Tribal Blood, page 10
For how long? she wanted to ask. She had escaped her captors and found safety, but for Colt, this was a different type of prison. He did not like being confined and she suspected the size of the property made little difference.
As for herself, she was relieved that Charlie was safe. But it sat badly that she was free when her friends were still captives. What if their captors had done something worse than move them? What if they had been killed because of her? Or had their babies taken?
The theory of growing fetal tissue rose in her mind like a waking nightmare, and her gaze cut to her sleeping baby.
She couldn’t live with that. They had to find them.
“Any progress on locating Brenda, Marta and Maggie?” she asked.
Tinnin sighed and pushed his gum to his cheek before answering. “FBI is still processing evidence, but there is nothing new.” His jaw worked the gum between his molars. “Listen, you’ve had a long day. We’ll check back in the morning.” His gaze flicked to Colt. “If you plan to stay, we’ve got you in the cabin beside Kacey’s.”
But the implication was clear. Tinnin didn’t expect Colt to remain or perhaps he did not want him to stay. In fact, with the investigation now centering on both Kee and Ty Redhorse, it was very possible that the chief would prefer that Colt leave.
Colt glanced to her. She reached out and clasped his hand.
“Stay,” she said on a release of breath.
His nod was tight. Then he turned to Tinnin. “I come and go as I like.” It wasn’t a request.
Tinnin lifted his dark brows, turning the skin on his forehead into a road map of horizontal furrows.
“You need to stay on-site,” said Tinnin.
Colt said nothing to this. Forrest and Tinnin exchanged a side glance. Forrest arched a brow. One more Redhorse to add to their list of suspects, she thought. Or just a loose cannon? Colt’s mutiny meant more work for a police force already stretched past its limits. But she knew that neither of these men nor Tribal Thunder could keep Colt here if he did not wish to stay. Colt was like a shadow in the woods.
He stepped around the table to face off against Agent Forrest, and his hands squeezed into fists. Nothing good had ever come from two men posturing like that, she knew.
She lifted Charlie from his bassinet and stepped up beside Colt, pressing her shoulder to his. He tore his gaze away from the field agent and glanced first at her and then at Charlie, who slept with his mouth open. Kacey didn’t ask; she just placed Charlie in Colt’s arms.
Forrest stepped back as if she’d handed Colt a live grenade. It seemed she had found the men’s weakness. Babies made many men uncomfortable. But not Colt. He cradled Charlie’s head as her baby nestled against his shoulder.
“We need to get him to bed,” she said. Of course, Charlie didn’t care if he slept in a bassinet, his mother’s arms or in a cradleboard. But Colt needed to be free of these two men.
He cast the two tribal police officers one last look, his mouth going tight. Then he turned away, still cradling Charlie.
Kacey lifted the empty bassinet and faced Tinnin, Forrest and Little Falcon.
“Good night, gentlemen,” she said to them. “I thank you for providing us a safe place. I wish my friends had the same.”
Kacey followed Colt out across the wide-open ground that separated the main lodge from the row of cabins along the river. The trees that lined the shore provided glimpses of the silver ribbon of water moving swiftly along. Too swiftly, she realized now that the dam no longer controlled the flow of water.
She gazed up at the deep dark skies alive with bright sparks of light. The wind brushed over her skin and she closed her eyes to savor the beauty and the peace as she gave thanks to the One Who Lives Above.
She was free. Just days ago, she had fled for her life and now she was here on her tribe’s lands. It seemed impossible. She opened her eyes to look at the heavens and found the star that does not walk around, the North Star. It was there as it had been every night of her life. It had not changed in her absence. Stars were constant. Would any of her friends ever see the night sky again? The tears came then, streaking down her cheeks.
When she lowered her gaze from the night sky, it was to find Colt staring back at her. He used the warm pad of his thumb to wipe her cheeks dry.
“It’s so beautiful here.” She swallowed against the lump that rose suddenly in her throat.
“Yes.” He took her elbow and gave a squeeze.
“I wish... I wish my friends could see this.”
His hand stroked up and down her arm and then rubbed across her back.
“I’m afraid what they’ll do to them because of me.”
His face was serious and he offered no false hope. He had friends as well, comrades who would never see the night sky or anything else again. He understood and did not minimize her fears with words. Instead, he gave comfort a different way by wrapping his free arm around her shoulders and ushering her forward to the cabin.
“I’m sorry for what I said about Ty,” she whispered.
He didn’t answer as they crossed the open ground and she thought he did not hear her. When they reached the porch, he turned to face her.
“It was a natural conclusion,” he said. “He was in the gang. But he’s not in it anymore.”
“My mother says no one ever leaves the Posse.” What she had actually said was that the only way out was dying. But Kacey wouldn’t say that aloud.
“Maybe so,” he said. “Let’s get Charlie inside. Cold out here.”
Every evening was cold in the fall. With no cloud cover, the earth cooled rapidly.
Colt held open the door and she stepped inside.
Charlie roused when Colt handed him back to her. Colt used a match to light the lantern and set about rousing the fire in the cast-iron stove to chase off the evening chill.
As he continued to feed the growing fire with sticks of kindling and then logs, she fed Charlie. She tried not to feel guilty that she sat in the comfortable cabin or wonder where her friends were right now. The skin of her naked breast puckered at exposure to the cool air, but gradually the fire’s heat reached her. By the time she switched Charlie to her opposite breast, she was humming.
She did not forget her pain or her promise, but her baby needed her. Could she risk something else happening to her? What would happen to Charlie then? Her mother was incapable of caring for him. Kacey had been in the tribe’s foster-care system at various times. Sometimes she stayed with Colt’s mother and helped look after Colt’s sister, Abbie.
Many foster families here were good, but many were little better than the family from which she had been taken. She didn’t want that for Charlie.
She looked down at the sweet face of her child. He stared up at her from deep blue eyes. The irises hinted that his eyes would be dark one day. His skin was lighter than her little brothers’ had been, and the fuzz on his head was a soft brown. She stroked his perfect head.
Not hers, but still hers.
“I don’t care about DNA and genetics,” she said to Charlie. “They took my freedom, so I’ll take you. Fair exchange. You’re mine.”
She felt Colt staring at her. She lifted her gaze from her baby to him and smiled.
“Do you think they will let me keep him?” she asked.
“The tribe, yes. The FBI, I don’t know.”
“He’s not evidence. He’s a baby. My baby.”
“As long as you stay here, they have no power to take Charlie.”
“Are you staying here tonight?” she asked.
“Maybe not in the cabin. I like to sleep outside.”
“I could open the windows.”
“Won’t it be too cold for Charlie?”
“No. We have blankets and someone left a wolf pelt.”
“You want me to stay?” he asked.
She nodded. “I feel safe when you are here.”
He stood and used one finger to rub at the corner of his eye. “You heard them, right? About Kee and Ty.”
“But your brother Jake is a member of the police force and he’s a member of Tribal Thunder.”
“Do you think it’s possible, what they suspect?” he asked.
She lifted one shoulder and then let it drop.
“Do you remember who saw you at the clinic?” he asked.
“Which time?”
“The first.”
“January sometime. I know that much.” Kacey shook her head. “I told you. I don’t even remember going to the clinic or much of the following day. It’s like I just jumped over them.”
“I wish I could forget, sometimes.”
She could understand that.
“Do you think you can’t remember because of the trauma?” he asked.
“No. None of us could remember.” Kacey didn’t think she was blocking out her experience. The other explanation she refused to say aloud.
“Could you have been drugged?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know.” But she suspected.
“They might have used that date-rape drug,” said Colt.
She lifted her brows and prepared to agree and instead shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t remember,” he said. “What about your mother?”
At the mention of her mother an instant knot gripped the muscles between her shoulder blades. “What about her?”
“She might remember who saw you.”
Kacey snorted. “She only drove me because she needed the car. She told me that she didn’t go in for the physical with me, just dropped me off at the door.” Like a stray cat outside an animal shelter, Kacey thought. But that was better than the alternative. “Then they called for a follow-up in February. Mom was annoyed. The woman who called said there was a problem with my blood sample and they had to redo it.”
“They found something?” he asked.
“Lost it, was what my mother said.”
“Who did she speak to?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I found the note on the counter telling me to drop in. No appointment necessary. I did and they took blood and urine. I have no trouble remembering that appointment. That was February 20th. They took me on February 22nd.”
“You remember that?”
“Every detail.”
Chapter Eleven
Colt listened as Kacey described being snatched off the road after leaving the late school bus after volleyball practice during the half-mile walk to her home. It had been dark, even though it was well before six in the evening and she had been alone. Her brothers, still in elementary school, took an earlier bus, and her sisters, Jackie, Winnie and Shirley, did not play sports. No one else used that stop.
It had been Kacey and two male attackers. She knew their names or at least the names that they called each other. Earle and Trey. She had seen them around. Minnie had been there, too, in the car. Kenshaw had shown her their photos and said they were all members of the Wolf Posse. Trey was in prison and Minnie and Earle were in custody.
She could not find it in her heart to be sorry. From each girl’s description, Marta had been taken by Minnie and Trey, Brenda by Earle alone and Maggie by someone else. Kacey hoped to God it had not been Ty.
Kacey knew her abductors were all gang members because they wore yellow and black, the Posse’s colors. They had simply lifted her off the ground and thrown her into the van. She had lost one of her sneakers; evidence, she had thought at the time. A clue to lead someone to her. Now she knew better.
Once they were inside the van, Minnie pointed the pistol at her. Earle and Trey used duct tape on her wrists, ankles and mouth. They threw her backpack in the back with her. They carried her from the van and into the house. All the while, she had been wiggling like a fly wrapped in a spider’s web with just as much chance of escape.
In the house, she saw the Russians for the first time. They paid Trey in cash. When the Russians had taken her to the basement, she was certain she would never again come back up those dusty wooden stairs. She shivered, the terror fresh as raw meat.
“You told Tribal this?” Colt asked.
She nodded. “Took them to the house, too. You know, every episode of that FBI show flashed in my mind. The body, the evidence, but not what the victim suffered,” she said. “Not the days and weeks locked in a basement.”
Colt took her hand. She wondered if his own capture was roaring through his mind, because his forehead glistened with perspiration.
“After they left me there, still taped up like a carpet, Marta appeared.”
Marta had been taken at the beginning of February and had been alone in that basement for nineteen days. She had released Kacey, told her what little she knew.
“We thought they were crazy, telling us to eat and take care of the baby. But then Marta started throwing up.”
She told him of living in the basement for months. And how they kept a calendar on the floor, scratching in the days. That was how she knew that Brenda Espinoza came in May and Maggie Kesselman arrived in late September.
“Do you think they moved them?” he asked. The implication was clear. If they were not moved, then they were dead.
“I hope so. None of them cared about us. But they sure cared about the babies. Kept us fed. Gave us vitamins. Let us wash and gave us each a mattress and a wool blanket. They were scratchy but warm. This was about the babies.”
He thought of Charlie and wondered where he would be now if Kacey had not escaped. “Do you know anything about the people who are the genetic parents? Do they know?”
She rubbed her brow with the heel of her hand, then let it drop. “I don’t know anything about them. I have spent a lot of time thinking about them. All I know is what Agent Forrest told me during our first interview. The FBI lab report said that Charlie is Caucasian and Asian.”
“No. He’s Turquoise Canyon Apache,” Colt said.
She smiled at that. Her heart twisted in her chest at the sweetness of his smile and the sorrow in his eyes.
“Well, you’re safe now with Tribal Thunder protecting you.”
“They still want Charlie,” she said.
“Too bad. Because they won’t get him,” said Colt.
She smiled and glanced back to where her baby slept. In the lamplight, she could see his mouth working as if he sucked, even in slumber, with his hands raised beside his head, perfect fingers curled into tiny palms.
Colt stepped up behind her, his arms slipping around her waist and his mouth descending to her neck. They had told her at the hospital that she should not sleep with a man for two weeks or more. That her body needed time to heal. But her body did not know or care about rules. And her heart did not know caution, for her heart sped, galloping along in anticipation. She lifted her hand to stroke his head, drawing his sweet mouth closer to the juncture of her neck and shoulder.
She turned in his arms and he lifted his head, meeting her gaze. Her brows rose as she pressed their hips together.
Colt stiffened as her stomach met the hard ridge of male flesh.
“It’s too soon,” he said.
“For that,” she said. “Do you remember all the times we went to the river?”
His eyes rounded. Kacey had kept her virginity. She and Colt had never had sex. But they had learned how to reach their pleasure without intercourse.
Colt’s smile was slow and languid. She stroked his arousal.
“I remember,” he said. “Everything.”
They moved into the bedroom, Colt carrying the lantern and Kacey carrying Charlie. He left the door open to let the heat from the stove follow them.
She wrapped Charlie in the wolf pelt and laid him back in the crib beside the bed. He did not even wake as she moved him.
Colt waited for her on the bed. He’d drawn back the covers so that only half of the bright red, green and black of the Navajo-patterned blanket was visible under the white sheets. The lantern now sat on a shelf above the bed, made for that purpose.
She sat on the opposite side and turned to look past the two pillows and the wide expanse of linen at Colt. He offered her a wicked smile.
Kacey removed her shoes and socks, but nothing else, before lying on the bed. She rolled to her back as he settled to his side. They met in the middle.
His kisses moved from her neck to her ear, sending delight shivering over her skin. Kacey caressed his head, gliding her fingers through the loose satin of his long hair before entwining her fingers behind his neck and pulling him down until his body pressed tight to hers. All the while, he continued to score the flesh at her neck with his sharp teeth. His fingers danced feather light across her hip and stomach until she could not stand having their clothing separating them.
He helped draw away her blouse, kissing the skin he revealed as he stripped her out of her jeans. When he finally climbed back up to lie beside her, Kacey was breathless and dressed only in a bra and panties. Her body hummed with anticipation as he turned away, stood and shucked out of his jeans, flannel shirt and undershirt.
When he returned to her, she reached for him, using her hand to do what her body was not ready for as he slipped a hand beneath her panties and caressed the wet wanting flesh at the junction of her thighs. His fingers moved expertly, parting her and finding the bud of needy flesh. He stroked as he rocked against her hip.
“I missed this,” he said.
“I missed us,” she said.
His gaze locked to hers and she saw the tension build. But he continued with long, even strokes as he teased and rubbed her toward her release. Her head dropped back and her breathing changed. He moved faster, his hot breath blasting against her throat. She arched up to meet her release, her body stiffening a moment before the wave of pleasure broke within her. She gasped and then gave a hum of pleasure. He kissed her then, pressing her back to the pillows as he cried out, his release pulsing in her hand.
