Chapter 4

Ryan opened the front door of his apartment the next morning and stopped dead in his tracks. “Shit.”

Bunny held up a sack of donuts. “Good morning, Ryan.”

No one should look that fucking cheerful that early in the morning. Ryan wanted to maul him just for the grin.

Julian breezed past him holding a huge box of coffee. “Good morning, lover boy.”

Ryan whimpered. Not him, too. Julian might live only because he had the coffee.

“So.” Bunny’s grin got impossibly wider. “How’d it go?”

“Yeah, did you express your undying love?” Julian put his hand to his chest and fluttered his lashes.

There was not enough coffee in the world. “Hell. You’re going to make me talk about my feelings, aren’t you?”

Bunny started setting out the donuts while Julian poured three cups of coffee. “Yup. We might even curl our hair and wax our legs.”

Ryan whimpered and shut the door. “Can’t I just go to work?” “Nope.” Bunny handed him a jelly-filled donut. “Spill.”

“Yeah, did you mate her?” Julian’s wicked expression would have looked more adult if he didn’t have a ring of powdered sugar around his mouth.

Nothing says “I’m sexy” like appearing as if you’ve just blown the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. “No.” He’d walked her to her door like a gentleman, refusing to give in to the howling of his Bear. He’d sat outside her apartment building, guarding her until the wee hours of the morning. He hadn’t scented anything strange around her apartment, but that didn’t mean whoever had left those presents wasn’t around. “But she told me I’m getting a second date.”

“Huh. For Glory that’s practically a proposal of marriage.” Julian fixed his coffee, adding enough sugar to send a six-year-old into orbit. “So things went well?”

Ryan took his cup and his donut and sat his ass on the sofa. If the two wanted to discuss his love life he was going to be comfortable, damn it. “Sort of.” When the two shot him concerned glances he told them about the gifts someone had been leaving his mate. “We think someone’s been watching her for a while now. They know her tastes, and I’m willing to bet that they know now that she’s living alone.”

“Shit.” Bunny clapped Ryan’s shoulder. “You need us to guard her?” Julian shrugged, his expression unhappy. “I’ve got some free time.” Ryan winced in sympathy. Julian hadn’t found a new job since Dr.

Howard’s practice had shut down. The man was a registered nurse, but his gift as a Kermode prevented him from working in the hospital. The other doctors in town weren’t hiring at the moment, which meant Julian was SOL in Halle. He was even thinking of taking work outside Halle, just so his work visa wouldn’t get revoked. If that happened, he risked deportation back to Canada. Hell, Ryan was about to suggest he get a job at the local college campus. It would be something, at least. “Thanks, and yeah. Any help you can give would be good.”

Bunny squeezed his shoulder before letting go. “As far as the date went, did you round any bases?”

Ryan stared at Bunny. “Really?”

“What?” That innocent look on Bunny’s face was as out of place as whiskers on a rock. “When are you going to claim her?”

“I thought I’d get to second base first.” Ryan grinned at his cousin as Bunny settled on the sofa next to him.

“Good. Tabby wants this settled. She says Glory’s panic attack scared her, and when Tabby is frightened I’m one unhappy Bunny.” Bunny growled. “And if Glory has a stalker, Tabby is going to be very unhappy.”

“I swear, our mates are trouble magnets.” Julian sipped his coffee with an unhappy sigh.

“It could be worse.” “How?”

“They could be Rangers fans.” When the other two stared at him blankly, he changed the subject. “We’re going to try and find out what happened to Hope.”

Julian settled on the overstuffed recliner Ryan loved napping in. “I can contact Gabe, see if he’s willing to help us look into her disappearance. We should tell him about the stuff someone’s been leaving for Glory as well.”

“You think they’re connected?” Bunny scowled.

“We just decided to look into Hope’s disappearance. Glory says the presents have been showing up for a few weeks now, and from the looks of things the asshole’s been watching her, learning what she likes.”

Both men cursed, but Julian summed up his feelings perfectly. “We need to find this guy and rip his head off. I’m tired of our mates being in danger.”

“It could truly be a secret admirer, someone who simply wants to make an impression.”

Bunny could be right, but Ryan wasn’t so sure. “We can ask the girls if anything odd has gone on around the shop, but we all know the answer to that one.”

All three men grimaced. Sometimes it seemed like nothing normal ever happened around their girls.

Ryan sighed. “We should talk to Emma and Max Cannon. Since Glory and Hope were human when she disappeared, we might need their approval to borrow Gabe for the investigation.”

Bunny shook his head. “I don’t think so, because they were human. This would fall under Gabe’s job as sheriff of Halle, not as a Hunter or even the Second. There shouldn’t be any conflict, so I’d go straight to him with this.”

“I agree.” Julian leaned forward, impatiently brushing a lock of his waist- length black hair behind his ear. “This isn’t shifter business, but human. So his human authority would be ascendant. Besides, Max declared all three girls under his protection. He’d probably give his permission anyway, so the point is moot.”

Ryan had to admit they were probably right. “Then I’ll call him and ask him to meet us at Cynful. Glory can talk to him, explain what happened all those years ago.”

“And Gabe might even have the original missing person’s report on file, since she disappeared here in Halle.” Julian grinned. “Cyn will be willing to give you any help you need.”

“Tabby too, though I’ve already told her to take it easy. I don’t want her risking the baby.”

“Thanks, guys. I don’t think they’ll be in any danger, but whatever we find, Glory will need her friends and family around her.”

Julian pulled out his cell phone. “Want me to call Gabe and have him meet us there?”

“Not a bad idea. I’ll call Glory and let her know what’s up.” Ryan pulled out his own cell phone and punched in the number for Cynful.

“Good morning, Cynful Tattoos, Cyn speaking. How may I help… Oh.

It’s you.”

“And good morning to you too, sunshine.” Cyn grunted.

“Are we still decaffeinated?” She grunted again.

“Julian’s here with coffee.”

“I hate you so much right now. Tabby vomits if she even smells coffee.” Cyn whimpered. “I’m dying here.”

Ryan didn’t laugh. “Listen, the guys and I are heading over with Gabe.” “Why? What’s wrong?”

That overprotective instinct of Cyn’s had kicked into high gear. She suddenly sounded wide awake and vaguely growly, her Bear ready to defend her friends.

“It’s okay. I promised Glory we’d look into Hope’s disappearance, so we thought we’d meet with Gabe at Cynful where Glory feels most comfortable.”

“Oh.” Cyn sighed, the sound relieved. “Good idea. Come on over, and bring herbal tea.”

Ryan started to laugh. “Can you sound any more disgusted?” “Hate. You.” And Cyn hung up before he could answer, not that he

could. He was laughing too hard.

Julian was clipping his phone back to his belt when Ryan hung up. “Gabe says he’ll be there in an hour.”

Ryan stood, putting a lid on his coffee. Tabby might not be able to stand the smell, but Ryan wasn’t giving up his early morning love. “Your mate wants to kill us for our caffeine.”

Julian sighed, but it was anything but sad. “Yeah. She’s mean like that.”

Bunny shrugged on his jacket and grabbed his coffee. “C’mon. I’ll need you both to suck some breath mints before we go in the shop.”

Julian’s expression turned instantly concerned. “It’s that bad?” When Bunny nodded glumly, Julian frowned. “Do you want me to check her out?”

As Bears, each of them had the power to heal, both themselves and others. But where Bunny and Ryan could only heal minor wounds, aches and illnesses, Julian, as a Spirit Bear, had powers neither of them could

truly comprehend. He could take someone on the brink of death and drag them back to life, but the cost to him was horrific. He’d nearly died twice, once when saving Jamie Howard when Jamie’s mate was killed, and again when saving Cyn after she’d been shot by Tabby’s ex-Alpha. If anyone could help Tabby with her morning sickness and her aversion to coffee, it would be him.

But Bunny shook his head. “Nah. Her OB/GYN said this was normal.

It’ll pass once the baby’s born, if not sooner.” With Jamie Howard no longer practicing medicine, Tabby had been forced to go to a human gynecologist. Luckily, shifter pregnancies followed human ones. A baby would pop out, not a cub, so they were safe there. Still, just to be safe, Julian was monitoring her pregnancy almost as closely as Bunny was.

“If you’re sure.” Julian tugged on his own coat.

Ryan headed for the front door, donut and coffee in hand. “If you value your lives you’ll bring those donuts.”

Laughing as the two Bears scrambled for the donuts, Ryan headed out to his car, eager to see his mate.

“Rye?”

“Hmm?”

Bunny frowned. “If we stay in Halle…?” Ryan nodded. “I’ll work with you.”

Bunny relaxed, his natural, easy-going smile gracing his face. “Good.” “You were seriously worried about that?” Ryan shook his head. “Chloe’s

out here, Glory’s out here. You’re out here. Of course I’m staying. Asshole.”

“Thanks. Buttmunch.”

Julian walked past them snickering. “I do not want to know if you’re kissing cousins.”

Rolling his eyes, Ryan slipped into his car. “Meet you at Cynful.” “Will do. And Ryan?” Bunny squeezed his shoulder reassuringly. “It’s

going to be all right, no matter what we find.”

“I know. Because I’ll be there for her, no matter what.” “Exactly.”

When Ryan said he was going to do something, he sure as hell did it.

Glory watched as Gabriel Anderson, the Halle sheriff and one of the local

Pumas, stepped into Cynful Tattoos with a file folder in his hand and a determined air. The man filled out a uniform like no one else, his broad shoulders and piercing blue eyes giving her more than one wet dream before Ryan came to town.

But the sheriff was utterly devoted to his wife, Sarah, a sweet woman who worked in the local high school, and Ryan…

Well, Ryan had given her more than wet dreams.

He was standing there, arms crossed, blue eyes sharp, his dark hair tousled like he hadn’t gotten the chance to brush it before leaving his apartment that morning. His breath had smelled suspiciously like orange breath mints when his lips had grazed hers.

“Hey, Glory. I hear you want to talk to me.” The sheriff held out his hand, looking surprised when she hugged him. He’d helped save Cyn, and been instrumental in giving Tabby a home. As far as Glory was concerned, he was family.

“Gabe.” She pressed a kiss to his cheek, enjoying the blush that highlighted his face. The man was adorable, and Sarah was a lucky woman. “Did Ryan fill you in?”

“Ah. Yes.” He fumbled the papers he’d been holding in his hands. “You want me to reopen the case into your missing twin.” And that quickly, the blushing man turned into the no-nonsense sheriff. “It won’t be easy. It seems like the investigator seriously dropped the ball on this one.” He shook his head. “I have to contact the old sheriff and see what he knows about it.”

“Was he…?” Glory held up her hands, making claws of her fingers, and snarled, pulling her upper lip back from her teeth.

“You’re cute.” Gabe grinned and patted her on the head. “Yes, Sheriff Giordano was a shifter.”

Why did that last name sound familiar?

Gabe must have understood her confused expression. “The old sheriff was the father of Dr. Adrian Giordano.”

She’d been around the Pumas enough now to know that Adrian Giordano was one of the rulers of the Pride. The Alpha and Curana led the pride, with their Betas, Simon and Becky Holt. Then there was the Marshal, Dr.

Giordano, who ruled over the physical well-being of the Pride. He was the one who saw to it that all of them were safe and controlled any enforcers needed to protect them all. His Second was Gabe.

Gabe’s mate, Sarah, was the Omega, a woman who could sense the emotional well-being of the Pride and, in some cases, manipulate their emotions, calming ongoing feuds or shoring up a Puma’s flagging self- esteem. Tabby had told her once that Sarah had walked up to Alex and stopped him from going into a rage when he discovered that Tabby had nearly been raped. Glory had seen Alex and Ryan shifted. She knew how large and angry the Grizzlies could be.

And Sarah had tamed the beast to her hand. That was one scary power… and one awful responsibility. Glory was glad Bears didn’t have Omegas.

She’d hate to think that she might accidentally wind up wielding power over someone else’s emotions when her own were such a roller-coaster. Glory knew she had no business messing in someone else’s head.

“All right.” Gabe led Ryan and Glory into the back room. Cyn and Tabby would watch the shop while Glory answered Gabe’s questions. Gabe set the file folder on the break table and took a seat. “Tell me what you remember.” Glory sat across from him, not surprised when Ryan took the seat next to her. She took a deep breath and began. “When my sister and I were sixteen,

she disappeared.”

Gabe nodded and opened up his notebook. “Go on. She went to the library on…” He opened the file folder and took a quick look through the papers there. “August twenty-sixth.”

“Yeah.” Glory twirled some of her hair around her finger. It helped calm her, the powder-blue curls so unlike her twin’s pale blonde hair. “I didn’t want to go. I wanted to go shopping with Cyn. So Hope left without me, and my father wasn’t happy about it.”

“She went alone?”

“Yes. We had a huge argument about it. My mother was still married to my father at that time, and tried to intervene, but we’d learned by then that she didn’t have any real power over us. It was my father who held it all.”

“He was abusive toward you.”

“He would beat us, but no one believed us when we tried to tell them what he was doing. He was a man of the cloth, a preacher. No one wanted to believe he was abusing his children.”

“No one except Cyn and her mother, who took you in when your family abandoned you.”

“Mrs. Reyes is more my mom than my biological parent ever was.” Glory grinned, hoping they didn’t see through the sharpness to the pain.

“And Cyn is more a nagging dad.” “I heard that!”

Glory rolled her eyes. Cyn’s hearing had gotten super-scary-good recently, ever since her mate had claimed her and turned her into a Kodiak. “Good!” she bellowed back.

Ryan stuck his finger in his ear with a wince.

Grinning, Gabe shook his head at her. “All right. So you go shopping with Cyn—”

“Nope. I never made it. My dad got a hold of me and grounded me.”

Gabe’s brows rose as he flipped through the papers again. “The notes here say you went out with Cyn.”

“That’s what my father told the officer.”

Gabe’s gaze hardened. “What did you tell the officer?” “The officer never spoke to me.”

Gabe swore under his breath. “He was a member of your father’s congregation.”

“Sorry, Gabe.” She hoped the man had retired by now, but if not, Gabe might have to sanction a seasoned officer for not speaking to a possible witness. “If it helps, I think he told the officer that I was too traumatized by Hope’s disappearance to speak.”

“What was the truth?” Ryan’s voice was dangerously soft.

“I was black and blue.” Glory tugged on her curl. “Look, my father was very good at making me seem like the bad child, the wild one who needed to be punished constantly. He hated that I was friends with Cyn, that I wanted a tattoo or my ears pierced. I wasn’t godly enough to be his child, and he made sure I was the example the others didn’t want to live up to.

Even Hope couldn’t stop him from taking things out on me, and he adored her.”

Gabe’s jaw clenched. “You were identical?”

Glory nodded. “She always dressed the way he wanted and wore her hair the way he wanted, to keep him from hurting her.”

“Do you think he did other things to her?”

God, how many times had she asked herself that over the last few years? “I don’t know. She was always quiet, withdrawn, but it got worse as we grew older. I just thought she was trying to stay off my dad’s radar.”

“Do you think your father had anything to do with her disappearance?”

She shrugged. “He lost his mind when we couldn’t find her. I’ve never seen him that angry. And he blamed me, like he’d hoped I would be the one taken and not her.”

Gabe tapped his pen against the table, his expression grim. “Is it possible that what happened to her was meant for you?”

She hated to do it, but she nodded. “Yes. If my father was the one behind it, then yes.”

“All right. Walk me through everything you remember before she disappeared, the day she went to the library, and the days afterward.”

Glory nudged Ryan. “Can you get me some water? This is going to take a while.”

Ryan softly kissed her forehead. “I’m here for you, sweetheart.”

“You shouldn’t be.” She closed her eyes. God, why did she keep trying to push him away? She was such a masochist.

“But I am, and I’m not going anywhere.” He got up and grabbed a bottle of water out of the mini fridge. “Go on. Tell him what he needs to know.”

She opened the bottle and took a sip before obeying Ryan’s request. “Before she left, everything seemed normal.” She snorted. “Normal for us, anyway. We all went to school, we all came home and did our homework. We hung out with our friends and gossiped about boys.”

“Your brother and sisters acted normally?”

“Before Hope went missing? Sure. Temp tried to keep the peace between us, but even he couldn’t keep our dad off us if he decided we needed to be punished.” She fiddled with the bottle cap, refusing to look at Gabe. “Temp was nothing like our dad. He was the one who did all the dad things, like making sure we got to school on time and lecturing us about boys.” She smiled wistfully. “And he doted on Faith.”

“Your youngest sister.”

Glory bit her lip. “I hope…” Ryan took hold of her hand, and only then did she realize how badly she was trembling. “I hope Temp kept our dad off her.”

“Why didn’t your mother gain custody?”

Glory finally looked at Gabe. “Because doormats don’t get anything but stepped on.”

Gabe nodded once. “All right. Everything was normal right up until Hope went to the library. That day, did any of your family react oddly? Was there anything strange, anything out of place?”

Glory tried hard to remember the details of that day, but everything up until the moment they all realized Hope wasn’t coming home was a blur. “I spent the day in my room, bruised and sulking. Temp brought me lunch and Faith tried singing to me through the door before my father screamed at her to stop. Dinner came and went, but Hope didn’t come home.”

“Then what?”

“The cops came and took a statement from my dad. They declared her missing because she was a minor, and they wanted to get her face out to the surrounding police precincts. But they never found her.”

“Your father left town when you were eighteen and left you behind.”

Glory hated thinking about that time. She’d been left in the cold with the clothes on her back, beaten black and blue and with five dollars in her wallet. Thank God for Mrs. Reyes, and thank God for Cyn, because otherwise Glory would have been homeless. “Yeah.”

“The years in between must have been hard.”

Ryan was still holding her hand, but at that he glared at Gabe. “I’d imagine so, if her dad blamed her for her sister’s disappearance.”

Gabe sighed. “I have to know this stuff, Ryan. The family is the first place we look when a child goes missing, even a teenager like Hope.”

“It’s okay, Ryan.” Glory leaned her head against his arm briefly. “I’m okay.”

He huffed out a breath, but it didn’t sound quite human.

Glory ignored him. “My dad became vicious to all of us, but especially me. My mother ran, just disappeared one night while we were sleeping.”

Gabe’s brows rose. “Disappeared.”

“We got post cards from her. I think she’s in Phoenix.” Gabe made a note. “Temp?”

“Stuck around, mostly for me and Faith.” She sighed. “Faith is eighteen.

With any luck, they’re both free of my dad.”

“I’m going to try and find them, see what they know.”

“I have no idea where they went when they left Halle. My dad didn’t exactly care if I could get a hold of them or not.”

Gabe’s smile was cold. “Then I will make him care.”

Ryan’s smile was just as vicious as Gabe’s. She had the feeling that if Pastor Walsh ever returned to Halle, he’d be the victim of a bear mauling, and she found she couldn’t care less. Any love she’d once had for her father had long since been beaten out of her.

“Good.”