Chapter Thirteen

SEVERAL hours and a stopover in Denver later our plane taxied into O’Hare International Airport. The minute we were given leave to, Owen stood. He’d been getting twitchier with each passing hour. When the passengers in front of us had disembarked, I ducked out of my seat. I pulled out my cell phone and turned off airplane mode. “I’m going to let my parents know we’ve landed. Find out how soon they’ll be up front.”

We’d barely stepped through the gate when my phone blew up. I’d missed eight calls and had twenty texts. “What the hell?”

Owen was looking at his own phone, cursing. I peeked over at it and saw he’d missed as many calls and had twice as many texts.

The texts were all from David, each one more urgent than the next.

Search results complete. No adoption records in US

Started intl search

Where are you? Need to talk

Srsly. Need to talk ASAP

Call me!!!

URGENT!

THIS IS FUCKING SERIOUS!

The last thirteen texts were all sent with exactly five minutes between each one. They all said CALL ME!! URGENT!!

Owen flashed his screen at me, showing a list of messages that were pretty much the same as mine.

I didn’t bother to listen to the voicemail message. It would likely be more of the same. Even while I watched, another text came up, but this one was from my parents.

In baggage claim area. See you there.

I sent a thumbs-up sign to my parents’ text before shoving my phone into my pockets.

We’d carried on our luggage, but I nodded to the signs pointing us to baggage claim and my parents. “Please tell me David is the type to be dramatic and hysterical with little provocation.” I slung my duffel bag over my shoulder. Owen copied the motion with his own backpack.

“Nope. He’s easily excitable, but not the type to panic. And this is total panic.”

“What the hell could have happened to cause this?”

“I’ve got no idea.” Owen tapped at his screen. We waited through six rings before David’s voice came through, telling them to leave a message.

We exchanged nervous looks; then Owen said, “We’ll try again when we reach your place. He’s waited this long, so I guess he can wait another hour.”

I wasn’t thrilled to put it off, not after the extreme texts, but if David didn’t answer his phone, what were our options? Feeling more than a little anxious, we made our way toward baggage claim.

At the first sight of my parents, I forgot the underhanded reasons for our visit and the niggly worry over David’s texts. I was so damned happy to see them, I shoved my bag at Owen and barreled toward them. I flung my arms around my mom, squeezing her tight. She was soft and warm and smelled like home. Growing up, there’d been no artificial scents, no flowers, no exotic spices. Everything had been sterilized and hypoallergenic. Even her soaps and shampoos. But here, with my newly augmented olfactory ability, I caught an underlying aroma of rosewood and daffodils I suspected was inherent to her.

She didn’t, however, smell at all animallike. With Owen and Buddy, and even David in the coffee shop, there’d been a hint of something wild.

She jerked in my embrace. Hugging was not something we’d done much of. Not because of any lack of desire on my parents’ part, I realized, but because they’d had to be careful. Touch without proper protective gear could be dangerous for someone whose immune system was compromised. Or so they’d been told. Once the surprise cleared, she wrapped her arms around me too.

“I missed you,” I murmured, giving her one last squeeze. “I hadn’t realized how much until now.” Maybe it was the time spent with Owen. Touch, whether hugging or brushing shoulders or even holding hands, was a big part of Owen and his friends’ daily lives. I’d started seeing it as normal and acceptable.

She was barely five feet tall, so she had to reach up to pat my cheeks. She spoke softly in Persian, then said in English, “Look at you. You look… well. Better.”

I remembered I had to play it up a little. Better was fine, but I couldn’t be drastically, miraculously cured. “I’m doing all right in Wyoming. Maybe it’s the mountain air.”

“It looks good on you,” she said, giving my cheek one last tap before stepping aside to let my dad greet me.

He stood there awkwardly for a moment. He wasn’t very tall—shorter than me by a few inches—and he had the dark blond hair and blue eyes of his German ancestors. We did the embarrassing shuffle where we each brought up one hand, then the other, then stepped forward and backward, as though we didn’t know whether to shake hands or hug. My height may not have come from him, but clearly the socially awkward gene hadn’t missed me. “Hi, Dad.”

He ruffled my hair like he’d done when I was little, and it made something tighten in my throat. This was my father. I didn’t smell anything to indicate shifter, and I didn’t see the reflected light in his eyes indicating tapetum lucidum. I swallowed past the lump disappointment left in my throat.

Owen moved up next to me, both our bags looped over his shoulders.

I needed to make introductions. I could do this. Introduce my parents to a friend. A friend whose kisses turned me inside out. A friend who was there to help me prove—or disprove—that my parents had been lying to me my whole life.

“Mom, Dad, this is my friend Owen Weyer. Owen, meet my parents, Joseph and Amaya Franke.” The whole thing sounded ridiculously formal. I’d never really had to do an introduction like this before. My palms were sweaty, and I didn’t know what to do with my hands.

Owen grinned broadly and shook my dad’s hand with the same natural enthusiasm he did everything else. “It’s so great to meet you. Yusuf has told me so much about you. It’s great to finally meet you in person.”

Mom arched her brows at his use of my given name.

“Is this all you brought?” Dad asked, nodding to the luggage.

“Yeah, since we’re only going to be here a couple of days, we didn’t need much.” I took my bag from Owen. I couldn’t believe I’d shoved it at him like that.

“You must be hungry after such a long day,” Mom said.

My stomach immediately growled, despite the big lunch I’d had in Denver while we waited for our connecting flight to Chicago.

“I have baked chicken breasts, brown rice, and steamed vegetables.”

Inwardly I cringed. It was the kind of healthy meal I’d spent my life eating, at least outside of the times I’d been put on one particular diet plan or another. “I promised Owen I’d take him Lou Malnati’s. Show him authentic Chicago-style pizza.”

Both of my parents stopped in their tracks. “You can’t—” Dad started.

“You shouldn’t—” Mom began at the same time.

I sighed. Deep-dish pizza was not something I would have eaten before moving to Wyoming. It wasn’t something I could eat before Wyoming. But, damn it, I was old enough to make my own dinner choices.

My parents looked at each other, holding some kind of silent communication.

Owen placed his hand on my wrist. “It’s okay. I like chicken.”

My parents’ silent conversation halted as they both focused on Owen’s hand on me.

I sighed. “Fine. But tomorrow we’ll go to Lou’s.”

WHEN we reached the condo, I dragged Owen to my room. I said something about it being a chance for him to “freshen up,” whatever the hell that meant, so my parents wouldn’t question it. Really it was an excuse to get away from my parents, who’d spent the entire car ride from the airport in excruciating silence. It wasn’t all about escape, though. We needed to reach David.

I’d forgotten how barren my room was. Four walls, a full-size bed, and a nightstand. The chest of drawers was kept in my closet because it was one more thing that could gather dust and germs. Owen didn’t seem bothered by the Spartan chamber and hadn’t given the industrial-sized air purifier a second glance. If he wasn’t going to mention it, I certainly wasn’t going to get worked up over it.

Owen sat cross-legged on my bed, back facing the wall. I sat next to him. My laptop was between us, David’s face filling the monitor. He didn’t look quite as perfect as he had the day we met. Dark circles shadowed his eyes, and his lips were pale. His slightly too long hair stood out in several directions.

“What the hell did you get me involved in?” he demanded the minute the Skype call connected. “If you’ve landed me on some international terrorist watch list, I’m going to be pissed.”

I gasped. “International terrorist—”

“What happened?” Owen asked.

“I got cocky, that’s what happened. And I triggered a freaking honeypot.”

I blinked at the screen. “I don’t know what that means. But I take it it’s bad?”

David ran a hand through his rumpled hair. “It’s a trap meant to lure hackers, one that allows police, or whichever officials are interested, to get data on hackers. I shouldn’t have missed it, but they’d hidden it well. And who’d hide a fucking honeypot that way? I mean, the whole point is to make it an easy, obvious target to tempt hackers, not bury it under so much code someone would only run across it by accident.”

Owen leaned into the computer. “Before you get too caught up in who’s responsible, why don’t you start from the beginning and explain what happened.”

“Fine. This morning I barricaded myself in my bedroom while the rest of my family did holiday weekend stuff. I had to pretend that I didn’t feel good, and since shifters are rarely ill, half my family is convinced I’ve developed some kind of freakish disease, and the other half thinks I’m ‘out of sorts’ and ‘pouting’ because Aiden announced his engagement,” David said with a glower I couldn’t read. “Like I’d be jealous over my brother hog-tying himself to some lady. Anyway,” he added when Owen looked ready to interrupt again, “since the surface-level adoption record search, both open and closed, seemed to be a no-go, I decided to run another, deeper search on the deep web, you know, in case there was anything sealed, or, you know, not on the up-and-up.”

“Deep web?” I asked.

“You know, the part of the internet that’s not really indexed by search engines. Usually it’s pretty boring stuff, but it’s where password-protected pages and encrypted networks and databases hang out. It’s not really sketchy, not like the dark web, but—”

Owen cut him off. “Maybe we should save the internet-security lecture for another time?”

“Right,” I said, but I made a mental note to learn more about hacking and network security stuff. It was kind of fascinating.

“Anyway,” David said, brushing his bangs away from his face, “I set the search parameters and had just found some records originating in Iran, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, when bam, the trap fucking blew up, and next thing I know, it’s a race to wipe away any traces pointing to me or the council before the people on the other side of the trap could get too much information.”

My mouth was completely dry, so it took a second to be able to say, “Did you make it? I mean, were you able to get away undetected?”

David curled his lip, and the skin around his eyes tightened. “Not entirely.”

“Oh shit.” Owen reached out, covering my hand with his.

“‘Oh shit’ is right. I had to ask Aiden, my perfect, brilliant programmer brother, to jump in. He was able to secure the council’s data—”

“Thank goodness,” Owen said.

“—but my system was completely mined. And now I have to go in front of the council to explain why I put everyone, the council, shifters in general, my family, at risk.”

I drew my knees up, wrapping my arms round my legs. I couldn’t believe the whole thing had taken such a turn.

“And the ‘international terrorists’ comment?”

David rolled his eyes like he thought Owen was being deliberately obtuse. “My system was compromised when I tried to hack into records for Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Pakistan. My brother is expecting Homeland Security or the US Bureau of Counterterrorism to be in touch any minute now.”

“Aiden’s an alarmist,” Owen said. “You’re researching adoption records, not poking into anything terrorists would have a hand in. Your brother’s just speculating due to the Iran/Afghanistan connection.”

I squirmed a bit. “It’s not completely unfounded. There are definite connections between illegal adoption schemes and human trafficking, and between human trafficking and terrorist groups.”

“You don’t think your situation has anything to do with any of that, do you?” Owen asked.

“No, of course not.” Because, seriously, my situation was weird enough without terrorists. “The site you found, the one with the honeypot thingy, do you have anything to indicate it’s connected to me?”

“Not really. It fit some of the parameters once I expanded to international adoption records, specifically in Iran. I warned you it would be trickier given where you were born, but I hadn’t expected this. We don’t have enough data, including proof of adoption or any of your birth information, to know if there’s a likely connection or not. Will you be able to get me anything on that, by the way? Your birth certificate or medical information? If you can find the hospital you were born in, for example, it would narrow it down.”

“You’re still going to keep searching? Even after all this?” I waved my hand to encompass the room behind me. Hopefully he’d interpret that to include honeypots and data breaches.

His eyes narrowed, and I saw the steely determination that would likely serve him well as an investigative journalist. “I don’t quit until I get the answers. No matter what.”