Bianca inhaled through her nose when her daughter stood and displayed the copper puzzle box cradled in both hands. “That’s a trinket, Cheyenne. A very hollow and meaningless gesture from a man like the one who left it in that hotel room.”
“But you kept it.”
“I…” Bianca’s mouth hung open for two seconds before she shut it again. “I did. And for the life of me, I don’t know why.”
“Because you knew it was for me.” The drow halfling stepped toward her mother, sparing a glance at the copper box that had sat on the bookshelf in her room as a child, and more recently, on the dresser in her apartment—until the day she took it to Mattie Bergmann with more questions than the university professor could answer. “Didn’t you?”
“I certainly had no use for it.” Bianca lifted the glass of mineral water to her lips for another drink, but her eyes lingered on the puzzle box. “I did think, at one point, that it might have given you some comfort.”
“You used to say he left it for me. That he wanted me to have it, remember?”
“Of course, I do. Cheyenne, you have to realize that man had no regard for the consequences of his actions. Whoever he was, whoever he is, he seemed to think leaving behind a metal box would serve as enough of a gesture to garner…something from me. Sure, it might have been left as an apology or a symbol of appreciation, however vulgar that sounds. In all honesty, I think he didn’t want me to forget him. I couldn’t say all that to a child, Cheyenne. To you. Your father, the man you want so badly to find, wasn’t thinking of you when he left that box. He was only thinking about himself.”
Cheyenne steadied her breath and waited for Bianca to meet her gaze again. “I think I know what it is.”
Bianca froze. She glanced at the copper puzzle box, and one eye twitched in hesitation and suspicion. “Well. That’s your business. If you can find meaning in it, I’m happy for you. But I don’t want—”
The landline filled the study with a loud electric ring. Bianca blinked and glanced across her large desk at the cordless phone in its cradle. Neither of the Summerlin women moved until the phone rang a second time.
“Excuse me.”
Cheyenne gritted her teeth, clamping both hands down around the copper puzzle box. Whoever’s calling better have something important to say. Which they would, because Mom doesn’t give that number out to everyone.
Her mom stepped around the front of the desk and lifted the wireless phone from its cradle. “Bianca Summerlin.”
The woman’s voice had taken on its usual calm, confident demeanor as if the last twenty minutes had never happened. She licked her lips, then the color drained from her face.
Cheyenne frowned.
“One moment, please.” Bianca lowered the phone from her ear, stepped toward her daughter, and offered her the phone. “It’s for you.”
“What?” The word came out in a whisper. Cheyenne’s eyes widened. Her mom extended the phone a little farther, and the drow halfling took it in reluctant surprise.
I don’t get phone calls here.
The minute the phone left Bianca’s hand, the woman reached out to steady herself on the long, sturdy desk. She stared with wide eyes at the floor while Cheyenne set the copper puzzle box on her mom’s desk and lifted the phone to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Neat little trick you pulled with that phone we gave you, halfling. How’s the shoulder?”
Cheyenne jerked the phone away from her ear when she recognized Sir’s voice. Then she pulled up the sleeve of her t-shirt to glare at the two wounds on her right shoulder, and everything clicked into place. Sha’gron’s fingers pushing into the open wounds. The Troll healer telling Cheyenne to look away. The instruction not to wash the wound, which was strange, coming from a magical doctor. Rhynehart asking Cheyenne where he should pick her up instead of showing up at the VCU campus and ordering her into the Jeep—because he couldn’t pin her location by tracking the burner phone. So he’d asked for Sha’gron by name at Rez 38, and the healer had done her job and then some.
Rage and indignation seared through Cheyenne’s veins. The heat of her drow blood flared at the base of her spine, but with her mom standing right there, she pushed it back down. She lifted the phone back to her ear. “You put a goddamn tracker in my shoulder? We had a deal!”
Bianca’s head whipped up, and the woman stared at her daughter with wide eyes, still unbelievably pale. Cheyenne barely registered any of it.
“And you changed the terms, halfling.” Sir sounded like his usual smug self. “I won’t say I’m not impressed because that would be lying. I don’t appreciate lying, Blakely, and I don’t have a lot of tolerance for it, either.”
Despite the man’s voice worming its way into her head, Cheyenne picked up on a different sound, and it wasn’t coming through the phone—tires rolling to a stop outside the front of the house. Doors opening and closing. Multiple pairs of footsteps crunching across the gravel and making their way toward the wide stone steps up to the front door.
“That’s not how this works,” Cheyenne screamed into the phone. Then she dropped the receiver and stormed across her mom’s study before the handset bounced a second time on the finely woven area rug.
She charged through her mom’s house, down the hall, back through the clean, finely decorated living room used for entertaining a certain level of guest.
I’ll not be entertaining any of this bullshit.
The halfling reached the front door and nearly yanked the handle out of its setting when she let her drow blood take over. The front door slammed against the inside wall, and Cheyenne lost it.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Two FRoE operatives in black fatigues stood outside the front door. One of them
