Chapter Twenty-five
Tess had a full day of appointments and walk-ins at the clinic, work she was grateful for because it helped give her something to think about besides Ben's disturbing telephone message. Yet it was impossible to put his call out of her mind completely. He was in some serious trouble--injured and bleeding besides.
Now, it seemed, he had simply vanished.
She'd tried calling his apartment several times, and his cell phone, the area hospitals... but there was no sign of him anywhere. If she had known how or where to contact his parents, she would have tried them too, even though the odds of Ben turning up there were slim to none. As it stood, the only other thing she could think of was to go past his place after work and see if she could find some sign of him there. She wasn't holding out a lot of hope, but what were her alternatives?
"Nora, patient in Two needs a combo test and urine sample," Tess said, coming out of the examination room. "Can you get those for me while I check the X-rays of our collie with the joint inflammations?"
"You got it."
"Thanks."
As she grabbed the films for her next patient, her cell phone went off in her lab-coat pocket, the vibration beating against her thigh like bird's wings. She dug the device out and checked the ID to see if it might be Ben. The number was blocked.
Oh, God.
She knew who it was, who it had to be. She'd been suspended in an awful state between anticipation and dread all morning, knowing that Dante was going to call. He'd called her apartment as she was leaving early that day, but she'd let the blocked call go straight to voice mail. She hadn't been ready to talk to him then; she wasn't at all sure she was ready now.
Tess walked down the hall to her office and closed the door, her spine sagging against the cool metal. The phone trembled in her hand as it rang for the fifth and probably final time. She shut her eyes and touched the talk button. "Hello?"
"Hey, angel."
The sound of Dante's deep, delicious voice sent a slow current through her. She didn't want to feel the warmth that spread along her limbs and pooled in the center of her being, but it was there, melting the edges of her resolve.
"Everything okay?" he asked when she fell silent, an air of protective concern in his tone. "You still with me, or did I lose you?"
She sighed, unsure how to answer that.
"Tess? What's wrong?"
For a long few seconds, all she could do was breathe in and out. She hardly knew where to begin, and she was terrified of where it was all going to end now. A thousand questions crowded her mind, a thousand doubts that had been raised in the hours since she'd listened to Ben's bizarre message.
Part of her doubted Ben's outrageous claims--the rational part of her that knew better than to believe there could be monsters loose on the streets of Boston. Yet there was another part of her that wasn't as quick to dismiss the unexplainable, the stuff that existed with or without tidy logic or conventional science.
"Tess," Dante said amid the quiet, "you know you can talk to me."
"Do I?" she said, finally pushing words out of her mouth. "I'm not sure what I know right now, Dante. I'm not sure what to think--about anything."
He swore, a snarled oath spoken in Italian. "What happened? Are you... hurt? Jesus, if he touched you in any way--"
Tess scoffed. "I suppose that answers one thing for me already. We're talking about Ben, aren't we? He was the drug dealer you were after last night?"
There was a slight hesitation. "Have you seen him today, Tess? Have you seen him at any time since you and I were together last night?"
"No," she said. "I haven't seen him, Dante."
"But you spoke with him. When?"
"He called last night and left a message, evidently while we were... " She shook her head, not wanting to remember how wonderful it had felt to lie in her bed in Dante's arms, how protected and peaceful she' d felt. Now all she felt was a pervading chill. "Is that why you've been screwing around with me, because you needed me in order to get close to him?"
"Christ, no. It's a lot more complicated than that--"
"How complicated? Have you been playing me all this time? Or did the real game start the night you showed up here with your dog and we--Oh, my God, now even that makes more sense. Harvard isn't your dog at all, is he? What did you do, take some stray animal off the street to use as bait for reeling me into your sick game?"
"Tess, please. I wanted to explain--" "Go ahead. I'm listening."
"Not like this," he growled. "I'm not going to do this over the phone." She felt a dark tension growing in him as he spoke, could almost see him pacing on the other end, alive with restless energy, his black brows low over his eyes in a scowl, his strong hand raking over his scalp. "Listen, you need to stay away from Ben Sullivan. He's involved in something very dangerous. I don't want you anywhere near him, do you understand?"