Diamond in the Ruff (Pedigree)

  "No isn't an option," he snarled as his fingers clamped on her mother's arm, dragging her away.

  Corra was a shivering puppy behind a trash bin in an alley when Columba's voice pulled her up again. In moments, Corra moved back through the landscapes to the professor's office. Eyes open, she stared at the ceiling, tears streaking her cheeks and neck. She drew a deep, deep breath and exhaled, letting anger settle in place of the fear.

  The shadow finally had a face.

  What did she do with that?

  "It's a good start," Columba said, handing her a glass of water as she sat up.

  Start?

  Not what she wanted to hear.

  But she had a face.

  Darcy grumbled as he unpacked his bag from the weekend.

  He stopped when he pulled out the folded vest that Corra had bought him and held it up. He smiled. It did suit him. Who'd have known she had a thing for guys in vests? He shrugged and hung it up with his jackets then, tossed the other clothes in the laundry.

  Caleb still hadn't opened the damned envelope.

  Darcy would have placed a hefty wager that the man would have ripped it open at first touch to see the documents inside.

  He hadn't.

  Darcy was sure the only reason he hadn't opened it was to torture him, knowing how curious he was.

  His phone pinged. He sighed, picking it up from his desk.

  Meeting.

  Joe Suricatta didn't like to be kept waiting. Darcy shot Caleb's empty desk a glare. No envelope. No Caleb, and now he was being summoned to a meeting.

  He grumbled all the way to the boardroom outside Joe's office.

  The grumbling ceased the instant he saw the meeting attendees through the windows that lined the room from the hall.

  Joe leaned against the blank whiteboard on the wall, ankles crossed, waiting for him.

  "'Sup?" Darcy said as he sauntered in and dropped into the chair next to Corra, across from Caleb and Bryah.

  Sylla Columba entered the room from Joe's office with file folders, which she placed on the table.

  Joe waved a hand toward the folders, indicating that they should each take one. Darcy pulled two toward his half of the table and slid one over for Corra, then picked up the other for himself.

  Suricatta spoke. "As you know, FUC has spent these last weeks interrogating Leonard Couleuvre after Bryah and Corra's rescue."

  Bryah squirmed on her seat, and Caleb placed his hand over hers, settling her.

  "Don't worry, Bryah. He won't be getting out of our prison any time soon. We don't take abduction and sale of shifters lightly. However, he has been cooperating for certain prison privileges."

  This elicited a snort and eye roll from Bryah.

  "In any case, he has been somewhat cooperative." Joe went silent for a long moment, drawing everyone's attention. "Bryah wasn't Len's primary target." The light glinted off his glasses as he turned his head toward Corra. "Bryah was Len's opportunity for revenge, but he was really after Corra."

  "Me? What the hell—why?"

  "Len's job was to secure and deliver you. He didn't care enough to ask why, and they weren't forthcoming. He did say they were some kind of underground group that had been around a very long time."

  Joe pushed away from the wall and paced a moment. "Since Bryah started researching your family with her limited access to our resources, she's made a lot of headway."

  "What's this have to do with their abduction?" Darcy asked at the sudden change of topic.

  Bryah's expression mirrored his own confusion.

  "Bryah, tell us all about your findings."

  She shrugged. "Okay, but I was hoping to get it all put together in a really nice report with pretty pedigree charts and everything."

  Suricatta gestured to the whiteboard behind him. "Improvise."

  "Caleb has been very generous in collecting some of his few family papers from home so I could work on this, which I did all the time you two were gone," she said to Corra and Darcy. "With a copy of your parents' marriage record, I was able to really get moving and fill out a lot of your ancestors."

  Darcy started tuning out as she described the record sets she’d gleefully scrounged through, waiting for her to get to the point. To him, it was all names and dates, like history class but without battles and riots to make it interesting.

  "Anyway, I followed the paper trails and newspaper articles, and there was a recurring theme. There was a long-standing rivalry between your mom's family and your dad's, going back a couple hundred years. At one time, their families had been close. Differing opinions landed them on opposite sides of the war, people were hurt, and their friendship became enemyship."

  "Is that even a word?" Darcy asked.

  Bryah shrugged. "It is now."

  "I'm still not sure what this has to do with Len," Corra said.

  "Names," Joe said. "And places. Bryah, draw the pedigree."

  Snapping up the colored dry-erase markers from the ledge, she proceeded to draw two rough charts, starting with James Terry in blue and the other with Jenny Sweetland in red.

  Caleb's eyes were glued to the whiteboard. Corra wrung her hands on her lap.

  "Hey, are you all right?" Darcy whispered.

  She nodded, cast him a weak smile, and drew a shaking breath. "I never knew anything about where I came from, and now it's all right there. So many names."

  Bryah stopped writing and turned to Corra with a quick accusatory glance at Joe. "This is why I wanted to make a special report for you."

  "A lot of this is all new for me too," Caleb said, and Darcy could see that Bryah's whiteboard scribbles were meaningful to him too.

  "It's okay. It's obviously important for some reason," Corra said, smiling at Bryah, who nodded and got back to work. When she finished, there were still a lot of empty slots.

  "Okay, so the Sweetland family-your mom," she said to Caleb and Corra, "migrated to Canada, where they stayed, while various branches of the Terry family—including yours—eventually migrated west."

  "Where Mom and Dad met, and I was born," Caleb said.

  "Right. So it looks like your mom, Jenny, enrolled at a college on the West Coast. I found her transcripts and the campus newspaper she worked for. Not sure why she went all the way out there—maybe for the program or just a chance to stake her claim to independence and be as far away from her parents as possible. Whatever the reason, this puts her in the same area where James Terry—or Jimmy—was living and working. He was also not in the same town as his own family. Jenny's transcript is incomplete. She didn't graduate. The telephone book and directory has them in the same household for a couple of years. By the time Caleb was born, they're listed in his birth town under the same surname."

  "They were married right before I was born," Caleb said. "So, they moved back to dad's family home. I know we were there for a bit before we moved across the border into Canada."

  "Right," Joe said, plucking the green marker from Bryah's fingers. "The young couple clearly wasn’t content staying close to your dad's family, having moved away again."

  "Yeah, well, they're a rowdy bunch. I don't blame them," Caleb said.

  "But," Joe went on, "seems the family followed them?"

  Caleb nodded. "Yeah. I grew up with dad fighting in the family fight rings. Then I was pulled into it, along with my cousin. That's why I'm here at the Academy. I didn't want to drown in that life like my dad did. I don’t think Mom did either, and maybe that's why she left. Those rings need to be shut down."

  Darcy recalled Caleb mentioning this before. It was a way his dad could support his family. As he grew older and couldn't fight anymore, the family had put more and more pressure on Caleb and his cousin Zeek to take his place and keep making them money.

  "What does this have to do with Len kidnapping Corra and me?" Bryah asked, replacing the markers on the ledge.

  Joe uncapped the green marker and turned to the wall, his arm moving in loops as he circled a number of names along Jame
s Terry's pedigree branches. Then he drew lines and added names along either side of James' name, including a woman's name, Sheila, with a line dropping down from it to the name Zeek.

  "Caleb, what do you know of your family's operations outside the fight-rings, which are illegal to begin with?"

  Caleb shrugged. "Nothing, really. Aunt Sheila insisted that Dad kept Zeek and me focused on the fights. We all knew there were other things going on that we weren't privy to. As the matriarch of the family, I think she and Dad were trying to shield us as much as possible from what was really going on. They kept us in the dark.” He blew out a breath as he ran a fingertip along the edge of one of the folders on the table. “And since I left, I know even less. I tried to convince Zeek to leave, too."

  "I saw a lot of those names popping up in newspaper articles and police reports when I was researching your parents," Bryah said.

  Pointing at the green looped names and additions, Joe said, "All these names do have police reports connected to them and are in our databases."

  "So what… are these guys like the Italian mafia of the West Coast?" Darcy asked.

  "More like the Dixie mafia of the West Coast," Joe corrected.

  "Fuck. Me," Darcy said, sliding his eyes to Caleb's face then to Corra, who sat ramrod straight on her chair as she and Caleb stared at one another.

  "Shit," Caleb said, swinging his gaze back to the board. "What does this mean for Corra?"

  "We aren't sure yet," Joe said. He placed the lid back on the marker with a loud snap then tossed it back onto the ledge with the others.

  Corra finally turned to Darcy. "Your mother said that my family was an ambitious bunch." The color had drained from her face. Even her lips were pale as her glossy eyes stared at him.

  Darcy swallowed down the heartache her expression brought up in him. "You're not them," he said, reaching for her icy hand. "Neither of you are." He turned to Caleb, who sat quietly, rubbing his hands over his face.

  Caleb slapped his hand down on the folder, still waiting on the table and pulled it open. Reminded of its existence, Darcy did the same.

  Inside were a number of sheets of printed reports and several photographs.

  From across the table, Caleb sucked in a breath.

  Darcy glanced up as Caleb's face drained of color. Catching Darcy's eye, Caleb said, "Zeek."

  "Shit."

  "Yeah."

  There were other photos. Another was a much older and more menacing version of Zeek. Darcy held it up.

  Glancing at it, Caleb nodded. "Zeek's dad, Rolland LeBrute."

  "Looks like a rough guy."

  "Rollo? He is. Nobody messes with him. He's gorilla; Zeek takes after him."

  "Not canine, like us?" Corra asked, her eyes still taking in the names on the whiteboard.

  Caleb shook his head. "He was in the rings for a while, too. Powerful fighter. One day he stopped, and we saw less and less of him around."

  "That guy has a very long list of police reports and arrests and very few convictions." Suricatta leaned over Corra's pile of papers and picked one report out of the bunch. "He was in the same prison at the same time as Len. He got out a couple of months before Len did."

  "You think he was Len's contact with the family," Corra said.

  Joe nodded. "We still don't know what their motive was. And since you were the intended target, it's probable they'll try again."

  Professor Columba's voice from the back of the room startled Darcy, having forgotten she was there. "They're an old, established, powerful family, and they keep their business close to the vest. It's hard to break secrecy."

  "Unless you're part of another established powerful family that is tapped into the powerful-family rumor mill," Darcy said, looking at Corra. "There could be something in that envelope."

  Corra worked her lip between her teeth, staring at Darcy.

  19

  "I just wasn't able to get close enough to her. She was glued to that cat all weekend," Zeek said to Rollo.

  "Excuses. You've failed to gain her agreement to meet with us twice now. We need to get her on her own. And now that she's back at the Academy, it'll be next to impossible."

  "Not impossible. She goes to the local watering hole frequently."

  "Alone?" The voice was skeptical.

  "No. Easier to approach. The trick will be getting her away from Caleb and that cat long enough to get the point across."

  The older man snorted. "Fucking Caleb Terry. As protective as his father was."

  "Uncle Jimmy was a good man."

  A hard stare lanced the younger man. "Sentimentalist. He lived in the past. Don't make his mistakes."

  "Yeah, I know. Keep your eye on future opportunities. Thanks for the fatherly advice."

  Mouth twisting behind his goatee, he said, "Just keep your head where we need it, and you'll get the Old Man's attention. Maybe even replace me when I'm done." He clapped his son on the shoulder in some brittle attempt at parenting. It was hollow.

  "Sure. That'd be great."

  "That's where Jimmy failed Caleb. He couldn't get him to think ahead. Always in the moment or lost in the past."

  Zeek wasn't so sure about that. Caleb said he was getting out because he wanted a better future. He'd asked Zeek to go with him. Zeek had plans of his own. He was going to solidify his place in the family—like his father had.

  Caleb had been right about one thing—a clear head was necessary. Kicking the drugs and alcohol had improved his situation ten-fold already, though thoughts of the high still pulled at his focus. Since his dad had come back and taken him under his wing, things were looking up.

  He didn't know why the family wanted to meet with Corra; he wasn't quite sure he cared. Caleb's reaction to the idea had made things complicated for him. He had to be seen as capable, so he needed to find a way to make this meeting happen.

  He'd also heard about the recent abduction. All he knew was that the hired goons had failed to deliver, gotten violent, and fucked up bad. The only way anyone could have screwed up a simple job that badly was by letting personal vendettas override the Old Man’s business.

  The Old Man wanted Corra cooperative.

  Idiots. What was the point of messing the women up like that?

  He glanced at his father, not so sure he wouldn't use that tactic himself. No, that wasn't true. He knew he would if he thought it would get him what he wanted.

  Zeek swallowed his disgust.

  He rolled his shoulders in determination. He was going to make this meeting happen, smoothly.

  Corra's brain hummed after watching Bryah sketch out her entire lineage in minutes. She hadn't known what to expect when finally faced with this moment. Overwhelmed wasn't one of them. All those people. She—and Caleb—came from all those people.

  Then the gear shifted to some of those people trying to get to her for some shady reason.

  She finally pulled her eyes from the whiteboard and looked at the photo Darcy had let drop to the table.

  She gasped. "Oh my God!" Finding Professor Columba's startled face turned to her, Corra said, "That's him. That's the face in my dream."

  Columba paced the room, and then she finally looked up at Instructor Suricatta. To Corra, she said, "Are you all right to recount your dream to Joe?"

  Heart hammering in her throat, she swallowed and nodded, eyes flicking up to Caleb then dropping to her hands, her thumb worrying over her fingers as she spoke of the last moments with her mother, which she saw over and over again in her nightmares.

  "That's the man that dragged Mom away the last time I saw her."

  Caleb shot to his feet, nearly knocking his chair over. His eyes met hers. Anger and fear burned in them.

  "Zeek came to see us last week to bridge a meeting between me and the family," she said to no one in particular.

  "Do you think the person following you over the weekend is this Zeek? Or Rolland?" Suricatta asked.

  Corra looked at Darcy. "I couldn't see him very well; it was dark
. Nor could I smell him well enough with the wind blowing his scent away from us."

  Darcy shrugged. "Could be. Size and general shape, yeah, maybe, but I can't be sure. I wasn't able to get a scent on him either."

  "He never felt menacing. I didn't get a sense of danger," Corra murmured quickly.

  "Seems to me like they're trying a different approach after the Len fiasco."

  "So they're sending Zeek to lure her in. And then what? She disappears like our mother did?" Caleb's wide eyes turned back to Corra. "Could she still be alive?"

  Her heart dropped. Head shaking, she said, "I don't know, Caleb. I clearly remember she was very sick. She was desperately trying to contact someone for me to go and live with. Maybe, whoever was supposed to be on the other side of that wall…" She swallowed.

  "Maybe she was trying to reach out to her parents. I suspect they may have been estranged, given the long rivalry between the Terry family and the Sweetlands."

  "Ridiculous," Corra growled.

  Bryah shrugged.

  "It happens. I've seen it," Darcy said, his expression solemn. "Romeo and Juliet."

  Corra had seen, firsthand, Darcy's mother's reaction to his desire to choose his own life. What would she have done if he'd told her he was going to marry one of her longtime enemies? Generational grudges.

  Her thoughts returned to the folder. "Darcy, did you throw the envelope away?"

  "No, I gave it to Caleb."

  Caleb instantly reached down, hefted his bag up from the floor, and dropped it onto the table. The zipper shrieked as he ripped it open, and a moment later, the neat manila envelope was in shredded pieces falling to the floor. Bryah was leaning over his arm, trying to see what it said, while Instructor Suricatta eased around Caleb's other shoulder.

  In all the time since she and Bryah had been at the Academy, she'd never seen her brother so flustered as the papers trembled between his hands.

  "May I?" Columba's soothing voice slid across the room, pulling his attention. He nodded, handing her the sheets.

  Everyone stood watching her while she read through them, Suricatta's fingers tapping the tabletop.