Page 22 of Old Secrets

“I have my ways of making you bite, and they involve handcuffs.”

“For how many hours?”

“Approximately eight, assuming I trick you into using your teeth appropriately.”

Would either one of us survive through eight hours of that? “You can try to convince me later. Back to work. So far, we know someone in this mess was aware I’m not precisely human. The people—or person—who set me up for adoption doctored my birth certificate so Ma and Pa assumed I was a newborn. In reality, I’d been a newborn for a period of at least six years. Ma must have known something was wrong with me, as she hid my condition and slow aging, making Pa sneak me to doctor’s appointments. That leads me to believe Pa had no idea what was going on, and the arrangements were made with her rather than both of them.”

“Those are sound theories,” Jake replied, narrowing his eyes. “Perhaps she was told you had a delayed development condition that otherwise did you no harm?”

“She tried to beat the fox right out of me, Jake. And she did. I’d always assumed she hadn’t wanted people from her church to ask questions about my behavior—but what if she had been warned about how I would behave growing up?” The possibility bothered me. “That would imply it wasn’t the Greenwich operators behind my transfer and adoption. Perhaps she was paid off to do it? I don’t remember us really actually struggling for money, and once I started hunting out fox holes, we were able to move quickly and without difficulty. As a child, I had no way of understanding how strange that was, but now? Everything about it is strange. Where did she get the money?”

“I don’t know. If there was a financial trail, I didn’t get access to it.”

We both eyed the pile of paperwork we’d failed to investigate, opting to keep each other in bed upon becoming overwhelmed.

I groaned. “Or we just missed it. We’ve neglected a lot of paperwork.”

“Karma, we’ve had over ten thousand pages of documents go through our RV in the past six months. Nobody expects us to be perfect, and our brains have been frying from trying to go through everything. If it weren’t for this trip, this batch might have been the one to do us both in.” In a louder voice, he said, “It’s like Mellisa wants to kill us using paperwork.”

“I do not,” the woman called back, and after a moment, she walked into our suite. “What are you two complaining about now?”

We pointed at the paperwork we’d brought with us.

“I don’t see what your work has to do with me.”

Jake engaged me in a staring contest and raised a brow.

Damn him and his pretty eyes, able to manipulate me into doing the work he wanted to dodge. “We’re trying to figure out my ma’s role in this mess. We’ve already figured out she wasn’t the first woman who took up the role of being my mother, but my first adoptive parents were murdered—probably by the same people behind the Greenwich kidnapping and the Henry disappearance.” I still had no idea how the Henry boy had escaped. I did my best to avoid working with that portion of the disaster, leaving it for Jake to sort out.

He hadn’t felt a need to update me on what he’d found, assuming he had found something.

I needed to do better about asking him if he was hiding things he thought would disturb me. Both of us struggled with that problem. I wondered if we’d actually move beyond the damage we’d done to ourselves and each other.

We’d find out eventually.

“I see.” Mellisa took the seat next to me, and then she whistled, which summoned Amelia, who sat next to Jake. “It seems they’re ready to discuss Karma’s adoptive family situation, Amelia.”

“About fucking time,” the Fenerec stated, and she buckled into the seat despite the pilots having done an admirable job of dodging turbulence. “I was beginning to wonder if the denial phase would ever end.”

“Denial of what? That she tried to kill me? I got over that one pretty quickly,” I admitted. “Even Mellisa said I processed that part really well.”

“It’s true. She even got to the general acceptance phase, acknowledging it wasn’t ever her fault. Amelia is more referring to the piling evidence your ma was more involved than we care to think about.”

“I don’t know if she was actually involved with the Greenwich operators or if there’s another party who was working on my behalf. I’m thinking there’s some other party who was working on my behalf. The Henry case has a lot of similarities to my case. As in the bodies and their condition. It makes me wonder if Jacob had help escaping from them—and if I had been helped, too. I mean, I must have been helped. I was just an infant at the time.”

“Or you shapeshifted,” Jake said. “Jacob’s a young Fenerec. Accidental ritual—and his family didn’t know it.”

“Pardon?” I blurted.

“Jacob’s a young Fenerec. He may have shifted to escape. He was not responsible for the deaths, though. But he may have transformed to his wolf to escape. I had smelled the wolf, but I hadn’t involved you with that portion of the investigation.”

Right. “Because I didn’t know about wolves back then.”

“Exactly so. But that’s why Jacob relaxed around us really quickly. You smelled of safety and security, and I smelled like another wolf—and his wolf would have recognized mine meant no harm. I did alert the appropriate people he was a probable stray so he could get into a pack environment.”

“He’s all right?”

“Jacob? He’s fine. If the Greenwich operators show up around him again, they’ll get a very violent surprise. His new pack is on guard, and they don’t have many puppies.”