“I’m so sorry.”
The hell? I double checked the caller ID listed and yes, that was my father’s number. It had certainly sounded like my father’s voice, too. “Are you being held at gunpoint?”
“No, don’t be silly.”
“Held against your will?”
“Tyr, be serious.”
“If you can’t speak freely, do something to make it obvious.”
I heard Dad huff out a breath of air in agitation. “I can damn well say what I want, no one’s around, I’m not being held against my will or anything ridiculous like that. Can’t a man just say he’s sorry?”
Yeah, that was him, and I couldn’t help the smile that bubbled up from my relief. He was just teasing me, not in hospital bed somewhere dying. “Well, when you say it that way…”
“You’re such a brat.”
“And here I thought you were apologizing.”
“I was. Am.”
Oh. He’d been serious. “I don’t know what for.”
“I didn’t believe you about your soulwords.”
A thrill of excitement curled down his spine. If he believed me that meant - “You found him?” Donovan was checking out the bakery and Trevor was going back to the club tonight, but if Dad found him this would be so much easier.
“Not yet.”
I almost fell over my chair, shoving it out of the way so I could pace freely. “Then what do you mean?”
“I - “ Dad hesitated on the line, and I had to grit my teeth together so I didn’t rush him. Hard to say meant it was something bad. There was something wrong. What? When he finally started again Dad’s voice was rough and strained. “I pushed you on your soulwords and insisted you had them, even when you kept telling me you didn’t. I thought you were just being stubborn.”
I was being stubborn, and he’d always assumed the truth: that I was lying. I did have words. They were faint and hard to read, but the words were just behind my ear and I touched them lightly as Dad tripped over his apology. Words my soulmate hadn’t spoken yet teased the edge of my hairline. I had assumed, since I’d confessed that I’d met my match, that I’d been caught in the lie once and for all. If Dad believed me - what the fuck had happened to my soulmate? “I don’t understand,” I said when Dad didn’t elaborate. I had to swallow a lump in my throat to get out: “What did you find?”
“Tyr - gods, I’m so sorry. I should have believed you. Should have considered what that meant instead of pushing -”
“I swear if you don’t tell me what you found right now I’m going to punch your lights out.” My throat felt like I’d swallowed a box of pins, a million possibilities making my skin crawl. And right there at the top of the list was my worst fear.
“I - I think your match is mute.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, a bit of a hysterical laugh breaking through. “Fuck. Is that all?”
“I didn’t beli-”
“I thought he was dead.”
“What?”
I collapsed back in the chair and dropped the phone for a moment, rubbing my face as I breathed through my hands and let my heart rate slow down from the supersonic pounding Dad had incited. I clicked speakerphone, then thought to check if the door was closed. It was. “Think about actually saying what’s wrong before you give someone a heart attack,” I finally managed. “You call, apologizing for not believing that I don’t have words, and then can’t choke out why? Of course that’s where I went. Think about who we are and who you were investigating before I dumped this on us.” Everyone else thought the Digger was just rumors, but if he’d taken my soulmate I didn’t care if he was a rumor. I’d ruin him.
“I’m a horrible father.”
“No, you just didn’t think things through.” I tried to be understanding, but I still had a chill from the sweat drying on my skin. “Just like you also should have realized this is a conversation we should have in person.”
“I’m really sorry I didn’t believe you.”
I felt a lump wedge itself in my throat again. What would I tell Dad now? I did have words, but if Dad thought my match was mute then there was a very good reason for that. Dad might not believe the man was my match, or he might start looking to fix the stranger when we found him - without even knowing if there was something to fix. Maybe it was a misunderstanding. Or maybe something was going to happen still, something which made the match incomplete.
As far as I knew no one else had faint words. Marks were like tattoos: black and stark. They never wavered, never disappeared behind scars or stretched as bodies aged. Fading was an exception, happening when both sides of a match rejected each other. That happened because of trauma, usually, and only started after they had met - not before. It didn’t match what we knew of soulsickness, either. That horrible disease ate at the soul of an incomplete and tainted bond, one where anger and resentment festered. Soulsick people still had marks, though.
What could cause a faint mark?
My leg bounced and I itched to find a mirror to check my mark again. I hadn’t looked at it since I was a teenager. Maybe something had changed and I’d just been too much of a coward to see it.
“Tyr?”
“I’m still here,” I said, gathering myself back together for the conversation. I’d need to research later. “Why do you think he’s mute?”
“Jocelyn asked the club for the security footage of you last night. You got it a few minutes ago with a note from the guard who reviewed it.”
“You’re in my email again?” I groaned.
“It’s not like you check it all the time. Anyways, at one point he’s with a young woman and she’s speaking to him but he’s not talking back. He’s using his hands instead. Later, he writes to one of the staff but doesn’t speak to him. It’s pretty clear he’s looking for someone or something, but he never seems to call out or ask for help that I can see, and the guard thought he recognized the motions as sign language.”
“He was looking for someone?”
“Yeah,” Dad said, and for once his voice was gentle. “He wasn’t trying to run away. Something - something just wasn’t right.”
“I don’t know if I should be relieved at that or worried,” I admitted. “On the one hand, at least I didn’t scare him off just because the words I said were crap.”
“On the other hand, what could have worried him so much he fled from his soulmate without explaining?”
“Did he sign anything to me?” I asked. My heart hurt at the thought that he’d said something and I hadn’t heard.
“I think so, maybe,” Dad said. “It’s a bad angle, and apparently no one there knows how to interpret it.”
I closed my eyes and breathed. I could follow that lead on my words, then. “Ok. Thanks. Let me know if you find anything else?”
“Of course.”
“Donovan’s following up the bakery angle and see if I can get a name or anything. Damn. If I’d just said something to him that day - anything - we wouldn’t be scrambling right now.”
“So it is the same man?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was up close with him and yes. Definitely.”
“What’s done is done,” Dad said simply. “Now we just work with what we have. I’ll follow up with the club and see what I can find. He’s not an official staff member. Looks like he was a newbie on probation or something. They’re trying to contact someone who worked out his hiring. You see what you can find and then tonight we’ll compare notes. Did you want to watch the footage with me?”
“It’s in my email, right? No offense, but I’d rather watch it privately.”
“He’s your soulmate, of course you want to be alone with him,” Dad teased.
“Dad,” I scolded. “Stop that. It’s embarrassing.”
“Please. If that’s embarrassing you then you’ll be as red as a tomato at your wedding.”
I bit my tongue against my first remark and moved on: “I asked our security to send me the footage from the day he delivered our lunch. I thought we might have better images, since the cameras wouldn’t have to deal with strobe lights and crowds. I wanted to send a pic to Trev and Don, but I don’t have anything that’d be of use yet.”
“I’ll give security a little visit while you look through the club footage. See what the holdup is on my way out.”
“Thanks.” I hung up and chanced a peek out the glass walls. Joce hadn’t noticed my agitation during the call, still sorting through emails with her headphones in and sipping on her cup of (probably cold) tea.
This didn’t look good. I’d encountered my match twice now, and both times the other man hadn’t said a word. Dad thought the man might be mute, but that didn’t make sense since I had words. And both times the brown-haired stranger was working for a different company.
What the hell was going on?
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