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“Even Rico.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I bet he bitched about it first, though, huh?”
He shoved me into the room. He followed me inside as I set my backpack on the edge of the bed. “Not a lot in here. Most of your old stuff is still in the other house. I wasn’t sure if you were ready for it, and Kelly thought it was best to wait. At least for now.”
They were right. It’d been a long day, and I wasn’t sure how much more I could take.
I looked around the room, trying to take it all in to see if something triggered in me—a thought, a memory, a remembrance of my time spent here.
There was nothing.
“You can do what you want with it,” Mark said. “Leave it as is or do something more.” He glanced at my backpack, and I had to stop from growling at him. He nodded and took a step back. “No one will take anything from you, Robbie. Not in here.”
“You already know what’s in the backpack, don’t you?”
He didn’t try to lie. “Yes. When we brought you back, we had to make sure there was nothing that could hurt us. I went through it myself.” He hesitated. “I found my brother’s journal in there.”
“Of course he’s your brother,” I muttered.
“Where did you find it?”
“Michelle’s office.”
“And you took it.”
I nodded.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It seemed important.”
“It is,” he said. “The others don’t know it’s there.”
“They don’t?”
He shook his head. “I figured you could be the one to tell them. To tell Elizabeth, when you’re ready. It should go to her.”
“Did you read it?”
He sighed. “I started to. I was greedy for it, for anything from him. But I realized it wasn’t meant for me. At least not right away. It should go to her before anyone else. Then she can decide what to do with it.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. “I don’t know why I took any of what I did when I left here. It’s weird, right?”
He rubbed a hand over his shaved head. “You already had it on you.”
I looked at him in surprise. “What?”
“You took that wherever you went,” he said, nodding toward the backpack, “when you left on assignment. It wasn’t because you didn’t trust the pack, it was just an extension of you. You had it with you on that first day you showed up on our porch. Said you traveled light, and for a long time, no one knew what you had inside. We did, eventually, when you let us in.” And then, “Still got the stone wolf, huh?” He said it like it was nothing, like it was just a simple conversation between friends.
I nodded, eyes narrowing.
“Take it out.”
My claws dug into my palms.
