The Curse of Tenth Grave Page 82
I rose onto an elbow beside him. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t find her.”
Alarm rushed over my skin. “She’s missing? I don’t understand. When was the last time you spoke to her?”
“Couple of days ago. She was setting up safe houses for the Loehrs. Scouting locations. Making the buys.”
“Safe houses?” I asked, surprised. “How many safe houses are we talking?”
“At the moment, ten. She was working on number eleven.”
“Ten?” I tried to stop my jaw from dropping. I failed. “We have ten safe houses?” Before I could stop them, tears amassed. “You bought ten houses? For, I don’t know, just in case?”
“Of course.” He said it like I’d grown another head.
“Reyes—”
“I told you. I’m doing everything I can to keep our daughter safe.”
I blinked and turned away. The depths of this man’s convictions astounded me. “I’m sorry. I got sidetracked. Kim?”
“Yes. She was looking at a house on an island south of Mexico. She was supposed to fly out today and get back with me, but she never texted me to let me know she’d made it.”
My shoulders stiffened. Kim and Reyes were close. If anything were to happen to her, I didn’t know how he would take it.
“I’m sure it’s okay,” he said, lying through his teeth. But I got the feeling he wasn’t lying to me so much as to himself. “She probably lost her charger. She does that.”
“Have you, you know, searched?” Meaning, had he searched for her incorporeally.
“Not yet.”
“We could send Angel.”
“We could, but I have him on another assignment.”
“An assignment? Like what kind of assignment?”
He draped an arm over me. “It pertains to one of those secrets I told you about.” He waited a moment and then said, “Go ahead. You know you want to.”
“Okay, seriously, can’t you just tell me one? It’ll be like opening one present on Christmas Eve. Then I’ll be satisfied and can sleep at night knowing that your secret isn’t that you’re really into women’s underwear or that you like Howard Stern or that you watched a snuff film once. If I just had those three things out of the way…”
“Fine.” He shifted to face me again. “You tell me one, and I’ll tell you one.”
I growled and buried my face in a pillow. “I can’t. Not yet. But soon.”
“Same here.” When I started to protest—an act I had zero right to do—he raised an index finger in warning.
I leaned forward. Wrapped my mouth around it. Sucked softly before sliding off it.
Reyes’s gaze didn’t waver. He watched with great interest, and I felt his pulse accelerate.
“Oh, wait,” I said, “what were you saying about money?”
It took him a moment to recover.
“That’s what I wanted to tell you. I’m out. I’ve gone through all of it redoing the building and buying the safe houses.”
“Oh, Reyes,” I said, now worried for him. “It’s okay. We have the restaurant and my business. We’ve never actually been in the black for longer than five minutes, but I can turn that around.” I thought about it and cringed. “Or, you know, I can try. I’m always getting lawyers who want to hire me. But they usually want me to get their scumbag clients off the very legit charge of drug trafficking or spousal abuse or cannibalism, but that was only once.” I looked at him, positive we’d be okay. “We can do this. I may have to sell out and get some creep off a couple of human trafficking charges, but we can do this.”
“You would never sell out. And I was fucking with you. I need you to know where everything is should anything happen to me.”
“What?” I scrambled up and sat cross-legged on the bed, the sheet covering my vitals since I’d recently lost my jersey and boxers. “What do you mean? Is something going to happen?” I gasped. “Is that one of your secrets?”
“No. This is just a precaution. We don’t live the safest lives. In general.”
“Oh. Okay, well, what do you mean where everything is?”
“Our money. Our lawyers. Our accountants.”
“You have more than one accountant?”
“We have more than one accountant. Seven, in fact. And one general manager. Basically you need to know how to get to any and all our resources. You have full access to everything, of course, so you can get anything you need anytime.”