Worst of all, the possibility that Winter was in the line of fire right now.
She’d sent him several subtle messages, asking him the time and where he was, when he’d be returning. Natural messages from a bodyguard.
Nothing. No replies.
His tracker had last pinged from Penelope’s home. So Sydney had rushed there, staking out a shadowed place in the bushes in the hopes she could make something out. But the apartment was dark now, as if Penelope had gone to bed. Or she wasn’t there at all.
She texted him several more times as she raced back to the home she shared with him in Kensington. As she stepped through the front door, she kept one hand lightly on the handle of the gun tucked in her pocket.
The house was dark, the bedrooms empty. Winter hadn’t returned here yet, either.
After several attempts, she finally got a signal for his tracker again. It seemed to show he was moving through the streets of London in a car in the direction of the house.
Sydney spent the next half hour pacing carefully through each room in the dark, her gun drawn, checking every door and closet and pantry. Then she made her way upstairs and scoured her bedroom before heading into Winter’s.
The space was impeccably tidy, tidier than she would expect the bedroom of a pop star to be. The bed was perfectly made, his clothes put neatly away and folded as if on display at a department store. In the bathroom, his towel was folded over the shower door as if done by an attendant.
On his dresser was a cup of water, a pen, and the notebook that she’d seen him scribbling in on the car ride from the airport. He hadn’t taken it with him to the concert and after-party.
Sydney looked away from it and checked every corner of the room. When she was satisfied that no stranger had tampered with his things, she settled again on the notebook. Once again, she felt the urge to steal rise in her chest at the sight of something valuable. Besides, she knew she should check it—the notebook was exactly the kind of thing where someone would leave a tracker or listening device. She’d once discovered a chip half the size of her smallest nail taped to the back of a room service menu in one of her hotel rooms.
Sydney picked up the notebook and opened it. The leather surface was soft with use, opened and closed a million times by his hands. She flipped through the first few pages.
They contained hundreds of lines of text—fragments of sentences, floating words, bars of music she didn’t know how to read, and sketches. A branch bursting with leaves, a study of someone’s hand, a pretty alleyway drawn out with just a few lines. He wasn’t bad.
As she turned to the last page, she stopped on the final lines of some lyrics he had written down.
I look at you and it all fills my head
this swirl of (every) thought
(every) nightmare (every) dread
Do you ever feel scared like I do
Ever hate yourself like I do
Ever destroy yourself for someone else?
Do you ever feel guilty for everyone’s mistakes?
Ever wish you could take someone else’s place?
Do you ever feel like dying?
Do you ever want to live forever?
And this hurricane goes on and on
Every time I look at you
You are my meditation
Am I ever yours, too?
Winter had written this recently, probably even last night, after she’d seen him dancing alone downstairs. She found herself rereading the words and storing them in her mind, enjoying the way they sounded, wondering idly who had inspired them.
Then she blinked and closed the book. She was getting distracted. Her fingers ran along the inner binding of the notebook, then across the inside and outside of its jacket. No trace of tampering, at least.
