by Kyle, Celia
Elissa snorted. “That old chestnut again? Tell me, Dad, how were you supporting me when you were in prison for most of my adolescence? When you sent me off to live with crazy Aunt Sanne? How were you supporting me then?”
Cray stiffened, but his tone remained cool. “I’m sorry I was a terrible criminal, Elissa. Truth be told, it never came naturally to me, but I did what I had to do. And if it wasn’t for my efforts, you never would have gone to journalism school.”
Elissa balked at his ridiculous claim. “Now you’re trying to get credit for putting me through college when I did it myself? I’m the one who won the scholarship to pay for it!”
“Ah yes, the Samuel C. Feelein Scholarship,” he said, crossing his arms and leveling a dispassionate look at her.
“That’s the one,” she snapped back, taking a second before confusion set in. “Wait, how did you…”
His smug smile tried to convince her of something that couldn’t possibly be true. No, she’d spent weeks sitting at their grungy kitchen table her junior year of high school, filling out application after application for grants and scholarships. In the end, she’d only received one, the Samuel C. Feelein Scholarship. And as smart as her father was, he’d pulled the name of it out of the air much too quickly after so much time had passed.
His eyes flashed panther yellow as he took a step toward her. “Because the Samuel C. Feelein Scholarship was me.”
Blinking rapidly, she tried to make sense of what he was saying. “Wait, what? What are you talking about? I won that, fair and square.”
“Sweets, you were the only applicant! Of course you won it.” His expression softened, as did his tone. “I wanted you to think you were doing it all on your own. I mean, let’s be honest. The odds were pretty good I’d be going away again, and I wanted you to have confidence in yourself. Besides, I knew you wouldn’t accept college money from me if I’d offered it outright. You’ve always been so stubborn about accepting my help.”
“Illegal help!” she clarified. “Accepting illegal help.”
“Either way,” Cray growled, “I was that scholarship. I got one of my underground friends to set it up and make it look convincing. Hell, I even named it after that damn cat you had as a little girl. Sam. And the C is for Cray, of course.”
Elissa gaped at him, totally shocked. Tears prickled her eyes again and she blinked them back. No way was she going to cry. Nope, not gonna happen. Not until she was alone.
“So you’re telling me,” she started, swallowing hard to keep the tears at bay, “that all these years I thought I’d won a scholarship on my own merits and was supporting myself, but all along it was…fake?”
“The money was real, sweets. It paid for your classes. Didn’t it?”
“This whole time I thought I’d done things the right way, the honest way. I studied hard, I worked two jobs to put myself through school, I landed a job others would kill for. And now you’re telling me it was all a scam?”
One fat, hot tear escaped and rolled down Elissa’s cheek. She angrily swiped at it with the back of her hand, hoping that was it, but she felt the dam getting ready to burst. She’d never felt so humiliated, so deceived. Cray had lied to her plenty over the years, but this was next-level shit.
“Money is money, Elissa. Who cares how you got it? You’re still the one who earned that degree. I only paid for it.”
The shock was wearing off and her body started to tremble in response. The silence deepened and expanded between them like a great canyon, and she wondered if they’d ever be able to bridge it. Not soon, she knew that.
Cray opened his mouth to tell her some more lies, but before he could speak, the doorbell rang. They both froze and slowly turned to stare at the door. Then they turned to stare at each other.
Uh oh.
Chapter Five
Ragan rang the doorbell again and bounced on the balls of his feet, waiting for the door to open. He was so pumped he could barely contain himself.
Cray Pardus—a panther shifter, according to Othercross records—had a rap sheet so long Ragan couldn’t believe he’d been released the last time. He had to have committed his most recent crime days after getting out of prison for the umpteenth time, if he hadn’t been lining them up before he was released. Pardus was obviously a career criminal, someone with no hope for rehabilitation.
Ragan already had a mental picture of the guy—not just the man’s face because that came part and parcel with his mugshot. His suspect didn’t have any violent crimes on his record, just a lot of things like the other night—break-ins, a veritable mountain of petty theft, a handful of white-collar crimes, and Ragan figured there was probably some tax sketchiness somewhere in there. A person like Pardus was an interesting criminal because he held so many possibilities. Maybe he had something even bigger lurking under the surface. Why did he commit so many crimes anyway? To pay off a mafia loan? Tax fraud? Bank fraud?
Getting ahead of himself was a skill Ragan could have advertised on his résumé.
But Pardus certainly was taking a helluva long time to answer the door. He stepped back and scoped the area to make sure he didn’t spy anyone trying to slip past him around the back. Nothing out of the ordinary, unfortunately. After finding his address, Ragan had wanted to shift into his dragon form and blaze a path of fury across the skies on his way over, flushing the suspect out with a gout of flame and a full team of Wildridge Security’s specialists ready to take him in. Shifter laws about keeping their true identities secret be damned.
But Charlie had warned him that, while a dragon was a powerful thing, Ragan’s specialty was computers, not subduing potentially dangerous panthers. They had to assume Pardus was dangerous because, if nothing else, his rap sheet proved he was desperate. And there was nothing more dangerous than a desperate man—or panther, as the case may be. As anticlimactic as it was, Ragan had seen the wisdom in Charlie’s words.
Shifting his weight from foot to foot, he waited with bated breath, poised and ready to jump. On the ride over, he’d rehearsed different lines for when the door cracked open and he saw Pardus’ sorry face. Something as pedestrian as “Cray Pardus, you’re under arrest for breaking and entering and burglary” wouldn’t do. Whatever he said needed to be more dramatic, more memorable. “Here, kitty kitty” would be funny, but it lacked the element of surprise. Maybe a simple “Gotcha!” would be best. Too bad Elissa wasn’t there so she could include a firsthand account of the arrest—not to mention his witty bon mot—in her profile on Wildridge.
Charlie would have chided him for getting excited about an arrest that might not even happen. Pardus might not even be home. But just as the thought passed through his mind, he heard footsteps on the other side of the door. Adrenaline gushed into his bloodstream and he felt his body grow in size. He wasn’t going to go full-on dragon in the middle of an apartment complex, but Pardus would see the shimmer of barely there scales on his neck and know the jig was up.
A deadbolt rattled back into itself. Every muscle in Ragan’s body tensed, ready to spring into action, should the need arise. He hoped it wouldn’t but it paid to be prepared. When the door swung open, Ragan opened his mouth…and froze.
Cray Pardus looked nothing like his mugshot. He stood a couple inches shorter than he should have and had long, lush black hair, deep violet eyes, and a voluptuous body. In fact, Pardus bore an alarming resemblance to the journalist Ragan had made out with in his SUV barely an hour earlier.
“Hi, Ragan.”
At the sound of Elissa’s rich voice speaking his name, his brain finally caught up with his eyes.
“Elissa?” His own voice was barely a whisper. It wasn’t the memorable one-liner he’d planned, but it was all he could think of to say.
She looked at him with a mixture of sadness and resignation, like she’d been expecting him, but he had no idea where she lived. Looking over her shoulder, he checked the apartment number against the address the DMV had spit out for Cray Pardus. They matched.
“Why don’t you come inside?” she offered, stepping aside to invite him in, albeit reluctantly.
“Elissa, what are you doing here?” he hissed as he followed her inside. “Do you have any idea where you are?”
The door clicked shut and she turned to face him, massaging her temples as if trying to rub out a headache. “Mmhmm.”
He was too consumed by worry over her safety to process her murmur. “This is Cray Pardus’s address,” he said, keeping his voice low, in case the felon in question was lying in wait around the corner. “He’s the one—”
“I know,” she interrupted. “I live here too, Ragan.”
Too. She lived there too. Still, the dots were taking their own sweet time connecting.
“You live here?”
“Yep.”
“With Cray Pardus?”
Her lips pressed into a thin line as she nodded, never breaking eye contact. “He’s my father.”
Ragan blinked at her as he felt the blood drain from his face. “You’re his…”
“Daughter.”
Whenever Ragan got caught up on a problem, the feeling of everything clicking when it came together was perfect. It was sublime and rewarding, and it was part of what motivated his life in criminal justice. But this discovery was like turning over a log and finding a rotten hamburger wearing a tutu. It simply didn’t make sense.
“I’m sorry, what?” He dragged a hand through his hair, trying hard to think clearly, but the thoughts pinging around in his head didn’t make it easy. “You… He… We…”
Elissa watched him with worried eyes as he processed all of this new, very confusing information. Elissa Malkin was the daughter of their prime suspect, Cray Pardus, and they lived together. Was that why his draconic senses went wild every time they touched? He’d thought it was attraction, but maybe it was all just her deception. Or could it all be a simple misunderstanding?
Before he could figure out how to ask, she spun on her heel and headed for the kitchen, leaving him staring after her. As usual, it was a fine view, but he couldn’t appreciate it at the moment. He needed answers and only one person could give them to him.
Following her, he stood in the doorway, tense and angry, as he watched her put away some sandwich makings. A light breeze ruffled the curtains covering the window as she picked up the plate with the finished sandwich and held it out to him, as if he could eat anything. He was sick to his stomach at the thought of Elissa somehow being involved in the Bradford case. Maybe she’s not, his heart insisted, though his brain couldn’t come up with a scenario that supported the theory.
With a defeated nod, she dumped the sandwich into the trash and gently placed the plate in the sink with a clink. This wasn’t the same woman who’d put him in his place that morning, or the one who’d forgiven him so quickly, or the one who’d flirted with him so much they ended up making out in his car. The woman who stood before him now was a mere shadow of that one, the one he couldn’t stop thinking about.
But maybe that woman was the fraud and the one whose father was a career criminal was the real Elissa Malkin. Was that even her real name? Ragan had come here expecting to find answers, but he’d found a treasure chest full of new and even more frustrating questions.
“Elissa,” he said, taking a step closer to her. “What the hell is going on?”
* * *
Elissa dropped her gaze to the tile floor, finding vague faces in the whorls and grain of the faux-marble design. She’d found herself doing that many times over the course of her stay in this apartment. Coming home from a long day in the Rawr offices, writing boring puff piece after puff piece. She would get home in a daze, the sheer volume of words she had written and read overwhelming her mind. Almost like clockwork, she would shed her shoes and coat and wander wearily into the darkened kitchen to heat up a crappy microwave meal or, on a really bad day, simply eat dry cereal from the box.
And she would stare.
Her eyes would dance over the unintentional shapes and faces in the tile pattern, zoning out because she was just so freaking exhausted. It took a surprising amount of energy to squint at a blank document all day, desperately searching for the right words to create something readable and interesting. Despite her grumbling, she loved her job, and now that she was faced with losing it—they wouldn’t exactly let her write the column from a jail cell, after all—she found she wanted to hold on for dear life.
Life. Funny word because life as she knew it, the one she’d painstakingly built with her own strength and determination, was over. She’d committed a serious crime, even if she didn’t know it at the time. Time to accept she was going down. But why did Ragan have to be the one to take her in?
She dragged her eyes up from the tile to meet his gaze and what she saw nearly made her cry. He looked at her like she was…her father. A screw-up. A criminal. A total piece of shit. An hour earlier, he’d looked at her with a hunger that made her skin pebble with desire. Like she was special. She wished she could have bottled that feeling, but now it was gone forever. No bringing it back.
And all of it because of her father. The man who had never been able to walk the straight line. The man who could not have carried out a normal life even if he’d wanted. Elissa had worked so hard to be normal, but maybe it was inevitable that she would fall on the other side of the law. After all, it was in her blood.
And even though she was so hurt and angry at her father for bringing her so-called normalcy to a screeching halt, there was no denying the way she felt. He was still her father, her only family, and she loved him. No way in hell did she trust him, but he hadn’t meant to hurt her, that much she knew all the way down to her marrow. The question was, how far was she willing to go to protect him?
Cray had doggedly maintained his innocence ever since Buddy jumped into the back seat of the car in a ski mask. That’s something he’d never done before, at least not with her. Elissa had to find out for sure whether her dad was guilty before she could justify turning him in. She couldn’t rat him out until she knew. Not yet. Not even to Ragan.
Lies didn’t come easily to someone trained to seek out the truth, so she decided not to lie to Ragan. If he asked her if she was in the getaway car that night, she would tell him the truth. Hopefully he would believe her story, but she wasn’t going to offer up any information unless he asked the right questions. Too risky.
“Look, Ragan,” she began, pleading with her eyes for him to listen and believe, “you have to understand…”
“Understand what? That you’re covering for a career criminal?”
Elissa didn’t flinch, didn’t raise her voice or get angry. He had every right to distrust her. All she could do was tell her story and hope he understood.
“That career criminal is my father, Ragan. You couldn’t possibly have a clue what that means since you were raised inside a Norman Rockwell painting, so let me paint a different picture for you. One of a little girl who never belonged. First, in this world ruled by humans who don’t know we even exist, but more to the point, in a home that never was. Well, it once was a home, but after my mother died, so did any hope for a normal childhood. I bounced between my father’s custody and, when he was in custody, my aunt’s. She’s a certified nut-job and my dad’s a career criminal who spent more time in human jail or at Othercross Shifter Judiciary than at home with me.”
Ragan’s expression clouded, but he remained silent. Elissa took a deep, bracing breath and continued.
“The last time he was locked up by humans, I was in my junior year at journalism school. He wanted to give me his old car, but I said no. I refused to accept any help from him, thinking I was so noble and honest for doing so. I didn’t want his dirty money. And at that point, I could still get by without the car. Sure, I was late to class occasionally because of unreliable public transportation, but I was adamant about forging my path on my own. After graduation, I landed a job and got an apartment of my own, but it was miles away from work. Plus, I needed reli
able transportation to cover mall openings and whatever other happening occurred in the community.”
He frowned, no doubt wondering where this was all going.
“My dad’s old car was just sitting in the lot, collecting dust, so…I gave in. I’m not proud of it, and I’m fully aware of how hypocritical that makes me sound.”
He started to shake his head, to argue, but she cut him off.
“I can see it in your eyes, Ragan. And you’re not wrong.”
Ragan looked away, and Elissa knew she was right. And though she was still stewing about the fake scholarship, she was determined to set the record straight. As much as she could, anyway.
“After a lifetime of rejecting as much as I could from his ill-gotten gains, I caved. Even though the car in that old lady’s security video is in my father’s name, I’ve been the sole driver for years. Until he was released last month.”
Ragan looked thoughtful for a few beats and then finally asked her a question. “Why do you have different last names?”
Elissa smiled ruefully. “You tell me.”
He nodded his understanding immediately. “You changed it.”
“Yep, to my mother’s maiden name. No respected newspaper would hire someone whose father was a felon. Sure, they could track it down eventually, but why make it easy when I had no intention of following in my father’s footsteps?”
“But this address is in his release paperwork.”
“He’s been staying here with me since he got out.”
Ragan pinched the bridge of his nose, looking frustrated and at a loss. Elissa gave him the space to let it all sink in, even though every cell in her body yearned to go to him, to tuck herself into his arms and feel his warmth, to breathe in his scent. When he finally met her gaze again, his face had turned stony and grim. She waited for the question she knew he’d ask. Had to ask.