Hisone momentlasts a lifetime, but eventually he hands my phone back, and it pings immediately with a notification from the Rover app, and my stomach squeezes.
I struggle to latch on to anything else he says as I rush him from the room, barely catching that his name is Santiago. Once the door is shut and locked behind him, I open the Rover app to open the messages.
Céce
Hope you had a nice flight!
Let me know once your return travel plans are arranged.
I couldn't find Ellie's chicken toy. Do you know where it might be?
How's the villa?
Fuck.
From the time stamps, the last two messages were sent in the last hour, when I imagine Atticus finally broke down and couldn't wait any longer for a response.
I know there's a chance someone could be monitoring my device like Atticus did when I first connected to their Wi-Fi at the cabin. So I don't start typing a single word until I know exactly what I want to say.
52
GONE DARK
SEVEN
For someone who told Elijah and me not to panic, Atticus is one hairpin trigger away from a total emotional collapse.
He's hiding it well, but his face has been twitching for the last thirty minutes straight, the vein in his neck has only thickened, and I don't think he's blinked once in the last ten minutes.
"We should've heard from her by now," Elijah says for the third time in the last hour, pacing the tiled floor of our small, rented villa on the Costa Brava. We got here three hours ago, even though we had a longer than planned drive from the Barcelona airport.
And by Atticus's timeline, Ro would've landed after we did.
But her tracker, the one we followed from the hotel in downtown Charlotte to the airport, stopped tracking her location data somewhere over the North Atlantic.
At first, Atticus didn't seem concerned. Something to do with flight-control interference and a lack of cell towers, or some other shit that's not my area of expertise.
But that plane should have landed hours ago, and yet the spot where her signal dropped over the ocean hasn't budged.
"I told you this was a bad idea," Eli groans, fists in his hair. "I fuckingtoldyou."
"Not helping, E," I mutter, gripping the edge of the cement countertop where I stand. From here, I can see every screen of Atticus's makeshift control center atop the dining table. While he's busy trying to find any trace of Aurora's arrival on Spanish soil, I watch the little trio of camera feeds that show the entry points to this villa.
Someone needs to make sure we haven't been made, even if I don't even want to imagine what that would mean for Ro.
We couldn't bring our whole arsenal, but I'm armed enough to handle anything that might come at us here in case shit goes south.
I haven't said it out loud, but if we don't hear from her in the next thirty minutes, I'm pounding pavement. We have intel that Ambrose's estate is near the ocean. That it's in the Costa Brava region, and is fit for a king.
It's enough for a start. And if I have to break into every rich fuck's vacation home until I find her, that's exactly what I'm going to do.
A window on Atticus's monitor chimes and Elijah and I nearly trip on each other trying to get a closer look.
"Is it her?"
Atticus sighs deeply as the mirrored view of Céline's phone fills the middle of the screen. "It's her."
Aurora
