Sarah turned the key over in her hand. “I guess he forgot to tell me about it.”

Bullshit, she thought.

“Happens all the time,” the manager said as she passed the POA back.

Does it really?

“Come with me.”

As Sarah followed the manager back out into the open area, she looked for Buffalo Bills guy. He was gone. Maybe she was just being paranoid.

The safety deposit boxes were way in the back, in a vault that must have weighed as much as the rest of the entire strip mall. After a little manila envelope was taken out of a narrow filing cabinet, Sarah was invited to sign on one of its vacant lines.

She froze with her Bic. The sight of Gerry’s signatures was like those boots with the mud in the treads, but worse: Without her knowing, he’d been in and out of the box seven times over the twelve months before he’d died … seemingly at random as she noted each of the dates.

The last one really got to her.

The Saturday he’d died. As she blinked away a wash of tears, she imagined him coming here as she had just done. Which spot had he parked in? Who had he talked to in the branch? Which of the staff took him over here to sign this little envelope?

What had been on his mind?

And like her … who had been watching him?

“Why wasn’t there a notice when he died?” Sarah asked. “I mean, why didn’t I get a notice that I needed to switch this to my name?”

The branch manager shook her head. “My guess is that because it’s a joint account, there was an assumption that you’d signed as well.”

“Oh.”

“Just right there at the bottom,” the manager pointed out gently. “That’s where you sign.”

“Sorry.” She focused on the initials beside each of Gerry’s John Hancocks. As they were just a squiggle, she couldn’t read them. “Is that you?”

“No, my predecessor. I took over this branch about nine months ago.”

“Oh, okay.” Sarah scribbled her name. “I was just wondering.”

The bank manager initialed and then they were inside the vault, looking for 425 in the rows of rectangular doors. Twin key turns later, and Sarah had a long, narrow metal box in her hands.

It was light. But there was something in it, a shifting weight and soft clink being released as she turned and went into a private room with no windows or glass.

The bank manager hesitated before closing the door. As she put her hand on her round belly, her deep brown eyes were grave. “I am very sorry for your loss.”

Sarah put her palm on the cold metal of the box and focused on the manager’s engagement ring and wedding band set. It was hard not to think that if Gerry hadn’t died, maybe she’d be where the other woman was. Then again, if Gerry had lived, who knows where they would have ended up, given how things had been between them.

God, she hated thinking like that.

“Thank you,” she whispered as she sat down in the chair.

Sarah waited until the door was shut before she lifted the latch and opened the half lid. Her whole body shook as she looked inside.

A USB drive. Black with a white slide.

And a set of BioMed credentials she’d never seen before.

Frowning, she put the USB drive into the zipper pocket of her purse. And then she inspected the credentials. The laminated card had the BioMed logo on it, and the bar code that got scanned by security whenever anyone entered the facility. There was also the strip on the back that you swiped through the door lock readers, a seven-digit phone number written in permanent marker, and the holographic image pattern that ensured authenticity.

But there was no photograph, no name, no rank.

Sarah tilted the box forward to make sure she hadn’t missed anything on the far end. Then she stuck her hand into the cramped space, feeling around.

Nothing.

She sat back in the chair. As she stared at the blank wall ahead of her, she realized that she’d once again expected a letter from him. Something sincere and heartfelt, along the lines of a last missive that helped her put everything into a good place.

Re-closing the box, she put the credentials into her purse.

As she stood up, she hesitated.

Then she got the USB drive and the credentials back out, and stuffed both of them in her sports bra.

Good thing she was relatively flat-chested. Plenty of room in there.

Longest, lousiest day of his life, Murhder thought a couple hours later.

Okay, fine, so maybe only the first part of that was true. But shit.

As he limped around Darius’s drawing room on his bum leg, he was surprised he hadn’t worn a path in the nap of the rug, his footfalls making a wear pattern that wound in and around the antique furniture.

God, it was difficult being so frustrated with something that didn’t care about his emotional state.

And no, he wasn’t talking about Vishous.

The issue was the sun. That enormous, glowing death ball did not give two shits about how pent-up he was. The sonofabitch was just meandering its way from east to west, and the fact that it had been snowing since about eleven in the morning didn’t help. Vampires were incompatible with daylight in all its forms, and even for somebody as loosely held together as he was, there was no risking even tangential exposure.

At least it was winter in Upstate New York. That grandfather clock had announced it was three in the afternoon a while ago, and darkness would start falling at about four thirty.

If it had been July? He’d have gone insane—

More insane, that was.

One more hour and he was free. Maybe he could get away with leaving in forty-five minutes.

Entering the empty waiting room, he stopped by the desk. Vishous, that supercilious shithead, had done in a number of hours what Murhder had failed to do in twenty years—and the answer had been medical records.

Murhder reached out and turned each of the three letters around so they faced him. He knew them by heart. The handwriting in the first two was painfully imprecise, the words scripted with a shaky pen. The final one was all in the symbols of the Old Language, and they were likewise drawn by a frail hand.

There was also a single piece of paper on the blotter by the computer, and Murhder picked it up. Nothing precise here. Just a bunch of dates scribbled on a timeline. Creating the chronology had been the only piece of teamwork he and V had performed.

Murhder had provided the start date, the night that he had gone back to the second facility, looking for the pregnant female. Working from there, they had traced the events the letters detailed, she being moved to another location, as she had given birth to her son, the years the two had spent together, her escape when the scientists had been transferring her away from her young.

Separated from her son, she had tried desperately to find him, searching every night for the hidden lab. With few resources and no money, she had never gotten very far, and she had another thing working against her: The final letter noted that she was in poor health.

And that was how V had found her. Havers, the race’s healer, had long kept records on his patients, and recently, the files had been transcribed into a database the King had access to. The search function had been complicated and inefficient, especially as they had no idea what she might have had to see the healer about. Because she had given birth, however, Vishous had started with that and managed to identify a pool of females who had come in with issues common to those who had at some point been on the birthbed. From those patients, he had further isolated those who had been born of a son.