The shop is so quiet I can hear the generator humming outside and the distant sound of traffic on the road beyond the tree line. Adam's arms tighten around me slightly, and I press back into him and let him hold me up while I think.
Someone who panicked.
Someone with powerful enough connections to make a police investigation disappear.
Someone who had been running collections from small independent pharmacies…maybe.
I turn it all over slowly in my head, trying to make sense of it.I need to get my hands on my notebook.
"That's all I have," Anton says finally. He looks at Cliff. "For now."
Cliff nods once. "Thank you."
Anton turns to leave, and something moves through me before I can stop it.
"Anton."
He stops. Turns back.
Everyone in the shop freezes.
I step forward, out of Adam's arms, and look at him directly. "Why are you helping me?"
The question hangs in the air between us, plain and honest and slightly too vulnerable for a shop full of people, but I need to know. I've been turning it over since Raff told me he'd gone to Anton, and I can't make it make sense. We weren't friends. We were barely colleagues.
He intimidated me, and I spent most of my time actively avoiding his attention.
"You're a good kid, Pérez," he finally says. "And there aren't many good people in my line of work." He looks down at the floor for a second, then back up at me. "And my parents were killed when I was young. I never got any answers." His jaw tightens slightly. "I know exactly how shitty that is. I know what it feels like to…" He takes a breath. "To not know."
He holds my gaze for one more second. Then, almost as an afterthought, "Milo misses you, by the way."
Something catches in my chest before I can stop it. A small, involuntary warmth that I immediately feel slightly ridiculous about. Milo is probably just bored. He never didwell without someone to talk at, and I was convenient. But still.
"Tell him I said hi," I say.
The corner of Anton's mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Then he turns and walks back through the bay doors into the afternoon sun.
The second he's gone, Adam's hand finds my shoulder, squeezing once, and I exhale slowly through my nose and turn back to the shop.
I can feel Cliff searching our bond, trying to figure out what I'm feeling.
Raff has his arms crossed, his jaw set, his gray eyes still fixed on the spot where Anton was standing like he's replaying the conversation.
“Are you okay?” Perrin asks.
“Yeah,” I say. "But I’d like to go home. I need my notebook." I look at Cliff. "I need to go through it. All of it. Everything I wrote down."
"Then let's go home," my mate says simply. "We'll look at it together."
For some reason,my notebook looks smaller on the coffee table than I remembered it. All my tiny notes are spread around, everyone taking turns reading everything through.
Raff shifts slightly beneath me, adjusting his grip on my hips. I lean back against his chest and look at the papers spread across the table.
I've gone over everything, front to back, pulling out every loose scrap of paper and laying them flat on the littletable.
Receipts. Torn envelope corners. Pages of dates and locations and partial names connected by lines I drew at two in the morning when I was too tired to be thinking clearly.
Hell, I even have a cocktail napkin with a detailed description of a dented soda can.
