Page 36 of Dark Rebel's Mystery

Jasmine ignored the jab. "Should I get glasses?" she asked, already moving toward the kitchen cabinet where they'd always been kept.

"Yeah, sure." Her father sat down on his favorite leather chair and motioned for the men to sit down, pinning Ell-rom with a hard stare despite being slightly drunk. "So, Eli. Jasmine tells me that you are a big honcho in that matchmaking scheme. Is that true?"

"Partially," Ell-rom answered, or rather the teardrop did.

"What's that?" Her father pointed at the device.

"It's a translator," Ell-rom said. "I'm in the process of learning English, but I'm not proficient enough to have a conversation."

"What language do you speak?" Her father was still eying the device suspiciously. "It sounds like that fake Klingon language fromStar Trek."

Jasmine laughed, but it sounded false even to her own ears. "It does, right? That's what I told him."

She walked over with the glasses, and the familiar dance of pouring drinks, making small talk, and waiting for the right moment began. But underneath it all, her heart was racing with anticipation and fear. When it was done, she would either have answers about her mother's disappearance, or she would find out that her mother was truly gone and the woman in Syssi's visions had been someone else.

23

MAX

Max waited patiently as Jasmine and Ell-rom engaged in small talk with Boris, using the opportunity to take light reconnaissance dips into the man's mind. The surface memories were mundane—fragments of television shows, an argument with his current wife about his increasing alcohol consumption, worries about a failing investment.

Beside him, Brundar maintained his characteristic silence, present but unobtrusive. They'd agreed to follow Syssi's intuition about Max taking point on the thralling, with Brundar as backup if needed.

As the whiskey level in the bottle dropped, Boris grew increasingly animated, his words beginning to slur. Max hoped that the man didn't have any hunting plans for the day. Mixing firearms with this much alcohol would be dangerous, and he was quite sure it was also illegal.

"You know, Dad." Jasmine's voice carried a forced casualness that made Max wince internally. She either wasn't that good of an actress, or her father was stressing her out. "Eli asked me about my mother, how she died, and where she was buried. I wasso embarrassed because I couldn't tell him a single thing. Don't you think it's time you told me what really happened to her?"

"No." Boris's response was sharp, and he emptied his glass down his throat and reached for the bottle again.

The question should be enough to bring old memories to the surface where Max could take a peek at them. He seized the opportunity and delved deeper into the man's mind.

The first memory hit him like a physical blow—raw anguish and panic as a younger Boris frantically called the police about his missing wife, then the desperation in his voice when they told him he had to wait twenty-four hours to file a missing person's report. The image of him rushing out of the house with little Jasmine and driving around with her in the back seat, then running around with her hugged to his chest while showing Kyra's photo to anyone who might have seen her.

The memory of little Jasmine crying for her mother twisted something in Max's chest. Then came the scene of Boris clutching Kyra's photo at night and sobbing into his pillow.

"They took her!" The words echoed through the memory, repeated desperately. "She said that they would come for her. What am I going to do?"

"Max?" Jasmine's worried voice pulled him out of Boris's head. "What's going on?"

He met her concerned gaze, then looked at Boris with newfound compassion. "Someone took your mother. Who took her, Boris? Who took Kyra?"

"Her family." The words seemed to be torn from him. "She said that they would come looking for her and that if they found out that she had married a Christian, they would kill her."

"But they didn't," Jasmine protested. "She sent you signed divorce papers from Iran."

Lost in the haze of whiskey and old grief, Boris didn't notice his daughter's inexplicable knowledge of events he'd never shared with her.

"They must have forced her to do that and then killed her. She said they would." Tears tracked down his weathered face. "They killed my Kyra."

Max felt his own throat tighten as Jasmine moved to embrace her father. The man folded into her arms, decades of grief pouring out in harsh sobs.

The scene shifted something in Max.

He'd come prepared to find a difficult man, perhaps even a cruel one, based on how Jasmine had described him. Instead, he found someone broken by loss, someone whose harshness might have stemmed from the pain of unhealed wounds.

When Jasmine turned to Brundar, her own cheeks wet with tears, Max already knew what she would ask. "Can you make him forget?"

Brundar nodded, understanding what she was asking. Taking away those old memories of pain was impossible, but Brundar could erase the memory of this meeting and of Boris telling his daughter about her mother.

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