by Lissa Kasey
“I will eventually,” he promised me. “The market is shit right now. You got a steal.” He glanced around my remodeled room like it was some sort of showplace. “I’d totally buy something like this if I could. I’m just not ready yet.”
He was getting therapy. Apparently he needed it more than even I did. But it wasn’t something he talked about. Instead, his security team would show up for him, and then a few hours later return him. He always looked tired and wrung out after the sessions. Four days a week was a lot for anyone to talk to anybody. If I were a better friend, I’d have let him talk to me, or opened up to him, but we both knew that wasn’t happening anytime soon. He’d spent years protecting his abuser, Levi, because Jacob thought family superseded all. Only by spending time with Kade and me had he finally understood that what his family gave him wasn’t love and support. The blackmail and sexual abuse he’d allowed a man who he’d thought of as a second father was the sort of crazy you saw on TV, not in real life. I didn’t understand the mindset but knew enough to realize it had severely warped him. Maybe therapy could fix him. I didn’t know, but even as much as he irritated me most days, I did want him to be happy.
“I’ll call Tomas to look after Newt while we’re gone.”
I stopped, then slowly turned to him. “No.”
“You don’t want someone to take care of your crazy cat?”
“No, you’re not coming with me.”
“Of course I am. Not like I’m doing anything else right now. I can’t even do a radio interview without my head threatening to explode from all the tuning shit that only dogs should hear. Plus Will can’t go with you. The whole ‘being a cop’ thing really ties his hands. Britney is preggers so you can’t take her. Ty has a law firm to run. He’s suing the hospital and threatening anyone he can with financial ruin for Kade’s disappearance, so he’s always in the press and working. And Tomas is just a baby.”
“Tomas is only a few years younger than me,” I pointed out.
“Numbers, babe. You’re worlds apart. He’s about as green as a nineteen-year-old can get, and that’s fine, ’cause Ty takes care of him. I think ’cause you grew up with just Nathan and were thrust into the modeling industry so young, you’d lost all that wide-eyed naiveté long ago.”
“Don’t call me babe.”
Jacob shrugged off my protest and took a step back. “I’m already packed. Normal shit. T-shirts and jeans, lots of hats. Got some cool tech shit from Tomas. Pin cameras and recording devices. I feel all secret agent–like. You should probably bring normal shit too. Pretty sure half the world has your legs memorized.” His eyes lingered like he was memorizing them.
“You’re not coming,” I reasserted.
“And what happens when the sparkles get bad? When one of those pounding headaches comes that all light and sound hurts? You just gonna pull over? Or get yourself into a wreck? Who will help Kade then? Kade needs you whole, Ollie. He was hurt, and he’s going to need you like a drowning man needs air.”
I scowled at him because he was right. But the last person I wanted to rely on to help find Kade was Jacob.
“I know you haven’t forgiven me. It’s my fault you guys were involved at all, and now Kade’s missing. That’s my fault. I get it, and that’s okay. But let me help. This all happened because of me anyway. Let me help you get him back.”
Which was part of the reason I didn’t want him around. If he hadn’t come back into my life, would we even be here? Would Kade be missing? Would I be dancing around a lifetime of cranial damage? I just couldn’t take it anymore. I collapsed onto the bed in a heap, letting the tears flow, and struggling to suck in air. Goddammit, I needed Kade for this. With him it had almost been easy. He always saw the attacks coming and could talk me down faster than anyone I’d ever met.
“Whoa, baby, whoa.” Jacob tried to hold me, but I shoved him off and buried my face in Kade’s pillow. It didn’t smell like him anymore. Just like my tears. But it was his. Damn him. He promised to never leave me. And when I was really truly positively certain that I had fallen madly in love with him, he was suddenly gone.
Jacob patted my back, whispering reassuring things. “We’ll find him. I’m sure he’s okay. Bet he’s going crazy trying to get back to you. Even more so if he knows I’m here with you. Not that I want to fuck you anymore since I like you as a friend and all, but hey, whatever motivates him, right?”
I snorted a laugh at the last; it hurt my head, but I let Jacob hug me. It was okay. Not awkward, like all the times in the past that we’d tried to be something other than fuck buddies.
“You’re my only friend now,” Jacob told me honestly. “With Kade gone, I don’t know who to trust. Not sure Kade would call us friends or not, but he’s likable enough. You picked a good one, O. We’ll get him back.”
“We don’t even know where he is.”
Jacob shrugged. “But I have a plan.”
I pulled away to frown at him.
“Been reading lots of detective novels since there are these two PIs I know.”
“It’s not like books or TV. Never that easy, and sometimes way easier.”
He pursed his lips in thought. “Yeah, but we gotta start somewhere, right? Did you know his family has more money than me? Big money. Old money. Powerful money.”
Kade had hinted of it, but since it always made his shoulders draw up with tension, I’d never pressed the issue or even questioned him about any of his past. He’d made it clear that his biological family was no longer a part of his life. I’d sort of thought that meant they’d disowned him. Except if they had, they wouldn’t have tried to institutionalize him in the first place. I don’t think either of us thought his family would be watching so they could swoop in and steal him again. “Yeah?”
“He changed his name too. Not long after entering the military. Last name, not first.”
That I knew since I’d run a thorough background check on him right after Will said he’d be coming to work at Haven with me. But again something I hadn’t asked about. Maybe I should have pushed. Maybe I’d know more. I felt like I knew Kade, the man who had been my lover, really well, but his past, any of it, including his time serving, I knew almost nothing. Even the names of the fellow Marines he’d lost when he was injured I only knew from his tattoo. He never spoke of them while awake. Though sometimes he called for them in his sleep. My therapist had advised me to give him time, and she’d handed me a long list of ways to broach the topic. Fear of him exploding like Nathan often had, kept me from trying. “They’re pretty big down there, I guess. Own half the town and businesses all over the world.”
Jacob picked up my suitcase and made his way toward the door of my room. “Weird family, though. As big as mine. Kade’s the middle kid. Can totally see that. Peacemaker type. Except when he wants to punch my face in.”
I wiped the tears from my cheeks and shoved my feet into a pair of sandals before following him down the stairs. My legs quaked, and my heart still pounded like I’d just run a race. Now was not the time to succumb to the wallowing. Only at night when I was alone did I allow myself to shatter that thoroughly. “You usually deserve it.”
Jacob laughed, and I thought for a minute he was laughing at my comment, until I entered the kitchen and found Newt lying on the dining room rug, surrounded by a half dozen of my underwear.
“Damn cat!” I stomped over and began snatching them up to dump them back upstairs. “Why are you being so damn weird?” He snagged a pair with one of his claws, threatening to tear it when I tugged. “Let go.”
Newt meowed a mournful sound. I knelt and scooped him up into my arms, hugging him tight. He let me, even bopped his little head to mine.
“We’ll get him back,” I promised our cat. Kade had said he thought the cat didn’t like him. That was such bullshit. I was going to make them have cuddle sessions if we got him home. When we brought him home. Shit.
“We’re going to bring him home,” I promised the air, needing to convince myself more
than anyone else.
“We are.” Jacob took the keys for my Bug and dragged the suitcase toward the garage. “But I’m driving.”
“You’re not supposed to drive ’cause of the hearing thing,” I pointed out.
“You’re not supposed to drive ’cause of the sparkle thing,” Jacob replied, copying me.
I growled at him. He just grinned back like the evil bastard he was.
“I could just call Ty. I’m sure he’d have a reputable driver I can hire.”
“No!” The last thing I needed was for Ty to know what I was doing. If Ty knew, he’d tell Will, who would probably impound my car to keep me home and have Britney sitting on me. I needed to find Kade and wasn’t about to let anyone stop me. “How are you going to get out of here without your guards?”
“I’m not,” Jacob said easily. “They will follow. Duke said he and his guys will keep their distance. They work for me. Not your overprotective cop and lawyer friends. They are a meat shield who take orders from me. But make no mistake, Ollie, if anyone comes at you or me with intent to harm, they are going down.”
I let out a long sigh. My life didn’t used to be this complicated. Not even when I was making close to a million dollars a year modeling. I looked down at the cat in my arms and knew what we had to do. “Grab Newt’s litter box out of the bathroom,” I told Jacob as I made my way to the cupboard to tuck some of Newt’s food and the water bottle bowl in my bag.
“You’re taking the cat?” Jacob asked me incredulously.
“He needs to see Kade too. We’re a family. Besides, Newt likes to be where I am.” Which was true. I carried him in his special backpack wherever I went. Even to the grocery store, no one had protested yet.
Jacob disappeared into the downstairs bath while I packed the car.
Chapter Two
“I THOUGHT I had a big family, but at least we were all born years apart. Someone should have told Kade’s dad to get the fuck off his mom. It’s like one every other year,” Jacob grumbled from the passenger seat as he reviewed information on my tablet. “And why are they all like hipster names? Peyton, Skyler, Madison, Kade, Ashlyn, Xander? Kade is the most normal name of the lot. Do you know how much shit I’d give you if you dated a guy named Peyton?”
“Peyton and Ashlyn are his sisters. Skyler, Madison, and Xander are his brothers.”
“Skyler and Madison? Are you shitting me?”
I didn’t shake my head because I had a headache. So far it was mild, but I knew eventually it would become unbearable. “He’s not close to any of them. Never was.”
“He’s the middle kid, though.”
“They institutionalized him several times. I think that’s enough to put anyone off people.”
“I can’t believe Kade is okay with you having this much info on him. And who decides an eleven-year-old is mentally disturbed? I can’t picture Kade torturing animals or burning down buildings.” Jacob had been digging through my extensive file on Kade for several hours. Reading everything he could, searching for more on the internet, and making notes about Kade’s family. “And why just him? I’m not seeing anything that says any of the other kids were ever treated like he was. The rest of them were prep school and piano lessons.”
That was a fact I found odd as well. Why had Kade been singled out? It couldn’t have been because he’s gay. Even now very few people would know he was gay unless they ran into us kissing or holding hands. Somehow I didn’t think as an eleven-year-old Kade had been so flaming gay his parents had decided to throw him in an institution. The attitude could be faked, but Kade just came across as the typical straight guy. Sure he was a little more in touch with reality than most heterosexual guys I’d met, but the world looked at him and saw a strong, masculine, good-looking, straight man.
“Paper records,” I told Jacob. Might as well have been smoke as far as I was concerned. Paper records were hard to find and almost impossible to get access to. The hospitals were out of business, doctors lost their licenses or moved to other areas of the profession. Who knew the real reasons behind Kade’s many hospitalizations? He’d never spoken of them to me with more than just passing acknowledgment.
“You’ve been with him a while. Does he seem unstable?”
“No.” Kade was the most stable person I’d known in my entire life. He didn’t doubt himself or hesitate. He was just Kade, ex-Marine, PI, and my lover. “Plus if he really had such a bad mental history, the military wouldn’t have taken him, would they?”
“Your brother had undiagnosed depression,” Jacob pointed out.
“PTSD,” I clarified. “That came after he got home.”
“Mhmm.” Jacob made a placating noise. “And how old were you when he came home the last time? How much do you really remember of his years serving?”
I remembered a lot of horrible things about Nathan’s years serving, though most of them had been relived in nightmares Nathan had screamed at me when I’d tried to rouse him. The stony silence had often been replaced with bitter tales of death and pain. In the end I’d stopped prodding him when he shut down. He never seemed to recall when he’d gone off on some tangent about the girl he’d seen raped and then dismembered by a dozen soldiers. Nathan had been horrified the one time I brought up a memory he’d accidentally shared. Our fight had been epic, and at the time I’d run to Jacob to escape, only to find him unengaged in us. “Why do you care?” I snapped.
He sighed. “Are we friends, Ollie? Like can we try and really be friends?”
“I’m not having sex with you.”
“I’m not asking you to. You’re the one getting defensive.”
“Don’t talk about Nathan,” I told him.
“But Kade was Nathan’s best friend. You can’t keep ignoring their connection.”
“Kade is not Nathan.” He’d told me so himself a million times. “He wouldn’t leave me willingly.”
There was a beat of silence that lasted long enough I had to glance over to see Jacob’s face. But his expression was carefully blank.
“Please,” I said after another minute.
“Okay, no Nathan,” Jacob finally consented. “Just don’t close down on me, and I’ll try not to do the same to you. If you need to scream, then scream. You want to cry, then cry. I’m not gonna judge.”
“Stupid therapy,” I grumbled.
He laughed lightly. “Right? Who do they think they are trying to fix shit?” He went back to humming softly. A few minutes later, I heard him mutter, “Fucking conversion therapy? You know how that messes people up?” But I said nothing. I didn’t want to think about it. It made my gut clench every time I imagined what they might have done to Kade, or be doing to him. I suspected his low libido came from his time in conversion therapy. It wasn’t something I wanted to remind him of, so we didn’t talk about it.
“I need to find him.”
“We will,” Jacob said, patting my knee absently. “You get to be the knight in shining armor this time.” He squinted at my sweater. “Or at least cashmere.”
I gave him a slight smile and tried to focus on the road.
“So mental illness runs in the family?” Jacob said after a while. “Kade’s mother’s sister committed suicide when Kade was little over a year old.” He flashed me the one picture I’d found of Kade’s father, Howard Almantey. Howard was young in the picture, maybe late twenties, and he stood beside what had to be Kade’s mother, Christine, a radiant blonde with upswept hair and an expression that said she was confident and powerful. Beside them was a sullen young woman. The girl, whose name had been Crystal, appeared to be either in her late teens or early twenties. Again there was little information to be found about her. She was beautiful, there was no denying that, even in the old photo, but her posture and expression were of someone who was tired of the world. Her suicide had been featured in a dozen articles about the family, as Howard had become the family patriarch a decade prior. However, little was said about Crystal’s life. Only that she’d always been a trou
bled girl.
“Kade wouldn’t have been old enough to remember her,” I told Jacob.
“His sister Ashlyn had just been born two months before.” He flipped through the folder about Crystal and the spreadsheet of information on Kade’s family. “Looks like Crystal was living with her sister’s family. They were taking care of her. I hope none of the kids saw what she did to herself.”
Crystal had died the same way Nathan had, a gun in the mouth. I didn’t want to think about it.
“No other siblings for either Howard or Christine, and both of his parents passed ages ago.” Jacob frowned at all the notes. “How do you wade through all this? There’s so much information.”
Only there really wasn’t. In today’s digital world, people’s lives were an open book. The schools they attended, sports they played, clubs they joined, places they worked, all of this was searchable. At least for the last twenty years or so. The Almantey history was limited. There were other databases to search, I just hadn’t had time to decode and break into them.
Jacob went back to grumbling as he read through my files and eventually put the tablet aside and stared out the window. If my silence bothered him, he said nothing.
THE FIRST leg of the journey was pretty uneventful. Without traffic, the GPS on my phone said it would take almost eight hours to arrive in Carlsbad, but I knew as soon as we hit LA, it would add at least another three hours onto our trip and had planned for it.
Four hours with Jacob humming and singing wouldn’t normally be annoying, but the headache hadn’t gone away, even with two pills. We were going to have to stop. I couldn’t hide the headache anymore. I’d planned to take a break about midday, linger a while so that by the time we hit LA traffic, it would be late and we’d be only hitting the tail end of the worst of it. What I didn’t plan for was the endless sunshine glaring off the water, cars, and windows, which made my head throb like an open wound.