Frost assaulted the skin on my face the moment I shoved the door open. I flinched, blinking and taking a step back. Soft, heartbroken cries caught my attention from the left, leading me straight to Tobias.
He looked… distraught. I hadn’t seen his face yet, but I didn’t have to. He was curled in on himself against the brick wall, snow turning to liquid as it pummeled the fabric of his jacket. I knelt beside him, ignoring the immediate pain from the cold ground. Tobias’s shoulders were shaking wildly as he hiccuped with each sob.
“Tobias.” I placed a gentle hand on his arm, only for him to flinch in shock. “Hey, what’s going on? Where’s Crew?” I couldn’t see him anywhere.
Tobias unfurled his head from his makeshift cocoon, the dark brown of his eyes clouded with tears. The rims of them were red, beginning to swell. “He’s gone.”
I let it sink in for a moment, trying to process the words as if I’d never heard them before. “Gone?”
“Gone.” As he repeated himself, his voice cracked.
“What do you mean, Tobias? We’re closing the place down; there’s a huge snowstorm coming. Did he call an Uber?”
“No!”
I barely had time to move before Tobias practically threw himself forward, hunching over and clutching his stomach. I thought for a moment that he was going to be sick, only to be proven wrong when a large cry escaped him. Seeing him like this, unable to help, hurt something deep within me.
Tobias and I weren’t close. He was an employee, a talented one, but an employee. Still, he was young. Timid. Scared of his own shadow at times.
Realizing I needed to take control of the conversation, I scooteduntil I was directly in front of him. “Tell me what happened, Tobias. I need to know where Crew went and how.”
Big, sad brown eyes clung to mine, their pupils wavering under the illusion created by the water in them. I watched pain and grief flash over them, fighting together to force Tobias to shut down. “I told him, Chef.”
He’d called me that ever since the day I went over the different slicing techniques. It started to make me hopeful, hearing it. Knowing someone in the world other than Crew or Willow saw something in me.
“I told ’im how we knew each other. He didn’t believe me at first. I thought he wouldn’t at all. But then he realized. Remembered. I saw the light drain outta his eyes, Chef. I did that to ’im. I reminded him of the worst time of his life.” He began to sob again, losing his voice with the cries.
“Hey, hey, come on, Tobias. It’s okay.” My head was a mess. I burned with the need to scratch, to worry, to maul myself until everything became okay again. I didn’t know what happened that traumatized both men so deeply, but it had to be bad.
Bad enough to make Crew hurt himself, inside and out. Bad enough for Tobias to hate speaking to people, too terrified to even introduce himself to Crew at first.
Tobias looked back up at me, the tears streaming down his face, combined with the frigid snow that was battling us. “He ran, Chef. Hightailed it outta here so fast, I barely screamed his name before he was outta sight. He’s on foot. He’s got a jacket, but nothin’ else, I don’t think. You gotta find him.”
On foot? He just ran? Does he even know about the storm?
I could see my breath. It was coming out in harsh pants, mist coming from my mouth that was warmer than the air around us. The chill settled deep in my bones, threatening to extinguish the fire that kept me going inside.
Wanting to get Tobias out of the cold, I nodded once. “You need to go now. Find Callum inside and leave with the rest of them. They’re calling for a massive storm, up to twelve inches of snow.”
“What about Crew?” He sounded so broken, so worried. It broke my heart. Tore it in two.
“I’ll find him.”
AndI meant that. With every fucking fiber of my being.
Snow coveredevery inch of the city. If I had to guess, I’d say we had already gotten about two inches in the hour we’d been out. More was coming in, falling hard and fast with no end in sight.
Thankfully, Willow’s friend had a truck that was more suitable for this kind of weather. I had called her the moment I was in my car, driving like a maniac to their house in the hopes that Crew would be there. Unfortunately, Willow was already home, and Crew hadn’t shown up. She immediately gave me the address to her friend Carly’s house, who gave us the keys to her truck without question.
I was grateful Willow had a friend like that. Someone who would drop everything and give up their truck without wondering why. Samantha used to be like that for me. Now, I knew without question that person would be Crew.
Which was why Willow and I were driving around in heavy snow with limited visibility to try and find him. We scoured the streets close to their house, finding nothing to suggest he’d been there. We even went to the bars I knew he used to frequent when he’d go there to pick up clients on the regular.
We searched close to The Arch, hoping he’d gotten too cold and stopped somewhere. Whatever was still open, we went inside and asked the workers if they’d seen him. No one had. It was like Crew had made himself a ghost. Like he didn’t want to be found.
The weather alerts kept coming, getting worse with each one. Neither Willow nor I spoke much except for the odd directions to somewhere we thought he’d go. We were both scared.
Willow didn’t ask what happened when I told her Crew ran off. “He does that sometimes. When he’s uncomfortable or feels a panic attack coming on. He won’t ever admit he has panic attacks, and he won’t admit that he runs. He’s an idiot like that,” she’d told me, only confirming what I knew about him.
