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“I think you’re going to like this one.” He polished off the last of his wine and put the glass on the counter behind him.
“I doubt it.”
“Ah, Genie. If you think of challenges as adventures, these costs are nothing more than new experiences that will help you grow.”
I rolled my eyes. “Your price, Cain.”
He licked his teeth with a purple, wine-stained tongue.
“I want your mother’s head.”
Chapter Sixteen
Everything in my body said it was time to bail.
Get out.
These two were fucking crazy, and I was better off taking my chances alone with the demon.
Then I remembered Heidi’s voice begging, Please, please, please. I remembered the eerie dead air in the house and that three girls were gone. I thought of the way Tansy had looked at me like I was her last and only hope, and I groaned.
“I don’t have my mother’s head.” Unless nightmares counted, because she had given it to me once in a dream.
“No, but I bet you know where it is,” Cain said.
I didn’t, not down to the marker or anything. My aunt Savannah had been the one who buried Mercy after Secret decapitated her.
But where my mother’s true final resting place was, I didn’t know. Yes, I could find out. But I’d gone a long time without knowing, and I was pretty okay with the idea of keeping it that way.
“What do you want with it?”
“That’s my business.”
“Considering it’s my mother’s head, that sort of makes it my business too, don’t you think?”
Santiago, who had already been promised his reward, got bored listening to us and went to the stovetop and moved the saucepot off the burner. He sampled it with his finger and stretched his neck side to side, debating whether or not he approved before giving a nod. He did all this as if he had no audience, and I suspected he didn’t care what we thought.
The man must have heard a lot of crazy shit in his time if an argument over someone’s dismembered head was too boring to listen to.
“I just want it. Why do I want anything, Miss McQueen? I want it so can I have it. So it’s mine and no one else’s. It has nothing to do with you.”
I recalled the familiar way he’d spoken about my family back at the bar and once again wondered if Cain had known Mercy more than he’d let on before.
A nervous-breakdown-inducing thought occurred to me, and I stared at him, searching his face for anything familiar. Anything that looked like…well, like me.
I had no idea who my and Ben’s father was, and if Cain cared so damned much about Mercy’s head, there was a chance he’d known her very well. Maybe in a Biblical sense? Maybe twenty-two years ago?
But there was nothing of me or Ben in him, which was both a relief and a disappointment.
Did I want Beau Cain as a father? Fuck no.
Did I want to know who my father was, even if it was someone like Cain?
I mulled that over.
Yes.
Only I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for in the face staring back at me, so he must have different reasons for wanting a dead woman’s head.
