Too hard to know she might be hurt.
Or worse.
I’d tried to be present, had tried not to consider all the horrific possibilities in the thirty-six hours she’d been gone, but it felt impossible. And something else had happened too, something unexpected: I’d started thinking about my mom, wondering if something like this had happened to her, if that was why she’d disappeared all those years ago.
Ray got up from his bed and came over, tail wagging, to greet me.
“Hi, boy. You okay?”
“Let me take those,” Lilah said, coming toward me to take the boxes of donuts.
It seemed stupid now, going out for donuts, but we needed to feed the people who were helping us find Maeve, and I guess we needed to eat too, although food was the last thing on my mind.
The donuts had given me an excuse to leave the loft, to walk, to be outside.
Of course they’d also made me think about Maeve, about the first morning she’d been back after the second Hunt and the way it had felt to walk next to her, like we were just two people grabbing food after a night of fucking, which had been easier than thinking about how happy I’d been to have her back and how complicated everything had been.
Now everything was shockingly simple: someone had taken the light of our lives, as sure as if they’d plucked the sun from the sky, and nothing was more important than making it shine again.
Nothing was more important than bringing Maeve home alive.
Lilah set the box of donuts on the dining room table and looked at me. “Coffee?”
“Please.” None of us had slept since we’d come home to find Ray alone outside, Maeve gone, and I was running on fumes. I was too worried to sleep, but my eyes burned with exhaustion.
A caffeine hit was definitely in order, and not for the first time, I was grateful that Rafe and his crew — Lilah included — had descended on the loft when we’d called to ask for their help finding Ethan Todd.
I dropped into one of the open chairs at the dining room table. “Anything new?”
“Three small planes have taken off from the charter terminal in Greenvale in the last thirty-six hours,” Rafe said.
“We traced the tail numbers on two of them,” Aloha said without looking up from his computer. “Nothing out of order. Working on the third.”
“Any word from our sources inside BPD?” We had a couple guys in the local police department, cops who gave us information and kept us clear of trouble in exchange for a little extra cash. We’d asked them to search the toll cameras for signs of Todd’s car leaving the area.
“Not yet,” Bram said.
I was relieved by the coldness in his voice, both because it meant he was done trashing the loft and because it meant he was in the dark place that would get us back to Maeve.
I didn’t love that Bram had to go there, that it was part of who he was — it was bad for him and sometimes bad for everyone else too — but right now we needed every bit of his darkness and so did Maeve.
Lilah set a cup of coffee in front me, then set a stack of plates on the table next to the donuts. “Anybody else need a refill?”
Rafe wrapped his arm around Lilah’s waist and pulled her against him. “I’m good.”
I’d never been so jealous in my life, not because I had a thing for Lilah but because Rafe’s woman was safe and close enough to touch while mine — ours — was god knew where and outside the sphere of our protection.
Nolan stepped back into the loft with his phone in his hand. “I think I might have something.”
Bram looked up and I was pretty sure I’d never seen such desperation on his face. “About Maeve?”
“Our guy at the embassy says they got a hit on a passport,” Nolan said.
I’d stopped asking how Rafe, Nolan, and Jude knew what they knew. They seemed to have contacts all over the world, people they could call at the TSA and Interpol and the Coast Guard, and yes, American embassies in the States and abroad.
I assumed it had something to do with the work they used to do and the work they did now, but if anyone knew it was best not to ask those kinds of questions, it was Bram, Remy, and me.
“Maeve took her passport?” Remy asked from the living room where he’d been talking to Jude.
