I stumbled inside with Ryder right on my heels. I didn’t make a sound, I didn’t even breathe as I crept through the entry way and toward the living room. I listened for any signs of life that would expose my mother or Nix or hell, squatters. The apartment had been left open and nothing had been taken.
Did that mean someone had been here recently?
They hadn’t forced their way inside. The door was perfectly intact. Nothing was amiss inside the apartment either. It looked exactly like it had the day I’d left except for the thick layer of dust that coated everything.
It was a mausoleum of my former life. A still life portrait. It was the ghost of my past that I wanted to forget.
I walked to my room and swung the door open. My jaw dropped and I gaped at the chaos inside.
While the rest of the apartment had been curiously left alone, my room had been ransacked. The closet had been completely destroyed. Clothes and hangers had been flung all over the room. My bedding had been stripped and the mattress had been ripped open, it hung cockeyed off my bed, half on the floor. My nightstand had been shoved over and the drawer had been torn out and dumped in a messy pile next to mattress springs and torn clothing.
Apparently, someone thought they would find answers about my whereabouts hidden somewhere in this room. They were wrong.
I had never kept anything that could incriminate me except for a small bottle of tattoo concealer and some old clothes my mother wouldn’t have approved of. Neither of those things would give anyone an idea of where I’d run off to. And they had ceased to be interesting the second Nix and my mother found my tattoos last year.
Ryder whistled behind me. “Did they think you were hiding in here?”
“I have no idea. What a mess.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t look like your mom was given any time to pick it up.”
I pressed my lips together. For the first time since Hermes had visited me, I felt a pang of worry for my mom. Had she been dragged from the apartment kicking and screaming? Had she put up any kind of fight?
What about the god-killer? Where was that?
I spun back around and surveyed the uncluttered living room. Not one piece of furniture showed signs of a struggle. The kitchen and dining room were also neatly tidied, except for the dust.
I walked across the apartment and opened my mother’s bedroom door. This was a room I had rarely spent time in. She had always demanded privacy and I had been more than willing to give it to her. I wanted nothing to do with whatever went on in her bedroom.
The door swung open to reveal more organized perfection. I walked inside and swatted at the dust particles floating through the air, illuminated by the open window looking out on the park below. I glanced over her king-sized bed made up with a rich ivory comforter and the desk with stationary and a fancy pen sitting on top that sat against the wall. I glanced in the master bathroom, not sure what I was looking for, but certain I wasn’t going to find it in there.
“Red!” Ryder called from the living room.
I walked back to meet him. He stood in front of the floor to ceiling windows holding a shoe box I knew well. “Why do you have that?”
“It was sitting on the floor on a pile of clothes. I thought it looked out of place.” He opened it slowly.
I walked over to look inside the box that he had started to open. “That just has my old tattoo concealer-”
My concealer was not inside the box, which didn’t surprise me. If Nix or my mom had been looking for something, I imagined they would have looked through that box already. Nix had probably burned the small flesh-toned tube.
He, however, did not burn the box. And inside of it sat an envelope with my name scrawled across the front in my mother’s neat handwriting. I stared at the letter for long minutes before finding the courage to pick it up.
It was heavier and thicker than I expected it to be. I could tell she had used her expensive stationary I’d seen sitting out on her desk. I couldn’t even imagine what she’d written me. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted her to say to me. I also found it slightly unnerving that she’d hidden the letter in this particular shoe box and set it where I could stumble upon it if I ever came back here.
Had she known I would come back?
I flipped the letter over and squinted at more of her writing. On the back of the envelope it looked like she’d hastily scrawled something last minute. The handwriting was rushed and sloppy, which was so unlike my mom.
I squinted at it and brought it closer to my face. It was almost too messy to read.
“We have to go,” I whispered to Ryder once I figured it out.
“What?”
I turned the envelope so he could see it and shoved it in his face.
They’re watching the apartment. Get out now!
