“A SHOE?” Garrison said, leaning into the counter with an expression that told me he was thinking just as hard about the situation as I was. He looked down at the printed-out photos I’d set between us, shaking his head. “That is pretty weird. And the papers and symbols are just as bad.”
I grimaced. “I just wish I understood what all of this means—if it means anything, you know?”
“Did you snap any pictures of the desk before you left?” Julius asked, scanning the photos of the bookshelves.
I shook my head. “I ran out of time. Maybe I can go back down there the next time I visit.”
Talon’s eyes shot up and captured mine. “You’re not going back.”
I frowned at him. “I have to.”
He gestured to the photos. “Not until we know what all of this means. It’s definitely disturbing, especially after what you found in the lock box. We’re not sending you into a potentially deadly situation for information. You’re not a spy.”
I narrowed my eyes in challenge. “No, but they are my family. It’s not like any of you could waltz in there and get access anywhere near as easily.”
“Talon’s right,” Julius said. “It would be reckless to go back without more information. We won’t tell you where you’re allowed to go, but please, give us a chance to see what we can make of this first.”
“I wasn’t planning on heading right back there today,” I said. “But even if I did, I can take care of myself.”
Garrison nudged me with his elbow, his tone wryly affectionate. “Sweetheart, nobody claimed that you couldn’t. But you do have a bit of a blind spot for your family, and we won’t let them exploit that—exploit you.”
I wanted to argue that I didn’t have a blind spot, but it would be a lie, and all of them knew it. No matter how much evidence arose against the Maliks, a part of me still wanted to believe it wasn’t possible. I couldn’t help searching for ways to deny the facts that had been laid out before me.
Blaze pulled the photo of one of the coded documents toward him, running his finger below each of the numbers that looked like years. “If these are dates, as the numbers suggest, it’s possible they’ll match up with some factor to do with the missing kids that I’ve found… Now that I have this, I might be able to break the rest of the code. I’ll see what I can do.”
He switched back and forth between the photos and his laptop, so immersed that he didn’t even glance at the rest of us. A weird tremor formed in my stomach, both anticipating the answers I’d worked so hard to get and dreading them at the same time.
“Was there anything else strange about the basement room outside of these pictures?” Julius asked.
“I took pictures of everything that seemed at all significant.” I lifted the photo that showed the image of the country home. “Any idea what this could be about when there’s no record of them owning another home? Why would they keep a picture hanging on the wall of some random house?”
“It could be one that used to belong to them and passed out of the family,” Talon suggested.
I hummed to myself. “I guess it could be that. Something they lost somehow and want to remember. No one’s ever mentioned an old house that they miss to me, but obviously there’s a lot they haven’t revealed so far.”
“They’re definitely keeping a lot of secrets,” Garrison muttered.
But what did it all mean? We didn’t know what the dates meant, just like we didn’t know anything about the house or the odd items on the bookshelves. There wasn’t nearly enough proof to draw any kind of conclusion. The only hope we had of finding evidence was Blaze, and he was currently frowning at his laptop with no sign of cracking the code yet.
“Where do we go from here?” I asked when nobody else offered any insight. “We have all of these clues, but we have nothing to connect them to. We don’t even have a working theory.”
Julius leaned into the countertop and swiped his hand across his face. He didn’t know either. Whatever the Maliks were hiding, they kept it hidden too well. What if Blaze couldn’t figure out what the parchments meant? We still wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.
Garrison straightened up and took on a brisk tone. “It’s no good standing around here brooding while the tech head does his work. Staring at the pictures isn’t going to make them speak to us.” He tapped my arm. “Why don’t you and I go scope out the place where Malik’s wife works? You said she takes Fridays off, right? So she won’t be there to notice. I can chat up her colleagues and see what they’ll let slip about her, and you can pickpocket a few phones we can scan for texts and emails exchanged with her.”
My legs itched to move, to have something more to do, but I hesitated, biting my lip. “I don’t know. Iris hardly talks about her job. It doesn’t seem like she’s that invested.” All I knew about it was that she worked in insurance.
Garrison shrugged. “What’s more likely to turn up something—standing here doing nothing or trying out a little more scouting?”
I had to admit he had a point. And now that he’d proposed the idea, the thought of sitting around in the house made me want to explode.
I glanced at Julius, and he gave me a nod. “You’ll want to be careful about it, but you already know that. As does Garrison.” He shot the younger man a pointed look. “Be quick. We don’t want anyone realizing why you were nosing around.”
I bounced on my feet, restless energy coursing through me. “All right. Let’s see what we can find.”
“We won’t do anything that you wouldn’t do,” Garrison said to Julius with a wink, and headed with me to the doorway. Once it’d firmly closed behind us, he smiled wickedly down at me. “Now, Julius has done a lot of reckless things, so if you want to jump into something crazy before we go to the office, the option is still on the table.”
I let out a genuine laugh for the first time in what felt like forever and bumped shoulders with him. “I think we should wait until after if we want to do anything too wild.”
Garrison looked down at me as we started our walk, and when I met his eyes, I found unrestrained joy there. It was almost as if coming out here with me had cleared his mind, and now he gazed at me as if I were the most valuable thing he’d ever seen.
“Are we thinking skydiving, bungee jumping, maybe stealing a police car for a joyride?” he asked.
I threw a mock punch into his arm. “I don’t think that Julius has ever stolen a cop car.”
Garrison shrugged. “I wouldn’t put it past him under the right circumstances.”
“I don’t think we have the right circumstances going for us right now,” I teased, and glanced toward the driveway. “Do you want to take the rental car? Or we could get an Uber if we don’t want the license plate caught on street cams in the area. It’d be a long walk.” I imagined it’d take at least an hour, although in my current state of frustration, I wasn’t sure I’d mind that much exercise.
Apparently, Garrison felt the same way. “I’m okay with walking a few miles if you are,” he said. “I’ve barely gotten much chance to stretch my legs in the past few days.”
“Other than arranging phantom farmyards and fighting for your life.”
He shrugged and smirked at me. “Yeah, other than those minor adventures.”
We turned the corner to walk past a couple of old industrial buildings, and the screech of tires made my head jerk around.
A van roared into view and skidded to a stop right next to the sidewalk. In the space of a heartbeat, three men in ski masks had leapt out, clamped their hands around Garrison, and hauled him into the back.
I leapt after him, my hand snagging on one guy’s shirt. The guy kicked back at me at the same time, and in my startled panic I didn’t dodge quite well enough. The heel to my gut sent me staggering to the side.
As I threw myself forward again, the van was already peeling away from the curb and racing away, the back doors clanging shut with Garrison behind them.
My body reacted on pure instinct. Some part of me believed that if I just pushed my legs fast enough, I’d be able to catch the van, even as the engine roared.
I sprinted after it faster than I’d ever run in my life, my feet pounding on the asphalt. A yell of rage lodged in my throat, but I couldn’t spare enough breath to let it out. My gaze darted over the few cars parked along the road, but if I stopped for long enough to break into one of them and hotwire it, I’d lose sight of the van and have no way of chasing after it. The license plate was covered, so I couldn’t even use that to believe I’d be able to track it down later.
So I kept running, propelling my body forward with all the strength I had in me. My hands darted to my hips. I hadn’t brought my gun for this excursion, but I did have my usual concealed knives. I’d started carrying two in light of recent events.
I drew out one and then the other and hurled them at the tires of the van, praying that I could hit one well enough to deflate a tire and force the vehicle to slow. But the driver must have noticed in the rearview mirror that I was up to something. The van swerved left and right on the wide road, and my knives clattered uselessly against the pavement.
Swallowing a curse, I raced onward, searching the ground for anything else I could use to try to stall the van in its tracks. As I passed the places where my knives had fallen, I scooped them up without breaking my stride. Then I veered toward the curb and grabbed a chunk of concrete that’d tumbled there.
In one last-ditch effort, I heaved the chunk at the van’s window. The vehicle swerved again at the last second, and the concrete only dinged the bumper. The van roared around the corner.
I dashed after it, sweat trickling down my back from the exertion. My legs were starting to feel numb from how hard I was pushing my muscles. I sped around the buildings onto the cross-street—
And found the van was gone. The engine sounded somewhere beyond my view, but it was dwindling too fast for me to catch up.
“Fuck!” I shouted at the sky, coasting to a stop.
I couldn’t do this on my own. I needed the rest of the crew—Blaze would be able to check traffic cams—Julius had contacts in the city. We’d figure this out.
Wouldn’t we?
As I hurried back to the house, my stomach knotted. What had the men in the van wanted with Garrison? Who had they even been? I had no idea if they were related to the attackers we’d faced in the city before, or our various earlier opponents in the crew’s hometown, or maybe they were some totally new force we hadn’t known about.
The look he’d given me a minute before the car pulled up—full of happiness and pride—reverberated through my mind. I swiped my hand across my face, but the gesture couldn’t shake my anguish.
They might be torturing him, even killing him, right now. While I loped along here unable to do anything about it. If I’d grabbed at him just a little sooner, reacted just a little faster—
I pushed my legs harder again. Any extra second could help Blaze find the van before it disappeared forever. I didn’t allow myself to consider the breathlessness or the exhaustion that wreaked havoc on my limbs. I just sprinted until the house came into sight.
I burst through the doorway, my breath so ragged it took me a few moments to gather myself enough to form words. “Garrison,” I gasped. “Some men grabbed him. Black van. Took a left on Meridian Street.”
“Hey, hey,” Julius said, striding over with his arms reaching for me.
I shook my head and pushed him away. “They took him! Don’t worry about me. We have to find him.”
Blaze stared at me with wide eyes. Why wasn’t he already pounding away at his laptop’s keyboard?
“We know,” Talon said, his tone chilly with anger. “We just got a text message from his phone.”
“What?” I sputtered. “What did it say?”
The men exchanged a look. They were calm—too calm. I’d seen that measured stillness on their faces before missions. This was the calm before the storm. I braced myself for what they were about to tell me.
Julius cleared his throat. “It said that unless we track him down in the next twenty-four hours, there’s no chance we’ll find him alive.”
