Don't Say a Word. Rita Herron

for you, Crystal. Always.”

      She closed her eyes to stem the tears threatening. Theirs was an odd relationship. Two misfits thrown together, two survivors hanging on to life by a severed thread. Yet they weren’t really living either.

      “I’ve missed you since last night, Crystal,” he said in a low voice.

      She tensed. She’d sensed that his friendship ran deep, that he wanted more from her. She loved him in a platonic way.

      Too many pieces of her past lost. Too many questions unanswered.

      Another man…maybe waiting.

      The sound of Lex turning his harmonica over in his hands with fingers brittle from his disease forced her to open her eyes again.

      “Our quote for the day,” he began, “is from Ecclesiastes 49:10. ‘Two are better than one, for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow.’”

      A sliver of unease tickled her spine as his words washed over her. Lex was her friend, but if she healed as Dr. Pace promised, and she had to hold on to the hope that she would recover, she couldn’t imagine Lex as her lover. And she knew that he wanted more from her.

      He lifted his harmonica and began to wail out a blues song that gripped her with sadness. Regret fed the flames of her emotions. She loved Lex, and she didn’t want to hurt him.

      But she had to find out who she was. Where she’d come from. How she had ended up here.

      If she had a family, a husband, other friends. A lover.

      And why in the past months, not a single person had cared enough to hunt for her.

      DAMON STUDIED HIS BROTHER’S face as he drove toward their family’s house. Of all the confounded nights to have a homey get-together…but his mother had refused to take no for an answer. She’d hinted that his oldest brother, Jean-Paul, a detective with the New Orleans Police Department, had to see them.

      God, he hoped that didn’t mean more trouble. Their family had been through hell the past two years. Katrina had nearly destroyed the family home and business—Jean-Paul had lost his first wife during the ordeal—and only a few months ago, their baby sister, Catherine, had almost died at the hands of a serial killer they’d dubbed the Swamp Devil.

      Tonight—after witnessing the extraction of the woman’s mutilated hand from the swamp, listening to conjecture about the cause of death and the perp from the officers at the scene, and watching his brother sweat bullets for three hours—Damon’s head throbbed with anxiety.

      But his mother insisted the Dubois family needed to celebrate Jean-Paul’s marriage to Britta Berger, the editor of a secret-confession column for a local magazine called Naked Desires, a woman who had drawn the serial killer to New Orleans a few months ago and given his brother the chase of a lifetime.

      And the woman of Jean-Paul’s dreams.

      Granted, Damon had been suspicious of Britta at first, and with good reason. Britta had a shady past, a traumatized upbringing, had lied and had secrets. But when the truth had been revealed, he’d realized she had been an innocent victim of a sinister cult that had sacrificed humans to a god they called Sobek. Not only had she survived and escaped the cult, and the leader who’d tried to kill her, now she helped teenage prostitutes get off the streets. She also loved his brother dearly.

      Lucky bastard.

      Damon pulled down the drive to their parents’ house, weaving through the maze of giant live oaks and the moss sweeping downward like spiderwebs. “Tell me about this woman, the one you think is our victim.”

      “Her name is Kendra. Kendra Yates.”

      “And how did you meet her?”

      “She was a dancer at a casino bar. I…didn’t ask questions until later.”

      Antwaun coughed into his hand. “Much later.”

      So they’d slept together. No big surprise. His brother was quite the ladies’ man, in a hellion, take-me-as-I-am kind of way. “Dammit, Antwaun, when are you going to stop picking up chicks in bars?”

      “Look, Damon, not everyone’s the sainted ex-marine that you are.”

      Damon gritted his teeth, guilt plaguing him. “I’m not a saint. Never claimed to be.”

      Antwaun scowled. “The folks and people in town sure see it that way.”

      Damon narrowed his eyes. He didn’t have time for this bullshit. “Just tell me what happened between you and this woman.”

      Antwaun flexed his fisted hands and stared at the blunt tips of his fingers. “We saw each other for a while. I…thought we were getting close.”

      “You gave her a ring?”

      “Yeah.”

      He cut his eyes sharply to the side. “And its significance?”

      “I didn’t propose, if that’s what you’re asking. But I did think about it, although the ring wasn’t expensive. I bought it from one of those artists on the streets.” He cleared his throat. Hesitated. Looked almost sheepish. Then a frown pulled at his mouth. “Later that night, she disappeared.”

      “You reported her missing?”

      “No. I thought she’d just left. Me.” His eyes darkened with hurt. “Figured I’d scared her off, or the ring wasn’t expensive enough.”

      Damon contemplated his brother’s declaration. He sounded serious.

      “I’ve never known you to fall for a woman, Antwaun.”

      Antwaun shrugged his blue denim-clad shoulders. “Never thought I would either.”

      Damon’s neck tightened as he parked the black FBI-issued sedan in the drive of his parents’ antebellum home. Since his last visit, they’d painted the house a pale yellow, the trim white. Huge ferns swung from the awning, and his dad had built a porch swing at one end and staged rocking chairs between pots of geraniums. Such a domestic setting.

      So at odds with the Dubois men and their jobs. And now this trouble…

      His mind spun back to Antwaun’s admission. If his little brother had actually fallen in love with Kendra Yates, she must have been pretty damn special.

      But now the woman was dead. Murdered—and they both knew that Antwaun’s relationship with her meant he would be interrogated.

      “All right, Antwaun. Now tell me the truth. Do you know why someone would kill her?”

      “No. Like I told you, I have no idea what happened to her.” His brother shifted, chewed the inside of his cheek, then stared at the woods that backed his parents’ property. A shadow caught Damon’s eye, and he watched a gator slither up onto the bank and settle in the dark bed of weeds, hidden.

      Damon’s gut churned. The cops called Antwaun a chameleon. When undercover, he could change colors to blend in with any background. Like the gator who hid in the spiny shadows of the weeping willow.

      But Antwaun also had a temper, and a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He also liked to break the rules and push the limits. And sometimes he played the role of undercover bad guy a little too convincingly. His hotheaded temper had landed him in jail a few times when he was younger, and Damon and Jean-Paul had bailed out his ass, although they hadn’t been happy about it. And even in the service, he’d walked a fine line between fighting the enemy on the field and ending up in the brig for insubordinate conduct.

      Damon studied the rigid set to his jaw as Antwaun climbed out. There was more to the story than he was telling. Something Antwaun didn’t want him to know. Something about Kendra Yates? Or was it about himself and their relationship? What else had happened between them?

      LEX VAN WORMER WATCHED her sleep.

      Crystal, he called her,