Cuckoo (Kindred Book 3) (9 page)

She didn’t mind giving up CI. Working there hadn’t been the same since Brodie came into her life and she saw the truth of Grant’s capabilities. Now that he was dead, he could never be redeemed, meaning they could never go back to the way things were. Brodie had shown her that opportunities existed for her to have adventures and make a difference. CI had been a compromise, she’d settled there and convinced herself that she loved it, too afraid to take the chance of finding something more fulfilling.

The Kindred were her future and one she could be proud of, if Brodie didn’t lose his patience with her. Kahlil could offer the truth of the most pivotal moment in Brodie’s past. Her thoughts on the subject grew to critical mass until a burst of air came from her lips, and she dipped her head into her open palms. They couldn’t let this pass them by. If she was curious, Brodie had to be too. If the guilty party was out there, then there was a chance of justice, Kindred style. Brodie wouldn’t be interested in evidential proof or courts of law. This was his family. If there were secrets in her family, she would want to know them, so she couldn’t believe Brodie was that much different.

A buzzing sound interrupted her reverie and made her frown. She had no idea what could be making the sound in their bedroom, and it wasn’t a noise she recognized. Rotating her body, the first thing her attention snagged on was Brodie’s nightstand, where they kept the sex toys. His control in bed extended to every aspect of her pleasure delivery. 

Crawling to the nightstand, she pulled open the drawer to see if he’d found some way to activate the devices from a remote location. Everything in there was quiet. Brodie wasn’t sending her any message that she was to get started on the foreplay solo. 

The buzzing got louder and she slunk off the bed in a crouch, craning to follow the sound to a source. Settling on her purse, which was on top of her suitcase, she pulled apart the opening to see her cell phone illuminated in a green glow. Green. It flashed that color when someone was calling her apartment’s hard line.

Calls hadn’t gone through the physical phone line connected to her apartment for ages. During Brodie’s grieving period, Tuck had worked his magic and now they were part of her Kindred phone profile, meaning all calls to her apartment landline were routed to whatever was her current cell line. 

The number flashing on the screen brought a bitter taste to her tongue. It was her father. 

Clearing her throat, she picked up, watching the bedroom door in case Brodie came in to join her. “Dad?”

She didn’t even bother with hello. Pleasant social calls had never been a feature of their relationship. Bad news was the only reason she could figure for this call. 

“Zara,” he barked, in his gruff smoker’s voice. “Good. Thought your number might be different.”

Good guess because it had changed more than once. That he was getting to talk to her was a testament to Tuck’s skills rather than dumb luck. 

“What’s wrong?” she asked, backing toward the bed to lean on the foot-board. The last thing she needed was a battle with her family. Soon she was going to be working to convince Brodie of the merits of remaining faithful to his own and getting justice for his parents. “You never call, is there—”

“It’s your brother,” he said, giving her the courtesy of getting straight to the point. “We figure since you’ve been up in that big city with the fancy job for so long, you gotta have some serious dough, right?”

Money. Well, at least no one was terminal. As bad news went, she’d take financial worries over health woes any day. “I don’t... How much do you need?” She wasn’t rich by any stretch, but if her father was lowering himself to tapping her resources, they must be in serious need. 

“Just twenty grand.”

Just... Her mouth fell open. “I can’t get my hands in that much. Why do you need it?”

“Your brother got bit by the IRS, bastards, they want paid for doing jackshit or they’re taking the farm. That’s our land, been in the family for—”

“I understand.” Her father cared more for the dirt than he did his own daughter. 

Chastising her father and brother for not paying their taxes on time would be redundant and hypocritical. Her boyfriend shot people for a living and had probably never paid taxes in his life. 

Still, twenty grand was almost the total amount of her savings, and she was reluctant to hand that over when she knew it would never be repaid. If the roles were reversed, her father would be more likely to give her an earful than a handout.

Elevating her chin, she observed her sumptuous surroundings. She lived in a huge manor house with a man who had plenty of means. Keeping her nest egg to herself in light of the turn her life had taken seemed rather selfish.

“So you’ll get it to us?” her father asked. “Has to be soon like.”

“Let me see what I can work out,” she said, and the line disconnected without any attempt at an awkward goodbye.

Her family was as broken as Brodie’s, except the fractures in her relationships with her relatives weren’t caused by death, not all of them anyway. Given the losses she’d experienced recently, she should take some time and do something about those fractures before she lost the chance for reconciliation for good. The next time her father or brother got in touch, it would probably be to tell her the other was gone.

Brodie didn’t want her out of his eye line, but he and Tuck had work to do, work that they didn’t need her for. After Brodie’s semi-assertion, she was beginning to see her role in the Kindred as more of hanger-on than as an actual useful colleague. On the plus side of that, it freed up time, so she could deal with these kind of unexpected personal issues without impacting Kindred progress. Mischa had CI to look after. Zara didn’t even have an apartment to clean.

Snatching her suitcase and tossing the strap of her purse across her body, she figured she had to make peace with the past before she could figure out the future. Kahlil and the Kindred would wait. She could be back with Brodie inside a day. Scribbling a note for him, she doubted he’d have a problem with her being independent when it was that ability to rely on herself and face problems that had attracted him to her and kept them all going in the aftermath of losing Art.

If she had her own familial demon to confront, she wasn’t going to shrink and hide, she was going to deal with it head on.

She’d been so damn sure about this trip that she’d ditched the man she trusted more than any other to make it. The flight was just a few hours, and it took little time to rent a car and drive to her father’s. The heat of the early evening sun joined her as she stood on the sidewalk, staring at the front door of her father’s home in the suburbs.

The house she was looking at now wasn’t the one she’d grown up in. Her brother had taken over the farm a couple of years ago, and while her father did still work in those fields, he’d moved out of what had been her childhood home in deference to her brother and his new family.

Coming here had seemed like such a good idea when she was sitting in the safety of the manor, and she’d gone on autopilot to make the journey. The moment she’d stepped out of the car and crossed the street to stand on the sidewalk where she was now, the instinct to progress disappeared. Taking in the modest home with its patch of grass out front, she watched the length of the intersecting path stretch. It wasn’t more than a few yards, but it was going to be the longest few yards of her life.

She stood frozen, with her suitcase at her back and her car parked on the other side of the street behind her. Escape was still a possibility. Settling an old conflict was a great theory, but there was a reason she’d never tried to mend her relationship with her father. Experience taught her that he was old school and didn’t understand her life choices. She wanted him to tell her that he was proud, to apologize for his behavior, and to admit that he’d loved her all along. Great dream.

Now that she was close enough to envision him in this place, she played the scenario forward. She’d walk into that house, he’d look her up and down, and assume she’d fucked everything up. He’d demand the money, show no interest in her life, and either tell her to leave or to cook him something. Her dreams could only be fulfilled by a paternal figure who wanted to love her. To get what she wanted, her father would have to be a different man, and her taking time to travel here wouldn’t change who he was.

Seeing him again would remind her of the heartache she’d gone through after losing him the first time. She’d be reminded that he was a bully who had no respect for her or what she’d been through and she’d end up hating him all over again. It had taken her a long time to get over the disappointment of leaving here without his blessing.

“Don’t go in there.”

The sound of the familiar masculine voice made her whip around. Brodie was propped against her car on the other side of the narrow street with his arms and ankles crossed. She sighed. “Jeez, you scared me,” she said because when she’d stopped here, she’d been sure she was alone, apparently she was wasn’t. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing here motionless staring at her father’s house, but she hadn’t heard a vehicle approach. “How did you know where I was?”

Her note had said she was going to see her father, but hadn’t said where he lived, or that she was travelling back to her home state to do it.

“You think it’s difficult for me to find you?” he asked, pushing off the car and sauntering over to stand with her on the sidewalk. “My best bud can hack any system, and when your name pops on a flight manifest, I know. Hacking the security cameras and running facial recognition takes two seconds.” Nodding at the car he’d just left, he hooked his hands in his pockets, leaving his thumbs in his belt loops. “That’s your rental car, another breadcrumb… and your phone is equipped with a GPS tracker. If you’re on this planet, I can find you. Need me to keep talking?”

If she’d just pulled up, he had to have been sitting in wait to be so hot on her tail. “How did you get here before me?”

“Means,” he said. “My cousins are chopper pilots, and I can get a jet to take me anywhere I want to go without waiting at check-in.”

Ok, so it wasn’t that amazing when he explained himself. Putting her hand on the extended handle of her suitcase that stood just behind her, she turned to face the house. “I have to do this.”

“No, you don’t,” he said, cool and quiet. He wasn’t appealing to her, he was stating what he believed to be a given fact. “You could’ve wired the ransom money and never set foot on a plane.”

Amazed that he’d known about her private conversation, she gaped. “How did you…?”

He shrugged. “I know everything.”

If he wasn’t recording her calls, he might have heard her on audio transmitters that were in the manor. She made a mental note to stop talking to herself when she thought she was alone.

“What the fuck possessed you to come down here?” he asked as she twisted to face the house again. “If you walk in there, he’ll think he was right all along, that you’ve come to grovel. You don’t have CI now, but you have us. You have the Kindred. You still feel like we don’t need you?”

Exhaling, she conceded that he deserved to know the truth. “I don’t have mad computer skills like Swift. I can barely change batteries in a remote. I’m not Falcon. I don’t have money to contribute like him, like you. I don’t have a useful degree or superior knowledge like Wren.”

He didn’t flinch. “They don’t have your legs.”

Tilting her head, she wasn’t impressed. “I’m serious,” she said, scowling at him and letting her hand slide away from the metal suitcase handle. “I’m not Premium Personnel Coordinator anymore. I’m out of CI, I can’t give you access. You own the damn building now anyway. You can get it yourself if you need it.”

“This isn’t about CI,” he said. “I don’t need dick from there, and you don’t need that place either.”

She didn’t feel any better. “I knew Grant for five years, but it took you telling me about Game Time for me to figure it out. I didn’t suspect that you were involved in what happened in Quebec. I didn’t see Grant’s double cross coming. You were out of the game for months, yet you picked up on it before I did. I was the only one to spend time with Benedict and I had no idea he was following his own secret agenda. When CI landed on you and you didn’t want to handle it, you called your ex-girlfriend to bail you out. I’m done. I don’t have any skills that can help you or the Kindred.”

“And you think walking back in there to Daddy and handing him a bundle of cash will make you feel better?”

“You don’t get it,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not here because I’m running back to him. I want to be with you, but I have to confront him, to make him see that he wasn’t right. My confidence relies on him admitting his mistake.”

“That’s not why you’re here. You’re running. You think I haven’t notice that you’ve avoided going back to the compound? Atlas was easy to avoid; we have no reason to be there. You can’t handle the deaths of people you care about because it reminds you of your mother.”

Brodie was way more perceptive than she’d given him credit for, and more attentive of her behaviors too. Swallowing, she wouldn’t let herself become emotional with him again. “How do you know that?” she whispered.

“Because when I was grieving, I shut myself off and got drunk. Your coping mechanism is to be busy. You always want to feel useful. It’s more acute now because you’re trying not to face how losing Grant has hurt you.”

Biting her lower lip, she held it between her teeth. “I wasn’t there for him at the end. I can’t fix that relationship.”

“So, fixing your relationship with your dad is some sort of substitute?”

Determined, she tried to conjure the resolve she’d had before embarking on this trip. “My dad needs me.”

“Your dad needs money,” he said. “He’s not gonna welcome you without judgement. If you want to stay here because you think he’ll make you feel useful, then do it. But it will fuck you up because he’s never gonna be the guy you want him to be.”

Zara knew that, her optimism had faded. Because she was here, she felt that she should go in to hand over the cash. The Kindred had plenty to keep them busy, and she wasn’t an integral part any longer.

Glancing up, she became overwhelmed by the sight of him. Brodie was an amazing man, handsome, smart, dedicated, and he had a purpose, which he’d put aside to come here to intercept her. “I’m of no use to you anymore. We both know it. How long will it be before you get tired of my dead weight on the team?”

His scrutiny made her return her focus to her father’s front door. Ignoring her love, she began trying to psyche herself up to start walking. All she could think about was her father’s judgement, about how her answers to the questions he asked would never satisfy him.

“That’s what your whore comment was about,” Brodie said and sighed. “You think if you can’t do a job then you’ll spend your days sucking my dick.” She shrugged because yeah, that was pretty much it. “The first time I shot a gun, I blew out the back tire of Art’s jeep.”

Despite the randomness of the statement, she drew her attention around to portray how impressed she was because that was a precise shot for a beginner. “Wow,” she said, surprised his aptitude had come to him so naturally.

He shrugged. “Thing is, I was aiming for a target six feet to the left and shot wide. Art had taken me to this little African village. He’d been there before and helped them out with a shitty landowner who thought he was God. Everyone in that village was watching me. They were so impressed because they thought that tire was my target. These people worshipped Art and after seeing that shot, they loved me.”

Young, triumphant Brodie was a hard thing to picture. “The praise must have felt good.”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “I felt like crap. We stayed in that village and ate with the people while they were celebrating my superior skills.”

“You could have just faked it,” she said. “Made them believe you had full confidence in your ability.”

“That’s what Art said,” Brodie replied. “The thing was, I was shit scared. I asked him, ‘What do I do if they call me in to get rid of some crazy bastard? They’ll find out I was a fraud thirty seconds before I get my ass handed to me. I’m not as good as they think I am.’ I asked how I could make sure that didn’t happen, how I could explain to them that I wasn’t that good.”

Her love didn’t often share stories of his past with her, and she relished the chance to hear one now, even if it was an odd time to be sharing. “What did Art say?”

Brodie moved in real close and draped an arm around her, across the width of her shoulders. “He leaned in to whisper and I thought he was gonna reveal some big secret and he said, ‘You’ll just have to get that good.’ I was pissed as hell.” She smiled. “I told him it wasn’t that easy. Then he asked if I wanted to know the secret to being a good shot.”

He paused for long enough that the suspense made her lean until she was almost kissing him. “So, what did he say? What’s the secret?” she asked, desperate to know.

He lowered his volume to a whisper, “Practice.”

Wilting, she was peeved he’d duped her like Art had duped him. “Hilarious.”

Though she tried to cast his arm off her shoulders, he didn’t take the hint. “It’s not a joke. I’m telling you that you’re still a rookie and getting that good takes time. You’ve been thinking about Saint’s death. You want to know who Leatt is working for and what his people are up to, right?” She shrugged. “When I didn’t give you the answers you wanted about Game Time, what did you do?”

“Research,” she said. “At CI, but I don’t have access to—”

“There are other places, other books, other systems. If you want to know who Leatt is, do some research.” Her confidence had taken such a knock that she wasn’t sure she was capable of taking on that challenge. Leatt wasn’t her primary concern since Kahlil had presented his offer. Her eyes drifted toward the house again, and Brodie’s lips closed in on the shell of her ear. “Your answers aren’t in there. Yeah, you can give up. You can walk away. But what makes you think you’ll be any more content in there than you are with me?”

Raising her chin, she apologized with her gaze. “This isn’t about us. I love you.”

“And how long will that last once your dad has you back under his thumb? There are plenty of eligible guys around here.”

It hadn’t occurred to her that Brodie might assume she was escaping the Kindred and their relationship by coming here. The last thing she wanted was regular guys and a normal life. Coming home to face her father was supposed to be cathartic, a healing experience that would give her an energy boost.

With Grant gone and Mischa in charge, Zara had no place left at CI. Feeling that she was of no use to the Kindred because she’d failed every mission, it felt dishonest to have the privilege of life at McCormack Manor at least until she could get some validation that her decisions were righteous.

“I feel like I failed you,” she murmured.

“We figured out where Game Time was because of you. You gave us the potential buyers. You went to that Grand meeting and charmed their asses. None of them suspected you of wearing a wire or fooling them. You went to the goddamn Game Time drop, even though you thought you were all by yourself. You were there because you wanted to stop it, even if it meant risking your life and revealing yourself. God, baby, it was hot to watch you so confident about doing the right thing.”

“Anyone could’ve done those things,” she said.

Grabbing her neck, he pulled her close. “For all we know, the reason Leatt didn’t kill us all where we stood was because you made him care about you. You went to Sutcliffe’s compound alone. We found the arsenal because of bugs you planted and cameras you carried. You are smart. You’re social and you’re beautiful. The Kindred need you. I need you. It’s as simple as that.”