“Four-thirty in the morning.”

He sank his fork into a cold flake of fish. “What are you doing up so early?”

“So late,” I corrected him.

“You haven’t been to bed?” Ryan asked, not bothering to cover his mouth. My mother would have been horrified. Maybe his deteriorating manners were the real reason she wouldn’t come see him. “So what was so important everyone forgot to feed the poor guy in the cage?”

I took issue with the sympathy Ryan seemed to think he deserved, but I kept my mouth shut. The more I pissed him off, the less likely he’d be to tell me what I wanted to know. “We’ve had a very eventful evening.” I leaned forward to make eye contact with him, and as I did, I noticed for the first time how much his face had fil ed out over the past three months. In spite of the lack of sunlight and fresh air, and the recently missed meals, he looked much healthier than he had in June, when our positions were reversed.

The fork paused inches from his mouth, a spear of asparagus impaled on the end. “What happened?”

“You’ll have to talk the Alpha into reinstating your security clearance before I can tell you that.” We both knew that would never happen, but because I needed information from him, I fought the urge to laugh at the disappointment in his expression. “However, I have a chance for you to earn a few brownie points.”

He bit the tip off the asparagus, his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What do you want?”

“Information.”

Ryan smirked as he chewed. “What kind of information, and how badly do you want it?”

“Badly enough to make sure you don’t get fed tomorrow if you don’t start talking. Right now,” I added, my face carefully blank as his smirk drooped into an angry frown. “I need to hear everything you know about Luiz.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Luiz?” Ryan relaxed visibly, slouching against the brick wall as he speared several slices of scalloped potato with his fork. “Why do you want to know about him? He’s dead.”

“How do you know?” Suddenly, I wished I’d brought a notebook, so I could take notes. Or at least have something to do with my hands.

My brother frowned. He swallowed his bite and took a long drink of not-so-iced tea before answering. “Well, I guess I just assumed he was dead, like everyone else did. Why? Did he show up?”

I ignored his question, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my forearm. Damn, I hate basements.

“You never met Luiz, right?” I asked, and Ryan shook his head, damp, stringy hair flopping. “Did you ever speak to him on the phone? Or hear Eric or Miguel talk to him?”

He nodded, pushing another asparagus tip around in a pool of hollandaise. “I heard Miguel and Luiz arguing on the phone a couple of days before they brought you in.”

“What were they arguing about?”

“How the hell should I know?” Ryan stuffed the bite into his mouth, then spoke around it. “They were speaking Portuguese. It’s not similar enough to Spanish for me to catch more than a few words.”

My ears perked up, almost literal y. “What few words did you understand?”

“Jeez, Faythe,” he said, pul ing one filthy-soled bare foot up onto his cot. “That was months ago, and I wasn’t really paying attention even then. I just wanted them to shut up so I could hear the game on TV.”

“Just think about it for a minute,” I insisted. He scowled but closed his eyes in concentration.

“They said something like ‘mujer,’ which means—”

“Woman. I know.” I waved off his explanation. “What else?”

“Give me a minute!” More chewing, and more thinking, and I couldn’t be sure which was more difficult for him. “Um. I heard them both say

‘humano’ a couple of times. And maybe ‘mordedura’—bite. And I know I heard something like ‘mate,’ which means ‘kill’ in Spanish, because I remember thinking they might have been arguing about killing me. But neither of them said my name, so that may not have been what they meant, after al .”

I nodded grimly, almost certain he was right, though killing Ryan was surely somewhere on their to-do list. It sounded to me like they were arguing about their pet project.

The grandfather clock in the foyer chimed five times, and I yawned into my palm, making a mental note to start some coffee when I went back upstairs. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. Luiz said something about someone’s nose. Nariz. Then Miguel kept saying something about a university. Universidad. He seemed pretty insistent, and Luiz kept saying no. Yelling it, like he didn’t want to go to school. I thought maybe Miguel wanted him to go learn some English.

But then, when Miguel said they were going after you, I realized that they were probably arguing over how best to snatch you from school.”

I barely heard a word Ryan said after “nose,” because that told me all I needed to know about the last things Luiz said before he disappeared. It sounded to me like Miguel wanted Luiz to take a second shot at me, but Luiz wanted nothing to do with it. Since I’d broken his nose, I couldn’t really blame him.

“When exactly did they have this argument?” I asked, rising from my chair to pace in front of his cage. “What day was it?”

“Shit, Faythe, I don’t know.” He grimaced at the last bite of cold halibut on his fork, hovering halfway to his mouth.