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“No.” She found one boot next to her, the other several feet away by a rosebush. She wasn’t too steady on her feet yet, and stiletto boots didn’t seem like a great idea, so she kept them off.
Dayton still looked lost in his thoughts. “Did you bite me last night?”
“Uh, yes,” she said. “Sorry. I can help you clean it.” She felt the guilt rise in her again, burning her face. “It’s not something I normally would’ve done without asking first, but ... you know.”
He searched her face, a thousand emotions playing out in his eyes. “If I hurt you last night, I—I’m sorry. I would never ...” He ran his hands over his face a few times like it would erase what happened. “This is so fucked up.”
She had been in so many compromising situations in her past where consent was nonexistent. Hell, most women have, but she could see this was a new experience for him. “We were drugged, so we can’t blame ourselves for what happened. We can talk about it more later if you want, but first we need to get my toy bag and get out of here before they find us.”
Dayton’s expression turned all business then. Good. She needed him to be in alert-detective mode.
They half stumbled around the maze of the massive garden, trying to find their way back to the mansion, but they kept coming to more dead ends in the high hedges. Rae didn’t know how she’d found the secluded spot the night before, but now she wished she could remember the path they’d taken.
She stopped walking when panic crept up on her. “What if we get caught? Will your team know to come find us if you don’t show up at work this morning?”
One look at Dayton’s face and her heart sank.
“They don’t know we’re here, do they?”
“Rae.”
She threw her boots down. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Please, let me explain,” he said as he tried to hold her shoulders.
She pushed him away. “I can’t believe you. What if something happened to us? Those crazy fucks could’ve done anything after they drugged us!”
He held his hands out in front of him like he was trying to calm a wild animal, which was exactly how she felt. She wanted to punch him.
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“Tell me why right fucking now,” she said quieter. She was worried someone would hear her screaming at him.
“Okay.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, his eyes closed tight for a moment. He looked at her, and she saw pain in his eyes. “I was going to tell you, but I didn’t know how yet. I needed to come here, but the chief wouldn’t approve it, so I had to get here through you.”
“I don’t understand. Don’t they care about Thomas Highsmith’s case? Why wouldn’t they investigate a lead like that? And the missing women?”
“Because they’re not interested in messing with the Coulter family,” he said.
“Then why did you want to come here, Dayton?”
He walked over to a concrete bench and sat down, his face drawn. “I came here to find the man who murdered my cousin thirteen years ago.”
It was the last thing Rae had expected him to say, and she waited for him to say more.
“When I met you,” he said, “I knew you were hiding something. So, yes, I looked into you, and when I saw you had changed your name, I looked further, and I read the statement you made to the New Mexico police on the Katelyn Reid case.”
He knew about her being trafficked then. He knew about Beth and Maria, too, and what she had reported on Clint and Bobby.
“They let you slip through the cracks. It wasn’t right, Rae, what the police did. You deserved justice for what happened to you.”
“What does that have to do with your cousin?” she said.
“Her name was Tula, and she was so smart and talented. She used to win for her dancing at all the Red Earth Festival competitions. We grew up around each other, and then her mother passed when she was twelve, and she came to live with us. We were more like close siblings than cousins.” He paused, a heaviness entering his eyes. “We’re both Choctaw, but I never lived on the reservation like she did. My father’s half Choctaw and my mother’s a quarter, and they chose to live in the city where they thought I’d have more opportunities.”
This explained the eagle-feather tattoo. She knew different types of feathers were held sacred to the tribes.
“Tula had trouble acclimating when she moved in with us. She wasn’t used to being in a big city and not being surrounded by her people. I was three years older, and I tried to watch out for her, but she kept distancing herself from me and the rest of our family. Then she got pregnant at seventeen and became addicted to pills and then harder drugs. And she eventually turned to sex work.”
