“Why would someone do this?” Remy prompted, completely dazed as she stood behind a seated Casper in his room of monitors and tech equipment, staring at the screen in front of her.
The four of them, Remy, Sinclair, Malachi, and Casper, were watching the black-and-white recording of a man wearing a balaclava to hide his face and thin gloves on his hands, striding arrogantly through her apartment. There was no sound on the recording, but that just made it more compelling to watch.
Remy hadn’t bothered to ask how Casper had attained access to the private security images. The youngest Kingston brother had always been able to hack into any system he wanted. He had even offered to check on her GCSE exam results for her seven years ago, before they were made public. Tempting as that was, Remy had told him a firm no, thank you and waited for those results, like every other anxious sixteen-year-old. The Kingston family had no longer been a part of her life by the time it came to the results of her A levels, but even if they had, Remy would still have said no.
Which was why she hadn’t even asked how Casper had hacked into the security at her apartment. Instead, she now watched the man on the screen going from room to room. He looked into drawers and cupboards before pulling out the contents and destroying everything that was breakable or could be ripped to pieces. Including the pictures and frames taken off the walls and the clothes in her wardrobe and drawers.
It was just as well Darius and Felix had picked up some clothes for her the previous evening; otherwise, Remy wouldn’t have had any clothes left to wear!
“My guess?” Casper answered her. “Whoever that is”—he nodded toward the replay of the security footage—“and taking into account the similar break-in at your parents’ house, I believe he has to be looking for something specific.”
Remy shook her head. “I don’t have anything of value that— Whoa.” She reeled back in disbelief as she stared at the screen.
“What is it?” Sinclair lightly grasped her arms and pulled her back against the hardness of his chest. “Remy?”
She literally felt the blood drain from her cheeks as she couldn’t stop staring at the body language of the man on the screen as he ran his arm along the shelf in the sitting room, knocking the dozen or so framed photographs to the floor, smashing the glass. The man put the heel of his boot on the ones that didn’t smash on impact, grinding down on them until the glass splintered. He then bent to sort through the glass to pick up the individual photographs, perusing who was on them before he ripped several of them into tiny pieces. Much like some of the photographs at her parents’ house had been.
“Remy?” Sinclair’s voice had grown sharper at her continued silence.
She wrenched her gaze away from the image of the man who Casper, after glancing at the shock on her face, had frozen on the screen. “Do you know how he got into my apartment?”
The youngest Kingston brother shrugged. “According to Liam, there’s no sign of anyone picking the lock, so it looks as if the man had some other way of letting himself in.”
“How?” Sinclair grated.
“With a key,” Remy answered after Casper gave her a rueful glance.
“Another man has a key to your apartment?” Sinclair’s hands tightened on her arms.
Enough so that Remy thought she would probably have bruises there later. Which was the least of her worries.
“What man has the key to your apartment?” Sinclair demanded, fingers digging deeper into the flesh at the tops of her arms, his gaze glacial.
Remy knew how bad this must sound to him. Just as she could see the mistrust building in his expression. A lack of trust she didn’t deserve, but knew, with the history of deceit in his marriage, Sinclair was bound to feel until he became more sure of her and her feelings for him. If he ever did.
Which was a depressing thought.
Because no matter how wonderful their lovemaking had been the previous night, or how much she loved him, if Sinclair couldn’t get past his lack of trust, he was going to destroy any relationship between them before it truly began.
As for who had a key to her apartment…
She pulled out of Sinclair’s grasp, no doubt causing more bruises, before turning to face him. “It isn’t what you think it is.”
His eyes narrowed. “Then tell me what it is?”
“Sin—”
“Stay the fuck out of my business,” he barked at Casper without even glancing at him.
Remy recognized the Sinclair now standing in front of her as being the same one she’d met at the hotel yesterday. A man with cold eyes and absolutely no softness in his expression or body. A man who admitted to having become a killer in his quest for justice for the weak or ignored.
Remy repressed a shiver as he looked at her without an ounce of the warmth and desire with which he’d made love to her the previous night. Several times. Each time had been more intense than the last as their familiarity increased and they learned what gave the other pleasure.
The same hands that had made love to her so gently and thoroughly were currently tightly clenched at Sinclair’s sides, as if that was the only way he could stop himself from hitting something or someone. Remy didn’t believe for a moment that he would ever physically hurt her.
Unfortunately, the man in the security footage was another matter.
“Let’s leave the two of them alone for a few minutes, hmm, Casper?” Malachi spoke quietly as he pushed away from the wall he’d been leaning against.
Remy turned to look at him. Malachi gave a pointed glance at the frozen screen, telling her he knew exactly what she was going to tell Sinclair once he and Casper had gone out of the room.
Because Sinclair was right, Malachi might not be the most sensitive when it came to emotions, but he tried to understand them by observing and analyzing. Right now, Remy believed Malachi had observed exactly the same thing she had about the image of the man on the screen.
“Fine with me.” Casper shrugged before standing. “Call us when you’ve finished talking.”
The two men left an awkward silence behind them, one that Sinclair’s harsh expression told Remy she would have to fill because he wasn’t going to.
She cleared her throat before speaking. “Do all of you still have your own apartments in town?”
“Why?”
Remy sighed. “Sinclair, if you can’t get over your suspicion in regard to everything I do and say, then we’re over before we begin. And that isn’t a threat. It’s a fact.” She gave a pained wince. “Healthy relationships don’t exist when the people in that relationship can’t trust each other.”
He drew in a steadying breath. “Yes, we all have apartments in town.”
Some of the tightness eased in her chest that he’d at least answered her. She nodded. “And does anyone else have the key to your apartment?”
“What the hell…?”
“Sinclair, your answer is important. Please,” she prompted emotionally.
Sinclair had absolutely no idea where Remy was going with these questions. Except the earnest expression on her face told him it was important that he put his anger aside and answer her.
She was right, they wouldn’t survive as a couple if he didn’t trust her. And after last night, Sinclair wanted them to survive. He wanted that more than he wanted anything, including his next breath.
Which meant he had to get over these feelings of jealousy. Remy was uniquely herself, no one else, and if he wanted to keep her, he needed to take a few steps back and listen to what she was saying rather than jumping to assumptions.
“We don’t actually have keys,” he answered briskly. “We have cards, and codes to verify those cards.”
“Like when you use a credit card?”
“Yes.”
“And does anyone else have a copy of your card and know those codes? In case you lose your card or forget the code?”
“I’m not senile yet.”
“Something I’m well aware of after last night,” Remy confirmed impatiently. “Will you please just quit giving me sarcasm and answer the damn question?”
After last night.
It had been an incredible night. One where he and Remy had made love for hours, exploring, loving, claiming, until they fell into an exhausted sleep wrapped in each other’s arms. A night when Sinclair knew Remy had given herself to him completely, leaving him in absolutely no doubt that her feelings for him were very real.
Only for Sinclair to react like an idiot this morning when Remy said the intruder into her apartment had used a key to let himself in. But if that man wasn’t her lover, and Sinclair knew that he wasn’t, then he had to be someone else close enough to her for her to have given him a spare key to her apartment.
Sinclair straightened as the truth of the situation started to become clear to him. “Casper keeps a copy and list of all the cards and codes for our apartments.”
She nodded. “Because he’s family.” Her eyes glistened with unshed tears.
“Yes,” Sinclair confirmed on an exhale. “In the same way your mother and father are your family. Is this the reason their house was broken into three nights ago?” He frowned. “Because the intruder was looking for the spare key to your apartment?”
She didn’t answer him. Instead, the tears balancing on her dark lashes now began to fall down her cheeks.
“Remy…?”
“The body they found is my mother,” she choked, sobbing harder now.
Sinclair stepped forward to pull her trembling body into his arms. “We won’t know that for certain until the police—”
“I know it’s her,” Remy wailed.
“How can you be so sure?”
She pulled back. “Because it can’t be him!” She glared at the image on the screen.
Sinclair turned to look at that image.
He saw a man approximately six feet tall, with wide shoulders and a slender build. The balaclava and gloves made it impossible to see his face or hands and make a positive identification—
Holy shit!
The gloves the man was wearing weren’t thin leather or cotton, but those thin latex gloves that doctors and nurses wore.
That surgeons wore.
That Ralph Mitchell, Remy’s father wore, when he was operating on his patients.