Chapter 100: HE GAVE ME A PHOTOGRAPH

Chapter 101

Ren

The office had gone dark around me without my noticing, the last of the daylight bleeding out of the windows while I sat there with my elbows on the desk and my head in my hands, trying to make sense of numbers that refused to make sense.

Darren knocked once and let himself in anyway, the way he always did when he didn’t like what he was about to say.

"You should eat something," he said, setting a folder down on the corner of the desk instead of a plate, which told me exactly how much he actually cared whether I ate.

"What is it."

He didn’t answer right away. That was the thing that got me first, before a single word out of his mouth...Darren not answering right away.

In eight years I could count on one hand the times he’d made me wait for bad news instead of just handing it to me clean.

"Sit down," he said instead.

"I am sitting down."

"Then brace yourself." He pulled the folder open and turned it toward me.

I looked down at a photograph clipped to the top page, and for a second my mind simply refused to do anything with what my eyes were showing it.

Priya.

It was a photograph of her laughing, Theo on her hip, taken at some birthday party months ago.

"Why is this in a case file, Darren."

"The print from the windowsill came back," he said quietly. "It’s hers."

The words landed somewhere behind my sternum and just sat there, refusing to sink any further, like my body was waiting for me to tell it this was a mistake before it let itself feel anything at all.

"Say that again."

"I ran it twice," Darren said. "I didn’t want to bring it to you off one pass either. It’s a match, Ren. Ninety-eight percent."

I stood up. I don’t remember deciding to. My chair hit the wall behind me and neither of us so much as looked at it.

"She had Theo," I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. "She had her son. Lumi without knowing, handed him straight into her arms."

"I know."

I was pacing now, three steps one way, three steps back, my hands opening and closing at my sides because they needed somewhere to put the thing building behind my ribs.

"She begged me to bring Lumi home. I trusted her and all along, she was working for..."

"Ren."

"Say something useful, Darren."

He waited until I stopped moving. He always did that, let me burn through the first wave before he gave me anything else to hold onto, and God, I hated him for it and needed him for it in the same breath.

"There’s more," he said. "And you’re not going to like it any better than the print."

"Tell me."

"Her father used to work for The Vale." I lifted an eyebrow up because I didn’t understand what he was referring to.

No. I refuse to understand what he said.

"Her father drove for the family, years back. Lumi’s dad’s personal driver before his disappearance." The room tilted slightly.

I thought I knew everything, thought nothing went unnoticed under my nose.

But I wasn’t even sniffing enough and let things happened that I’m no longer sure I have control of anymore.

"Priya grew up around that house, Ren. Wherever her dad went while he was working. She’s known that family since she was a kid. She just never once mentioned it. Not to you. Not to Lumi, as far as we can tell."

I thought about how good she’d been at all of it. How natural.

"She’s been inside this the whole time," I said, and hearing it out loud made something in my chest go cold and very, very still. "Since before any of us ever knew her."

"We don’t know that yet," Darren said, careful now, watching me the way you’d watch a man standing too close to a ledge.

"Growing up around that house isn’t proof she did anything. It’s the print that’s the real problem, and even that only tells us she was there recently. Not why."

"I want to see her."

"Not like this." He stepped in front of the door before I’d even finished the sentence, one hand flat against my chest.

I let him, because some small, still-functioning part of my brain knew he was right even while the rest of me wanted to put my fist through something.

"If she’s involved and you go in there like this, she lawyers up or she vanishes, and we lose whatever she might still lead us to. You go calm. You go like you don’t know a thing."

I stood there a long moment, breathing through it, feeling my wolf claw and circle just under the surface, furious in a way he hadn’t been since the night I found Lumi on that floor.

"Fine," I said finally. "Your way."

This was about Lumi and not my ego so I have to thread cautiously.

For once I need to work with my brain and not my fist.

But I’ll get to the bottom of it all. I do not care how long it takes me.

I’ll make sure they all rot in jail and then I’ll bring Theo back to Lumi and make her my mate.

....

I found her three days later at the little park two streets from her building, the one with the cracked green bench where she used to bring Theo and her own sons.

She was alone this time. Everything in me wanted to walk up to her and shred her into pieces but I held myself and reminded myself why I’m doing this.

It’s for Lumi.

"Ren." She looked up, and for one unguarded second before she could arrange her face into something warmer, I saw it plainly.

Fear. Not surprise.

"Mind if I sit."

"Of course not." She scooted over on a bench that was already wide enough for us.

"How’s Lumi?" she asked, too fast, filling the silence before it could settle.

"Getting better," I said. "The words are coming back."

"That’s wonderful." Her voice cracked slightly on the last word, and her hands found each other in her lap, twisting, a habit I hadn’t noticed on her before because I’d never had a reason to look.

I watched the swing set instead of her face. Gave her room. The way you leave a cornered animal a gap it thinks is an exit.

"I keep thinking about that day," I said. "The day she dropped Theo with you."

"You’ve asked me this already." Each word placed like she was crossing ice.

"I know. I just can’t stop thinking about it." I let a beat pass. Let her sit in it. "We got a print back. From the room they found her in."

Her face lost its color all at once, the way a light does when you flip the switch.

"It wasn’t her father’s," I said. "It wasn’t Callum’s."

"Ren, I..."

"I know your father drove for her mother," I said, turning to look at her fully now. "I know you grew up around that house. Long before you and Lumi ever became friends."

She didn’t deny it. She just sat there with both hands pressed over her mouth, tears sliding silent between her fingers, and in that one unraveling silence I understood that whatever this turned out to be, it had been years in the making, and none of us had ever seen it coming.

"I can explain," she finally said, the words barely making it past her hands. "Please, Ren. Just let me explain."

"You get exactly one chance," I said, low, the voice my pack had learned over years never to test twice. "Start talking."

She dragged in a breath that shook the whole way down, wiping her face with the heel of her hand like she could wipe away the last few minutes along with the tears.

"He came to me," she said. "A few months before Lumi went missing. I hadn’t seen him since I was a girl, Ren, I swear to you. He just showed up outside my building one evening like it was nothing, like eleven years hadn’t passed at all."

"Lumi’s father." She nodded, her throat working.

"He said he needed my help. He wanted me to get close to her. Closer than I already was. He wanted to know her schedule, her habits, who she trusted, who she didn’t."

"And you said yes."

"I said no." Her voice cracked sharp on the word, angry now, angry at herself in a way that sounded old, worn smooth from being repeated.

"I told him to leave. I never liked Lumi much before any of this. Becacuse I remembered how he treated my father. Like he was furniture. Like a man who drove him around for a decade didn’t deserve to be looked in the eye. I wasn’t about to do him any favors."

"So what changed."

"He told me it’s what my father would have wanted me to assist him." She laughed, short and broken, no humor in it anywhere.

"Said my dad would have loved seeing us talking again. I didn’t understand that. My father hated him, Ren. Hated him with everything he had, right up until the day he died. It made no sense."

"And then?"

"Then he gave me a photograph."

She reached into her bag with hands that hadn’t stopped shaking and pulled out a folded print, worn soft at the creases like it had been handled too many times, and held it out to me.