The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(25)

“Why not?”

“Vic has been teaching him the Disappointed Look. I can’t get another of those looks in the same twenty-four-hour period. And I told him I was leaving soon.”

Mercedes just looks smug, which does not bode well for me.

“Mercedes . . .”

“I’ll offer a deal.”

“Your deals suck.”

“If I don’t tell Vic or Eddison, I get to tell Marlene and Jenny.”

Vic’s mother and wife. That might . . . that might actually be worse. “No deal.”

“Then I’m telling Vic and Eddison.”

“Telling us what?”

“Nooo,” I whine, and Mercedes and Cass snicker at me.

Vic stands in the doorway in the rumpled jeans and faded polo that are his sole concession to coming in on a Sunday, his weathered face both kind and stern. Bran’s at his shoulder, and at the sight of me he frowns and eases past Vic to enter the room properly. “Are those yesterday’s clothes?” he asks.

“These are today’s clothes.”

“Because today is still yesterday,” Mercedes adds helpfully.

She isn’t close enough to kick.

“Eliza . . .” It’s hard to tell from that sigh if he’s Eddison or Bran right now. When we first decided where the boundaries were, we said being in a Bureau building automatically required Eddison and Sterling, not Bran and Eliza, but over time the boundaries started smudging to actively working, and then started smudging a little more. Kind of like the boundaries between team and family, and this team threw those out the window long before they met me.

“When was the last time you ate?” Vic asks.

“Ooh, I know that one.”

He crosses his arms over his chest with an unimpressed look. Then he winces slightly and shifts the position a little lower. His scar must be pulling tighter than usual, which is generally a sign of him being too tired. I am not, however, going to point that out right now, because it will come back at me with added attack power.

“We ate dinner after Gala left. Around seven or eight.”

“Did you eat anything after? Drink anything?”

I wheel over to the trash can and look inside. Except apparently I didn’t notice the cleaner coming through, so I have no idea if there was snack detritus in there from munching and not paying attention to it. And the headache starting to demand notice says I probably didn’t drink anything, or at least not enough.

I’m starting to understand why Shira insisted on being my roommate through college, even though our scholarships would have let us spring for singles instead. She may be the only way I survived it.

Apparently not answering is answer enough, because all four of them glower at me. “I’m sorry!” I cry. “So sue me if I get a little focused!”

“This is not a little focused,” Cass points out.

“Lehi lehizdayen.”

“E vaffanculo anche tu,” she retorts cheerfully.

Mercedes and Bran roll their eyes, as if we don’t spend half our lives listening to them bicker in Spanish. As if Priya, who resolutely refuses to learn Spanish purely to tease them, doesn’t answer in French when they do it in front of her.

“Ma decided to make breakfast for all of you,” Vic says, voice deceptively mild, “but I’m not entirely sure you deserve it if you can’t take care of yourself properly.”

“You’re withholding food to punish me for not eating?”

He blinks at that, then chuckles and shakes his head. “Well, when you put it that way.” He picks up the brown paper grocery bag at his knee, moving carefully, and sets it on the table.

Marlene Hanoverian owned her own bakery most of her adult life until she sold it to one of her daughters and retired. Then, bored as hell and incapable of sleeping past four in the morning, she started baking again and relied on her son and granddaughters to get rid of it all. Marlene’s baking is amazing. Even after a series of small strokes over the past couple of years have had her reluctantly slowing down and transitioning from a walker to a wheelchair, she’s happiest baking.

Along with a tinfoil twist of buttery soft croissants still warm from the oven, there are Tupperware bowls filled with a mixture of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, and tiny grilled tomato chunks. I reach for my bowl, but it’s intercepted by Bran—and when he does this, he is absolutely Bran, on the clock or not—so he can take my tomatoes and give me his hated mushrooms. It started with him taking things I actually don’t like in exchange, but if I like everything in the meal, he’ll take what he thinks is the least likely to get him stabbed with a fork.

Attempting to take my bacon would definitely get him stabbed.

Has gotten him stabbed.

Wow, I need to eat.

“So what time did you guys actually get back?” I ask around a mouthful of egg.

“Almost ten-thirty. We just went straight to Manassas.”

“Is Cass living out of her go bag for the duration?”

Occupied with trying to shove an entire sausage link in her mouth at once, Cass simply nods.

“Any updates?”

“They’re already starting to phase some of the officers out of the search,” Mercedes says. “I get it, there are other crimes, but it’s hard to explain that to scared parents.”