Imperial Coffee

Bones: Part Eighteen

A/N: Just a warning that there's heavier swearing than there usually is. Have a good weekend, guys! Don't kill me for this part! 

Cinder tried to compose herself as Kai turned the car towards the San José Airport. She let her hair down and tied her ponytail back up, wiped her cheeks, and put the screw back in her pant's pocket. There were other things she couldn't change, like her wet clothing and stained shirt, but Kai didn't say anything about her appearance. She looked like she'd passed through a hurricane, and she knew it.

She certainly felt like it. Up to that point, the name Levana was nothing but an impersonal annoyance. She'd seen a few news stories about her and her scandals, and she knew she was the CEO of Imperial Coffee's biggest competition, but that had always been it.

If what Winter said was true, though, Levana wasn't just a nuisance—she was a murder. And Cinder was in the thick of it.

"How do you know Winter?" Cinder asked. She worried about distracting Kai from the road when it was dark and raining, but she was curious—and needed a new direction for her thoughts go in.

"My father and her mother had meetings together relatively frequently. When we were pretty young, her father supervised us. Later we had to suffer through the meets together. Can't say we ever knew each other well, but more than strangers or acquaintances, I guess." Kai shrugged.

"Did you ever visit the East coast then?"

"I didn't fly around too often because I was in school, but I came along over summer and breaks."

"So...was there any chance we met each other then too? When we were children?"

Kai's eyebrows scrunched together, but he continued to watch the road. Cinder wondered if she should stop talking.

"It's unlikely. I don't really remember it if we did."

"Mmhm."

Cinder looked away, out the window on her side. Cars and streetlights passed, shimmering like illusions in the storm. She wondered what time Thorne's flight was, if they would even get there in time. From what Kai told her, it seemed like he would be eating dinner before, so hopefully that's what they'd find when they got there—not that he'd already left.

Her gut twisted. Why was he leaving so suddenly? Even if he did drop out of Stanford and get accepted at the school he wanted to go to, he couldn't very well start in the middle of the second semester. If he was flying there now, it wasn't just because of school. It was because he wanted to leave.

The question was, why? Was he really that sick of the school that he didn't even want to be near it? Did he have a falling out with his other friends? Did he have a falling out with her?

It was too much to think he was leaving for her. That would be a self-centered thought, she knew. But she did wonder if she was a factor, and if she was, she couldn't forgive herself for it.

"Do you think we'll catch him in time?" Cinder asked. They were only five minutes away now and the rain was starting to let up. It wasn't stopping, but at least it was easier to see the road and other cars.

"Yes," Kai said.

"Why?"

"Well," Kai said. "I'm optimistic. And I'm also pretty sure a plane isn't going up in this weather."

Thorne munched on fries, checking the boarding pass on his phone every twenty seconds. The words didn't change, the ones that now said DELAYED in big, glaring white letters. He'd been planning on going into the airport, but the notification had popped up right before. He decided it would be much better to wait outside than inside if it really wasn't going to be another five hours before he could get on the plane, so he found the closest restaurant, which happened to be a McDonalds.