Page 31 of Lure

“Nobody makes Am do anything she really doesn’t want to do. She’s a fighter. She’d fight with every ounce of who she is and she’s smart as hell. No, if they tried to force her out or do something illegal, it wouldn’t end well for them.”

I had zero doubt about that.

“That fits with the profile,” Bones said. “So what we have is a pair of sisters set up and targeted. One is an attorney and the other a model. Your sister does a lot of pro bono work, she’s not corporate. You do a lot of corporate shoots and brands.”

“So?”

“So, there are only a couple of places your work and hers intersect.” Bones raised his eyebrows as though daring me to deny it.

“Our work doesn’t intersect.”

“Except you paid down her loans.”

I shrugged that off. She had tons of scholarships thanks to graduating at the top of her class and being brilliant. What loans she’d needed for bridging weren’t something she should have to worry about, “There are no debts between us.” There never had been and there never would be. “She supports me and I supporther. That’s how it works.” Especially with there only being the two of us now.

“Understood. Then we’re back to which of the pair of you was the primary target.” Bones cocked his head to the side, studying me. “We can’t eliminate your sister being a target particularly after the response from her law firm.”

“Arguably,” Voodoo said. “They could have been misinformed by whomever took her. It could be another method of covering their tracks by eliminating who might report her missing.”

That made a sick sort of sense.

“Kind of hard to do with me.” I had a lot of clients and connections. Then there was Eleanor. She would take a torch and set the world on fire. It had been weeks already. She had to be…

“Hard is not impossible,” Bones said.

“Okay.” I didn’t like the sound of that. Should I ask the question or just wait?

“There are no news reports about you being missing. Nothing local or national. Nothing on web servers or gossip sites—the closest we could identify was a possible blind item and it mentioned yachting.”

Yachting. That was the last thing I wanted to talk about.

I gaped at him. “What do you mean no one reported me missing? Eleanor would be—” My stomach flip-flopped all over again. I had to put the coffee cup down when it sloshed over my fingers. “Eleanor would not buy any two bit excuse and if I scrubbed on a contract, she’d hunt me down herself.”

“There is no easy way to tell you this, Grace. I am sorry to be the one to inform you that Eleanor Hightower was in a car accident. She was declared brain dead. Her family agreed a few days ago to take her off life support and donate her organs.”

If there were more words, I didn’t hear them. I couldn’t. Not when the roaring in my ears drowned everything out. Someone swore. The table was shoved backwards. Goblin barked.

Then it all just shut off.

Chapter

Twelve

ALPHABET

“Goddammit,” I swore as Lunchbox barely got the table shoved away from her with one foot as she dropped. Bloodless, she’d taken an almost haunting white pallor. The contrast with her deep blue eyes had been startling for the point two seconds before she pitched forward.

Emotional body blow after body blow had rained down on her slim form. For all that she was a looker—and holy shit was she ever—she looked like this fragile, pale imitation of herself. All the life and vibrance sucked out of her and leaving her collapsed like a broken doll.

Voodoo had popped forward and caught her head against his palm even as Lunchbox sent the table away. Bones grabbed her coffee cup as it pitched forward, launched by the force of the shove.

His sigh seemed both aggrieved and worried. The worried was the only thing that had me fisting my temper. Goblin had sounded a warning but she had already fainted.

“You could have done that with a lighter touch, Captain,” Voodoo chided Bones before he picked up Grace. She seemed even smaller now than she had before. The fierce, larger-than-life personality she radiated was such a contrast to the rest of her.

“Wouldn’t have mattered,” Bones said, setting the coffee cup down on another table. “Hearing someone you cared about has died is never easy even if they are expecting to hear it.”

“She thought we were going to tell her that she’d lost her sister.” Lunchbox raked a hand through his hair as Voodoo set Grace down on the sofa.

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