“Jayne?” Simon’s voice shook. “Jayne, what’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter?” Jayne asked. He shook his head and laughed under his breath, then kissed the top of Parker’s head. “Have you even looked in Shep’s room lately?”
“Yeah.” The adhesive terror that had once spread through Simon’s body rose up to coat his throat uniformly, and when he swallowed, it stretched through him like restrictive spiderwebs. The same fear spun itself tightly around his brain, limiting what he could think to say. Intelligent answers were lost—he ended up repeating himself. “What’s… the matter?”
“Oh, nothing much,” Jayne said casually. “Just the fact that Evelyn fucking Warwick is sitting on Shep’s bed.”
The name struck Simon like the blunt side of a mallet to the face. The spiderwebs inside snapped, and the resulting kinetic energy shot Simon’s fear into orbit as all of the pieces fell into place.
Warwick.
He knew that name.
Evie Warwick, the celebrity daughter of Harlow Warwick, the man Simon had cyberstalked thefuckout of and who he’d been fantasizing about regularly for almost three years, was in Shep’s bedroom. Alone. Without a bodyguard to be seen.
The steely, broken cadence of Harlow’s voice. The ambiguity of his situation. The plea for geographic coordinates, tracked to a cell phone he swore a female someone had on hand…
“Ohshit,” Simon squeaked. The man following Evie wasn’t a stalker—it was her father. And if Simon knew Harlow half as well as he thought he did, then that meant… “H is coming here, and he’s going to kill us all.”
