Tiger Bound by Tressie Lockwood Page B

with a glass of water and two pills. He took them from her with his thanks, but he set them on the table along with the glass.
    “I’m going to try to hold out a bit. So far, I haven’t come across anything useful.”
    Together, they scanned each page one by one. Deja pointed to the top of a sheet to a square with writing inside it like someone had stamped it. “What’s this? ‘Original sent eight twenty-four.’”
    “‘No evidence observed. Human,’” Heath continued from another line on the page. “I think that box is noting the date he sent this information to someone—maybe to Spiderweb. This other part I don’t get.”
    Deja shivered. She dipped her head, and he put down the papers and wrapped an arm around her. When she hugged him back and nuzzled into his chest, he lifted her chin to look into her eyes. The fear he saw there stirred inside him as well, but so far, he had nothing concrete to blame the sensation on.
    “Some of the words in there are medical terms, complicated medical terms. I don’t know about you, but seriously, I would never in a million years believe your dad would know them to toss all around his notes. He always encouraged you to read, but I never saw him pick up a book, I mean nothing complex.”
    “Almost as if he wanted us to believe he was no more than the average Joe,” Heath agreed.
    She clutched his hands, and he both felt and saw the tremor in them. Deja wasn’t shaken easily. Nothing seemed to faze her, especially when it came to getting on his ass about whatever didn’t please her. What did get to her was anything that affected him negatively. This mystery had the potential of displacing everything he knew about his dad. He knew she recognized the fact and didn’t like it.
    “I think it’s time for you to read that letter, Heath. It might take care of all the questions and clear up this mess to the point that we’re laughing about getting all nervous.”
    “You might be right.”
    She leaned up from his embrace, and he set the papers aside to pick up the envelope. Inside were several sheets of writing paper, but only the first held his dad’s tight, neat script. Just as he thought, the letter hadn’t been finished. He probably thought he had plenty of time to get everything down before the accident took his life.
    Heath swallowed and began to read.
    “Dear Heath,
    Before I get into the secrets I’ve kept from you all the years of your life, I have to say this first. Do not take another pill. No matter how bad the pain gets, ride it out, son, because if I am gone and you’re reading this letter, you will need to be all you were born to be—”
    “What the flippin’ hell?” Deja interjected.
    Heath put the letter down and stood up. He paced the living room floor, running fingers through his hair over and over again. Glancing at the pills still sitting on the table, he wondered what his dad had been feeding him all these years and why he needed to stop now.
    “The words in this sentence are all underlined and traced over several times,” Deja told him. She repeated the words, and their meaning sank into his understanding like bombs, detonating on impact. Bile rose in his throat, and his head spun. Why? What did it mean, and why did his father give him the pills in the first place if they did something to him other than quell his pain?
    After he calmed down a bit, he sat and retrieved the letter from Deja to continue reading. “Son, I first want to tell you I love you, more than I have a right to—just as I loved your mother. They expected me to do my job and nothing else, but how can I be a human being without love? How can I live so many years with another person and not come to care? It’s impossible, and I wonder how they expect compliance, knowing that’s the case. I take that back. I don’t wonder. I know. They expect compliance because they enforce it, and that is why I am writing this letter. So you know what you’re dealing with and so you