She pauses every few steps like she expects someone to materialize out of the shadows and stop her.
No one does.
I lean on the rail and watch. Curiosity keeps me there. A little bit of pettiness does, too.
I could wake Nash. Probably should. He’d want to know the second she made a move, and there’s a certain logic to cutting this off at the knees before she ever reaches the front door.
But I don’t.
Maybe because he had her tonight and I didn’t. Okay, that’s absolutely what it is.
But there’s more too.
Maybe because she chose to slip out after being in his room instead of coming upstairs, and some mean, ugly part of me wants to see what that earns him come morning. Especially after he was such an asshole about me taking her in the woods.
Maybe because I want to know where she thinks she’s going. What she’s up to.
She makes it to the back entrance, fights with the latch for half a second, and disappears into thenight.
I wait another beat, then go to my room, pick up my phone, and watch the tracker Shiloh sewed under her skin move with her. There’s another, on her vehicle, but I don’t bother to pull that one up on the app. The one in her arm will be more precise.
A small blinking dot slides away from Blackwood House, gaining in speed.
I slid the chip to Shiloh when I brought him the medical kit to stitch up Reva’s wounds. It was one of those things I’d had in my arsenal and been mulling over for a few days, ever since we’d been tasked with keeping an eye on her. I just hadn’t known exactly how I was going to go about implanting it without her knowing about it.
The cut she suffered was kind of a twisted blessing in that respect, I guess.
The GPS on her SUV is mine, too. Redundancy matters. And you never know when someone as feisty as Reva would figure out she was being tracked. Better to have both and only need one than to suffer because of idiocy.
I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark, phone in hand, and let her run.
The gesture feels almost generous.
The tracker moves through the city, then slows. Stops. Shifts once more. Settles.
I find the address in Google. A motel. Not a great one, but she’s probably not flush with funds. We could push someinto her account, but that would make things too easy for my firefly.
I stare at the map a moment longer, then lie back down and close my eyes, phone on my chest. A notification will vibrate if she moves. I can rest for a few hours, knowing she’s alone and safe.
Nash is in the kitchen when I come down early the next morning. Shiloh sprawls at the table with a mug of coffee and the kind of lazy-alert expression that usually means he’s been awake long enough to become irritating on purpose.
Nash looks up when I walk in. His gaze flicks past me and then back. “You look like shit.”
“Thank you.”
Shiloh lifts his mug. “You always know just what to say in the morning.”
I pull a clean mug from the cabinet and fill it from the coffee pot. Nash made the coffee this morning; it’s strong enough to walk on its own two feet.
“Reva ran last night.”
That gets both of their attention. Nash goes still in that particular way he has, the one that says his mind is already ten steps ahead, rearranging pieces on the board. “When?”
“Few hours ago.”
“And you didn’t wake me.”
“No.”
