Ryder’s face did something strange. His eyebrows rose. His lips twitched. And then, impossibly, he started laughing.
I stared at him in disbelief. “What the fuck is so funny?”
But Ryder just shook his head, still chuckling, and asked, “Did he have it on when he left? The matching necklace?”
I thought back to those horrible moments in the bedroom. Knox walking toward the door. His shirt pulling tight across his chest. The glint of silver at his collar.
“Yes,” I said slowly. “He was wearing it.”
Ryder’s smile widened. He held out his hand. “Can I see yours?”
My hands were shaking too badly to work the clasp. I fumbled with it uselessly for several seconds before Noah stepped in, his gentle fingers unclasping the chain and sliding it free from my neck. He handed it to Ryder.
“Why?” I asked, watching as Ryder turned the pendant over in his hands. “What are you doing?”
Instead of answering, Ryder pulled out his phone and opened an app I didn’t recognize. He squinted at the back of the pendant, where I now noticed there was a series of tiny numbers engraved into the metal. Numbers I had never even noticed before.
He typed them into the app.
A prompt appeared on the screen, asking for a four-digit password.
“What would Knox use?” Ryder asked, looking up at me. “Something important. Something meaningful. A date, maybe, or a combination of numbers that matters to him.”
I stared at him blankly for a moment, my exhausted brain struggling to keep up. A password. Something Knox would use. Something important.
And then it hit me.
The panic room. The code on the keypad. The combination of their children’s birthdays that unlocked the door to the underground sanctuary he had built to keep us safe.
I recited the numbers, watching Ryder type them in with trembling fingers.
For a moment, nothing happened. The app just sat there, loading.
And then the screen changed.
“Bingo!” Ryder shouted, his voice ringing with triumph.
Everyone in the room surged forward, crowding around the phone to see. I pushed to the front, my heart pounding, barely daring to hope.
The screen showed a map. A satellite view of the region, with topographical lines and markers indicating major roads and landmarks. And on that map were two blue dots.
One of them was right here, in Ravenshollow. In the pack building. Where we were standing right now.
The other was miles to the south, deep in the wilderness that Cole had indicated on the paper map. Deep in rogue territory.
Moving.
“Is that what I think it is?” Noah asked, his voice shaking.
Ryder nodded, his smile so wide it threatened to split his face in half.
“The necklace has a tracker built into it,” he explained. “It’s something I had made for Jasmine some time back. I wanted a way to always be able to find her, no matter what. When Knox asked me about it, I gave him the contact for the jeweler who made them.”
He held up the phone, the blue dot pulsing steadily on the screen.
“We have Knox’s location.”
31
