bureau, too. She had emptied the closet, emptied the drawers, emptied the blanket chest at the foot of the bed. She had stripped the bed, packed up the sheets, folded up the blankets. But that was as far as she had gone. She had intended to give it all to charity. She still did.
Not yet, though.
Maybe . . . not ever.
It was hard to part with the inanimate objects her sister had chosen and worn, collected and kept. As much as Helania told herself that none of it was Isobel, and as much as her logical side believed that, her heart would not budge.
She might as well have been giving away parts of the body.
Rubbing tired eyes, she leaned back into the sofa cushions and closed her lids. It didn’t take her long to picture that male, the one with the dark hair and the black clothes and the aristocratic inflection to his voice.
The image that persistently invaded her thoughts was of him standing in that cut of illumination between the two buildings, his breath leaving him in puffs of white, his big body poised, his eyes staring into the darkness.
Directly at her.
When they had gone back into the club and sat on those folding chairs with the Brother, he had looked at her the whole time. Part of her wanted to believe—needed to believe—that it was just part of the questioning, the investigation, the job he had been sent by the Brotherhood to do.
A professional obligation.
But another, deeper, more worrisome side of her . . . wondered about things that should not have been on her mind at all.
Things like maybe he had stared for another reason.
“You have got to stop this,” she said out loud.
Upstairs, there was a resounding thump!, which was good news. That was the outer door to the humans’ apartment shutting. Things would quiet down now.
Another image of that male popped into her head. It was of when she had first seen him down in that basement corridor. He had been backing away from the open door to the storage room where that female had been killed, his head turned away from the cell phone in his palm, his eyes squeezed shut as if he were trying to wipe something out of his mind.
Perhaps a picture of that murdered female.
You can trust me. I won’t hurt you—
As her phone went off with a text, she frowned and glanced over at her cloak. The black folds were hanging on a peg by the door, next to her parka and her yellow rain slicker. Getting to her feet, she wondered who the wrong number was looking for.
It was not someone reaching out for her.
Both parents gone. Sister . . . gone. No extended relations. And as for friends? Isobel had been the social one, and after her death, all those people who had orbited her sister’s charismatic center had spiraled off in search of another sun around which to circle.
Maybe it was the Brotherhood.
Helania dug into the cloak and took the burner phone she used out of the hidden inner pocket. It was a text from an unknown number:
I just wanted to apologize if I didn’t handle things as well as I could have tonight. I’m worried I made you feel uncomfortable by racing after you. I am very sorry. Please do not be deterred from sharing things with Butch or anyone else. All that matters is that we find out who is hurting these females. Thank you for reading this, Boone
Helania froze where she stood.
Then she looked over to where she’d been sitting and wondered if he’d somehow picked up on the fact that she’d been thinking about him.
Back on the couch, she read the message through two more times, noting that unlike the texts she’d used to get from Isobel, there were no abbreviations. No emojis. No text grammar. It was more like an email. Or a handwritten letter.
Abruptly, she realized she was sitting forward with her phone cupped in her hands.
Like she might do something with it.
Like she might reply to him.
Her heart rate jumped into a higher gear, and she felt a flush hit her face. As her fingertip floated across the phone’s screen, she watched from a distance.
No text. Nope.
Things were ringing.
She slapped the phone up to her ear, shocked that she had put a call through. She had no idea what she was going to say or why she was calling him. Especially as she was just a civilian, and he