“Ever heard of knocking?” I said mildly. Wylder’s family owned this entire mansion—technically he had the right to barge in wherever he wanted.
Kaige shoved past Wylder. “Have you seen Mercy?”
His obvious agitation unnerved me more than I liked, which made me irritated all over again. “I haven’t seen her since yesterday night. What’s the emergency?”
“She went for a run with me,” Kaige said. “We were supposed to take three laps through the path around the backyards and then meet up at the front steps. I’d pulled ahead of her by the third time around, so I got there first, but she just… never turned up.”
“I assume you checked the path and obvious places like her room in case she took a detour to get back to the house a different way.”
“Of course,” Kaige snapped. “She isn’t anywhere, and it’s been nearly an hour.”
The obvious conclusion hit me, bringing an unexpected twinge of disappointment with it. I wasn’t sure I liked that reaction either. “She took off, then. Decided to get her revenge on her own terms.”
“Why the hell would she do that?” Wylder said. He kept his voice even, but the tension running through it brought me to sharper attention. He was worried. “I gave her my word just this morning that she’s one of us now, that we’re going to crush Colt. It wouldn’t make any sense for her to leave the second she got what she’s been pushing so hard for.”
Rowan shifted in his chair. “Maybe she decided she can’t take you at your word after the ways we’ve jerked her around.” His tone was casual, but his shoulders had stiffened. I got the impression he wasn’t okay with the idea that Mercy was gone even though he’d given every indication that he never wanted her here in the first place.
Kaige shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s not just what Wylder said. I found this in front of the neighbor’s house. I’m sure it’s hers.” He smacked a phone on my desk.
“Maybe you should have led with that?” I said dryly, and picked up the phone. It was the same brand of burner as the phone I’d seen on her. Opening it, I tapped through to the recent messages. Yes, there were the urgent texts she’d sent all of us last night trying to warn us about Gia—and an unsent one to Kaige that cut off in mid-sentence as if she’d been interrupted. Maybe hurry your ass…
I couldn’t think of many things that could have caused Mercy to drop her phone in the middle of a text and not pick it up again, and none of the ones I could think of were good.
Kaige paced to my aquarium and back again. “Check the surveillance footage. Maybe that’ll show us something.”
“It doesn’t cover the neighbor’s lawn,” I said.
“Just check it!”
Wylder clapped a hand to Kaige’s shoulder. “We’ll figure it out. Give the man room to work.” He nodded to me. “It can’t hurt to take a look. We might see something useful.”
The words should have sounded like a suggestion, but there was an obvious command to them. I could feel the tension in the room pulling taut like a bow. All four of us—in our different ways—were disturbed by Mercy’s absence. I supposed I’d gotten used to having her around, and now our dynamic had been thrown off just slightly again. It was nothing more than that.
I pulled up the feed for the camera that gave a view of the yard and sidewalk in front of the house. “So this was about an hour ago? How long was she out of your sight while you were running?”
“I guess… about ten minutes? After I’d come around the side of the house at the end of the street, I stopped for a few minutes figuring I’d let her catch up enough to give her a fighting chance. When she didn’t come around the bend, I assumed she’d pulled some kind of fast one on me. But then I couldn’t find her anywhere.”
Playing back the footage at ten times the speed, I studied the screen. Kaige and Mercy set off running. Several minutes later, they reappeared neck and neck. After another several minutes, they reappeared with Kaige several paces in the lead.
Just a few minutes after that, Mercy came jogging into view from the wrong angle, as if she was coming from the house rather than from the street. I slowed the recording down.
Kaige blinked, and a laugh sputtered out of him. “She did pull a fast one. I should have seen that coming. She must have made it over the fence with those parkour moves of hers and cut through the yard.”
“That doesn’t explain why she vanished afterward,” Wylder muttered, stepping right up behind my chair and peering at the screen intently.
Mercy waited in front of the house for a minute, bouncing restlessly on her feet. Then she jogged out of frame toward the neighbor’s. I was just reaching for the mouse to start zipping through the footage again when a white van whizzed past at breakneck speed.
Kaige froze. “What the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but I couldn’t shake the apprehension that was creeping into my gut. Why would a regular delivery van be tearing away from here like a bat out of hell?
Nothing else showed in the footage except Kaige loping into sight a little later. I dismissed the window and stood up, grabbing my tablet. “I think we need to take a look at the actual scene. Show me exactly where you found her phone.”
Kaige hustled along the hall and down the stairs as if Mercy’s life might depend on how quickly we made it outside. I didn’t like the knowledge that it very well might. As we stepped out into the warm summer sunshine, I couldn’t help picturing her prancing out with a smirk to laugh at us for worrying about her. I might even have been hoping for it.
It didn’t happen. Kaige strode to a spot about halfway along the neighbor’s lawn and pointed to the edge of the sidewalk. “I found it right here.” His hand dropped to his side, where it flexed and clenched as if just waiting for something—or someone—to punch.
The sidewalk and the neatly mown grass offered nothing. Wylder had already stalked over to the road. A breath hissed in through his teeth.