoped Michael’s eyes wouldn’t meet mine. Between overhearing his conversation with Lia and telling Dean about the update in my mother’s case, I felt drained, empty, but for a dense ball of emotion, barely contained in the pit of my stomach, like a grenade.
Get it under control, Cassie. If you feel it, he’ll see it. So don’t feel it.
“Can I tell you about our specials?” A waitress appeared beside our table. The six of us managed to place both drink and food orders before Michael turned his attention to my side of the table. I could feel him working his way up and down my face. He glanced briefly at Dean, then back at me.
“Well, Colorado,” Michael mused out loud. “Slight tension in your neck and jaw, eyes cast downward, brows pulled together ever so slightly.”
I felt naked under his gaze, laid bare.
I’m angry. I’m angry that the police found a body and angry that it took them five years to find it. I’m angry about what your father did to you.
“You’re sad and you’re angry and you feel sorry for me.” An edge worked its way into Michael’s voice. He wasn’t a person who let other people feel sorry for him.
Nothing hurts you unless you let it.
“And you,” Michael said, pointing a chopstick lazily at Dean, “are having one of those oh-so-Dean moments: self-loathing and inadequacy, check. Longing and fear, check. Constant, seething anger, bubbling just under the surface—”
“When you lose the remote control to your television, four percent of the time it ends up in the freezer!” Sloane blurted out loudly.
Michael glanced at Sloane. Whatever he saw there must have convinced him that now wasn’t a good time to be stirring things up with Dean and me. He turned back to Judd and said, “I believe your line is ‘This is why we can’t have nice things.’”
Beside me, Dean snorted, and the tension that had settled over the table dissolved.
“Check out the company.” Lia nodded to the bar. I turned to look.
Camille Holt. She was sitting at the bar, wearing black shorts and a backless top, sipping a red drink and talking with another woman.
“Person of interest number five,” Dean murmured, eyeing Camille’s friend. “Tory Howard.”
Next to Camille, Tory Howard—stage magician and rival of our second victim—drank beer from a bottle. Her dark hair was wavy and damp, like she’d come here straight from jumping out of the shower. No muss. No fuss. I tried to reconcile that with the fact that she was a performer, an illusionist, pulling off tricks that were larger-than-life.
“This,” Judd muttered, “is why we can’t have nice things.”
He’d tried to tear us away from our work—and there work was, sitting at the bar.
“Mr. Shaw.” The hostess’s voice broke into my thoughts. I glanced toward the front of the restaurant, expecting to see Aaron. Instead, I saw a man who looked the way Aaron would in thirty years. His thick blond hair was tinged silver. His lips were set in a permanent half smile. He wore a three-piece suit as comfortably as other people wore a T-shirt and jeans.
Aaron’s father. My stomach twisted, because if this was Aaron’s father, he was Sloane’s father, too.
Beside him, there was a woman with light brown hair coifed at the nape of her neck. She was holding a little girl, no older than three or four. The child was Korean, with beautiful dark hair and eyes that took in everything. Their daughter, I realized. Aaron’s little sister. As the hostess led the trio to a table near ours, I wondered if Sloane knew her father had adopted a child.
I knew the exact moment Sloane saw them. She went very still.
Underneath the table, I reached for her hand. She squeezed mine, hard enough to hurt.
Several minutes later, our food was deposited on the table. With great effort, Sloane let go of my hand and pulled her gaze away from the happy threesome, just as Aaron slid into the empty seat at the table to join his family.
His family. Not hers.
I tried to catch Sloane’s eye, but she wouldn’t look at me. She concentrated all of her attention on the sushi in front of her, carefully disassembling it and dividing each roll into its parts. Avocado. Salmon. Rice.
At the bar, Camille and Tory finished their drinks. As they gathered their possessions and turned toward us, I noticed two things. The first was the thick silver chain Camille wore looped multiple times around her neck.
The second thing was Aaron Shaw noticing Camille.
