A nurse came into the room to take his vitals and ask him a bunch of head-injury questions. Victor flirted outrageously with her, and she tossed a maybe-smile in his direction before leaving.
When she closed the door, Dusty continued their conversation. “Someone is after Grace. She tells me you’ve been helping her out. I’d like in on it.”
His hand shaking, Victor picked up a Styrofoam cup of water, missed his mouth twice with the straw, then finally managed a sip. “You know the players?”
“Rush and his family, specifically Porter. John and El.”
Victor put down his drink. His eyes seemed to clear. “Specifically Porter?”
So the guy was going to feel him out first. “Yeah. Mukta has been using Gracie’s existence to bribe Rush for thirty years.”
Victor pressed the button on his bed and sat up straighter. “So why not Rush Senior?”
“Well, he’s been dealing with Mutka for decades. He’s got no reason to balk now. More likely the son, the campaign manager who would’ve had to vet his own father, discovered what was going on and decided to put an end to it.”
“Seems like you got it all worked out.”
“Come on, Victor. Get over whatever bug flew into your sweet tea and remember this is about Grace.”
Victor scratched at an itch in a somewhat obscene place. “John and El have a money market account. One of them took out fifty thou last week and put it into an offshore account. A similar transfer of money happened right before Gracie was shot at.”
That was an odd coincidence. But Dusty didn’t buy them as perps. Still, a niggling voice told him there was something there. “Anything else on them?”
“I spotted his wife, El, taking pictures of Gracie’s club.”
“The wife?”
“She has a history. Got into a fight with another girl over her ex-boyfriend a dozen years back. She might’ve used those photos to help someone plant explosives.”
“Outside the club? Doubtful.” But if she’d been looking for an architectural detail—could she have spotted something that would lead her to the elevator?
Victor shifted, made a face.
Dusty stood, reached out a hand. “Thanks. I’ll get out of here.”
Victor ignored the hand. “Don’t ask her to choose between you and her family. It’s not right.”
Dusty dropped his hand. “Get some rest.”
Out in the hall, Dusty considered the brick of truth that Victor had just lobbed at his head. He was right. He couldn’t ask Gracie to make a choice between him and her family. The choice was his. So could he stand by not just Gracie, not just her family, but her mother?
He honestly didn’t know.
Chapter 43
As the summer storm neared, the sky became a field of gray-blue. The wind picked up and whipped the late-blooming white flowers from the olive-barked Amur maackia. They drifted across the road, like petals cast before a bride on her way down the aisle.
Gracie usually loved this time of year, the magical drive through the flower-strewn country road that led to campus. Today, those petals reminded her of ash.
And lost limbs.
Including Victor, eight people had been injured badly enough to require hospitalization, though none as seriously as that woman who’d lost her leg. The straight shooter. All the way down to her drink.
Gracie closed her eyes, kept them closed. Pain pressed against her chest like a boulder.
Dusty drove, steadfast and intent behind the wheel of her car. They’d been awake for days, not just hours. And in that time they’d shared a lifetime. A heat like nothing she’d felt in her life, a connection, and then a crash back to reality. The anger and sadness when he’d admitted the focus of his investigation was Momma had been crushing. And then the explosion. He’d thrown her to the ground, saving her from worse injury. He’d then risked himself for those in the club and had stuck beside her afterward.
And if she was honest with herself, as much as it scared her, she was so glad to have him here, to have him by her side.
Gracie opened her eyes and shifted her head toward Dusty. He had healing cuts from shattering glass along his handsome face. He caught her looking, winked. “Looks worse than it is.”
True. And the explosion, as bad as it was, could’ve been worse. She was fairly certain it had been set to distract from whatever those two people who’d broken in upstairs were looking for. What had they been looking for? Had they known about her servers?
Dusty stopped at the elaborate wrought iron gate of the Mantua Academy campus. A security guard came out, checked the trunk, took their weapons and Dusty’s bat-belt, checked credentials, did a pass under the car, waved them through.
He looked over at her as he accelerated through the gate. “Hate to think what happens when someone who’s not family shows up.”
She smiled. “They don’t mess around.”
They paused at the first stop sign. She looked right toward the school, lined walkways, spires, and brick buildings framed by marble pillars. It hurt her heart to see it so empty. Since the drone bombing a few months back, students hadn’t been allowed to return.
“Which way?”
Gracie tried to answer but found her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She was doing it. She was bringing him to the house. Yes, he was no longer working on the case, but still…“Left here, right at the next stop sign, and then up the hill.”
He followed her directions up the big hill with the big house at the top. Big. It wasn’t just a McMansion or even a regular old mansion. It was the size of a palace.
It had to be to hide the operations center for the League of Warrior Women deep below ground. Hidden not just by earth but by a system that sent a false signal to any thermal imaging. Stealth technology that was closely guarded by her wealthy family. Because the idea behind the League—to help women—was simple, but the means to help them often complex.
She saw Dusty take in the huge home as they crested the hill. He looked over at her. “Bigger in person.”
He’d meant it as a joke, but a thread of alarm worked its way down her spine. Should she have brought him here? Her family was unlike any other in the world. This place. Her siblings. It could be overwhelming. John had hated coming here.
Dusty pulled around the fountain and parked in one of the empty spots opposite the large stone mansion.
Disconnecting her cell from the car charger, she got out. Dusty grabbed her suitcase from the back seat and followed her.
At the top of the stone steps, both massive front doors were thrown open. Between them stood Momma, with her sturdy body in a light blue business suit and matching niqab, and her arms spread wide in invitation. Gracie moved quickly up the steps.
Until that exact moment, she’d never known what it felt like to arrive here, like so many of her sisters had, broken and in need of respite.
For the first time, she understood exactly how this home, these grounds, would seem to those kids. A sanctuary, a place that called out, “Here. Put down your burden. You are safe. And welcome.”
She walked into Momma’s waiting arms, which came around her soft and secure. Momma smelled like Une Rose and home. She whispered, “It will be all right.”
Gracie didn’t realize she was crying until the second set of arms came around her. Leland. Then there were more arms. And she sobbed and lost herself in the feel of her large family.
She couldn’t see them with her eyes shut tight and trying to stop the tears. But she felt the love and warmth.
And then reality broke in.
“Stop stepping on my toes.” A scuffle. A shove. And some angry words in a foreign language. Chinese.
The group broke up, and everyone piled into the house. She sensed Dusty walk through the threshold behind her. Momma turned to Dusty. Her dark eyes, already so mysterious wh
en framed in her niqab, narrowed. “Aren’t you the young man who is investigating me?”
Sugar. She knew?
Chapter 44
Dusty had to admit it was a mite awkward, standing in the most lavish entranceway he’d ever seen, a multimillion-dollar mansion, while a family of rescued kids hovered on the stairs. And the woman he’d been intent on taking down for the last few years stood there, smooth as the silk covering her face, accusing him, pretty accurately, of spying on her.