Seven-ten.
She lifted her gaze to the door again.
Seven-fifteen.
“I’m just going to send a quick text to make sure we didn’t get our wires crossed.” Andi grabbed her phone.
I’m here. Everything okay?
No response.
A flicker of unease stirred inside her, faint but insistent.
“Why don’t you call her instead of texting?” Duke suggested.
“Good idea.”
She dialed her friend’s number, but the call went straight to voicemail.
Her friend had been many things—busy, scattered, perpetually optimistic—but unreachable wasn’t one of them.
Something probably came up, Andi mused. A late night or a missed alarm.
Any minute now, her phone would ring. There would be an apology. A joke. An over-explanation.
Andi set the phone down and stared out the window.
The city continued waking up.
Every so often, her gaze drifted to the door as she waited for a familiar face to appear.
It didn’t.
And that was the first definitive sign that something was wrong.
An hour later, Duke and Andi joined the group at the hotel.
The team congregated in one of the hotel’s smaller conference rooms, and Duke took the seat nearest the door out of habit. He kept his back to the wall, had clear sightlines, and everyone was in view.
Old instincts. Useful ones. If something went sideways, he wanted to be the first to see it coming.
Coffee cups were scattered across the table, and the muted thrum of Los Angeles bled through the walls. Traffic noise. Sirens in the distance.
Andi leaned forward slightly as she filled everyone in. “Kate didn’t show for breakfast. No text. No call. When I tried her number, it went straight to voicemail.” She hesitated. “That’s not like her. Then again, I haven’t seen her in years.”
“You think something happened to her?” Simmy asked.
Andi shook her head, but not with conviction. “I don’t know. But I have a bad feeling.”
Duke filed that away. Andi’s instincts were rarely wrong—they were just inconvenient.
Mariella tapped her keyboard, pulling attention back to the table. “On a slightly unrelated note . . . I’ve been digging through our inbox. Older submissions this time. The ones that never bubbled to the top.”
Duke’s shoulders tightened. He didn’t like the phraseslightly unrelated.
“Anything interesting?” Ranger lifted his coffee.
“Define interesting.” Then Mariella turned the laptop so they could see. “Because I’ve got something I’d classify as disturbing.”
