know who, or why. Or where. It doesn’t give us anything that would lead to Arthur yet.”
“What about you? Are you okay?” Checker asked after a moment.
The question startled me. “I’m fine,” I said a little too harshly. “Just want to get him back.”
He hesitated, then frowned. “That seems like a pretty big coincidence, though, doesn’t it? That they’d kidnap your friend without there being some sort of, I don’t know, connection?”
“Selection bias,” I snapped. Refusing to acknowledge the possibility aloud may have been petty, but … it wasn’t like admitting it would help us find him. The self-recrimination twisted into barbs before I could stop myself. “Do you really think it’s so unlikely that your old friend D.J. would end up hooking up with some of the most dangerous people in the world all on his own? Arthur would’ve told you about investigating Teplova in the first place if this were a regular case, so I’m assuming he was tracking D.J. and then got mixed up in the rest of it. Willow says Teplova kept referencing D.J. all panicked.”
Checker’s head jerked. “Yeah, um. Probably whoever our murderer is just—hired him. I don’t know.”
“Diego said you knew him pretty well.” I felt a vindictive spark as he flinched, and tried to quash it. “Any guesses on his next move?”
“I don’t—I wish I knew.” Checker’s posture had gone so tense, it was as if he were about to make himself shatter. “It was a long time ago. And if he’s working for someone else, then—I swear, Cas, I wish I could help. If something happens to Arthur because of—or if something’s already happened to him—” His words strangled off like they had choked him. “That can’t, that can’t happen, all right?”
“Oh,” I said. “I forgot to tell you. Simon got intel that Arthur was seen alive earlier today somewhere. He’s working on the where. But alive.”
“Wha—he’s ali—you forgot? What the fuck, Cas!” Checker spun and grabbed for his keyboard, his phone-texting program summoned to the screen before I’d seen him hit a key. “Did you tell his family? Or Pilar?”
“Uh—” I’d been reaching for some sort of emotional high ground in this whole situation, some vengeful absolution—from any responsibility for it, from Arthur’s opinion of me and every assumption I’d been screaming to prove wrong. It all socked out of me, leaving me breathless and flat-footed. “No, I—”
“Forgot. Right. Fuck you.” Checker’s fingers clattered on the keyboard, the messages sending faster than I could have spoken them aloud. Heat rushed into my face and the back of my neck, my skin tingling with a thousand tiny needles, a buzzing in my ears.
This wasn’t the angriest Checker had ever been at me. But it was the first time I’d felt like this about it. It was worse than having a gun pointed at my face.
Much worse.
I would have liked to blame my forgetfulness on possible telepathic influence, or on whatever Simon was doing—there was something I was supposed to remember, and where had he gotten the intelligence about Arthur again? Fuck—but I wasn’t having any trouble remembering the actual information. I was just … the type of person who would forget to tell Arthur’s friends and family about it. Apparently.
The very type of person Arthur thought I was.
“So, you know Arthur’s family pretty well, huh?” I said, watching Checker send the texts.
“Yes. Can we do this later?”
“How well is well?”
He slapped the keyboard back and met my gaze defiantly. “They were almost my family too, if you must know. Arthur and Diego offered to adopt me.”
“What?”
“It would have been murder on their health insurance, so I said no. This was right after my accident, and I figured I’d let the state keep paying for the physical therapy. But they took me in, set me straight—saved my life, to be dramatic but truthful about it. Before them, I was pretty much the poster child for ‘messed-up teenager,’ and it’s not an overstatement to say I literally owe them everything. That’s it. Happy?” He pulled at his desktop, sliding himself over to start typing at a different screen. “I still have decades of tax records and client data to sort through, not to mention decrypting the rest of what we got. You should start with Dr. Teplova’s surgical methods; I’m betting you can—”
“Yeah, give me a workstation.” My breath was coming short now, like he’d stabbed me in a lung. Like they all had. “And then take five seconds and tell me what the