From Sanctum with Love (Masters and Mercenaries #10)(73)

This wasn’t a therapy session, however.

“Has she agreed to go out with you tonight?”

Case nodded. “Yes. I think she’s interested in spending more time with your brother. He might be the one who gets her up and dancing and then I’ll handle it.”

“I doubt that.” Mia didn’t watch Jared. She watched Case. The few times she’d been in a room with Jared, she barely noticed him, but damn the girl lit up when the young Taggart walked in a room. If she was holding out on him, she had her reasons.

Could Mia be turned? Would she go against her family for a man she loved?

While he waited for a chance to tag her phone, he would also talk to her. He would try to get a better feel for the woman.

“Case is going to teach you what you need in order to follow the Lawless woman, but I’m here for a different reason,” Rush said, looking a bit impatient. He was out of place in the peaceful confines of the office. He sat on the couch, his big body rigid in a space that was supposed to be relaxing.

God knew he relaxed there. At least once a day for the last couple of days, he called her in and cuddled against her, their bodies tangled together while she talked to him about her life, her past, her friends, her everything. He would rest his head against the softness of her breast and spend an hour simply being with her.

He loved to scene, but those hours of peace and calm were so precious to him.

“You want me to tell you my brother is a serial killer.” This was precisely why he needed the calm with Kori so badly. Jared had flown back to Vancouver to shoot some promotional spots for his TV show, but he’d shown back up this morning.

They still hadn’t talked. He’d fully intended to sit his brother down and find out what he’d meant in the elevator that day at McKay-Taggart. Not everything Jared had said made sense. But the next time he’d seen his brother had been at Sanctum and he’d gone into teaching mode, and then Jared had been called away.

It had been so much nicer to concentrate on his new sub. His new girlfriend.

With Jared out of town, he’d been able to focus on her. All his nasty attention. Night after night. Twice during the afternoon.

It should have made him chill, but somehow f*cking Kori simply made him want her more. Even now he was thinking about her and wondering if she’d gotten his gift yet. She was outside in the lobby at her desk. Sitting there. Waiting for him. Fuck, he wanted her.

“I want you to do what we discussed. I want you to get involved in your brother’s life so you can figure out if he’s the one killing these women.”

He wished he could stop thinking about this. “He’s not. I grew up with him. I would have seen signs. I was responsible for him the entire time we were growing up. He wasn’t a bully. He wasn’t bullied. He was the kid everyone else loved.”

“He also grew up without a father and I suspect his childhood wasn’t as rosy as you claim. He had several visits to the emergency room and a couple of brushes with the law.”

Did the special agent think he didn’t know his own brother? “He got into some fights and he was always a clumsy kid. He had a couple of football injuries. I think he broke his arm during a game once.”

Rush’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, I’ve made a study of your brother. You’re talking about an incident in high school. A spiral fracture of his left arm. The only problem was he didn’t play that night. I checked the actual hospital records. He was taken to the ER long before the game that night. I suspect your brother suffered some abuse at the hands of a coach. Sometimes that can make a man like Jared feel small. Did you know that there was a rash of small animal disappearances around the same time he was in high school?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. My brother took in strays constantly.” Why would Jared have lied about how he’d broken his arm? He remembered the day. He’d been working and he’d come home to his mother worrying over Jared. She’d been sick at the time, too. It had been the early days of her cancer, the first rounds of chemo that had left her body devastated. Even as her hands shook because she hadn’t been able to keep anything down, she’d taken care of her youngest child.

Kai remembered how pissed he’d been because they didn’t have money for more f*cking medical bills. He’d had an argument with Jared about how much playing a stupid game was going to cost him.

Take care of your brother, Kai. He needs you more than you know.

Had his mother known something he didn’t?

“You know as well as I do that many serial killers start with small animals before moving to humans,” Rush said, a nauseating sympathy in his voice.

“Yeah, well, we lived in Washington state. You can throw a rock and hit a serial killer.” It wouldn’t do any good to argue with the special agent. He had preconceived notions and the only way to fix the situation was to prove it couldn’t be Jared.

Because it wasn’t. No matter what the man said, he couldn’t buy that his brother was a killer. He could buy that Jared was keeping secrets. It was time to acknowledge that his childhood wasn’t as cut-and-dry as it had seemed. Tomorrow morning he and his brother were going to have a long talk.

After he got through tonight. One clusterf*ck at a time.

“You’re being awfully narrow in your thinking, Special Agent,” Case interjected. “I’ve studied those files too. The brothers, Brad and Tad, they came from an abusive home. From the time their father left them, their mother went through multiple men, several of whom abused both boys according to CPS records. The boys went to live with their grandparents, but both of them were in and out of trouble. The grandmother had enough money and power to cover a lot of it up, but they both had some violent encounters.”