The Thief (Black Dagger Brotherhood #16)(74)

Perhaps it was best for her to abandon the search for the bodies of her brothers. If she were honest, the reason she wanted to find them was not so much the closure and burial, although she would feel she had done a right and dutiful thing if she could put them in proper graves. No, she was desirous of the knowledge that they were well and truly gone. That she didn’t have to worry about her reinstating the business only for them to miraculously show up and steal her future away—

Vitoria slowed and then halted.

“What?” Streeter groaned behind her.

Well…there it was. The cut-through they had been looking for, the lane so narrow and unmarked that she had missed its appearance on the ascent due to the snow’s masking properties: It was only thanks to this different viewpoint that she could pick out the break in the forest, the hole in the evergreens.

“We have found our drive,” she announced.

Success gave her a burst of energy, and it certainly improved Streeter’s respiration. The pair of them made quick time through the man-made tunnel in the forest and then there it was. Yes, this had to be her brother’s bolt-hole: The structure was single story and unadorned, only a row of thin windows just under the roofline allowing light into the interior. A snow-covered car was parked off to one side and there was a petroleum tank the size of an outhouse cozied up to the opposite flank.

Although none of that was what told her it was Ricardo’s.

The door was the telltale. It had no handle, no knob, just a security keypad that offered a choice of either a numerical grid or a thumbprint reader.

If this were just a hunting cabin in the woods almost at the border of Canada, why would you need such security?

Vitoria went forward, the piff, piff, piff of the snowshoes loud in her ear. She had never been much for premonitions, but as she came up to the door, she had one that was very clear.

Bad things happened here. Very bad. Although…not recently: the snow cover was utterly undisturbed by tire track or human print, and God knew that snow-impacted car hadn’t been driven anywhere in quite a while.

Before she attempted the numerical lock, she paused and looked to the heavens. After offering a prayer in Spanish, she put in their mother’s birthday—

The shift of the lock was automatic, and as if forces from the other side of the grave wanted to urge her entry, a release of interior pressure pushed at the door, causing it to open a crack.

Vitoria clicked on her headlamp, the beam a bright, burning blue that hurt her eyes until they adjusted. Extending her hand, she opened things wider, that shaft of light from her forehead penetrating the dense dark.

“Whattaya see?”

She didn’t bother answering Streeter. Bending down, she released the snowshoes and stepped free of them. “You stay here,” she told him.

“No problem.”

As she put one foot over the threshold, she turned…and her headlamp illuminated a severed human hand that lay on the floor, just inside the door, like something one might find in a gag gift store. The shriveled fingers were curled up around the palm and frozen in place, the decayed flesh gray and white.

It had been cut off cleanly.

“Be on guard,” she heard herself say.

“Yeah. Okay.”

As Streeter answered, she frowned and realized she’d uttered that to herself. Forgetting all about him, she went in farther and closed the door most, but not all, of the way. God knew she wasn’t about to take a chance on getting locked inside…except there was no need to worry. There was the same keypad and thumbprint reader on the interior—

That was what the hand must have been used for, she thought. Someone had escaped from here, getting free of her brother’s vengeance by cutting that hand off and using its print. Because they hadn’t known the code.

Taking a deep breath of air that was as cold as that of the outdoors, she smelled mold and must, but not the telltale sweet stench of mortal decay. Then again, given the layer of dust on everything? Nobody had been in here in a long time—so whatever bodies there might be had gone through their decomposition process already.

She saw the boots first. Then the legs, long legs encased in blue jeans that were stained—so this was not either of her brothers, as neither Ricardo nor Eduardo ever wore those kinds of pants. The male torso plugged into the denim was clothed in a loose sweatshirt, and there were hands at the base of each arm. So this was also not the one whose fingerprint had been used for escape.

As she inspected the grimacing face, she winced. The man had been in great pain as he had died, his gray, frozen visage bearing a stunning wound in one eye’s socket.

A burn, she thought. Someone had stabbed him in the eye with a torch or a flare.

Moving her head around, she inspected the interior and found nothing surprising: Galley kitchen, tiny bathroom, cots to sleep on. There was a minor degree of inhabitation debris like wrappers for foodstuffs and soda cans, as well as some weapons, so she guessed they had been here for a time before the ruckus had occurred.

Training the headlamp higher, she noted those narrow windows all the way at the top of the walls. Smart. One wouldn’t want anybody seeing inside—

Across the way, there was another door, one more akin to that of the entrance than the bathroom.

Vitoria stepped over the body and proceeded over to what turned out to be a stairwell down into a cellar. As her beam penetrated the black hole, something skittered out of the way at the bottom, and she began her descent cautiously, putting her gloved hand on a railing that was bolted into the wall.