“Santi,” Rhett interrupts with an eye roll that’s more like him. “This is me trying to be better.”
I blink in surprise. “Oh. Ah… did Blair beat you into this?”
“No, this is all me.” Again he rolls his eyes but with it comes a chuckle. “But speaking of beatings, remind me never to get on her bad side again. That woman is terrifying when she’s pissed.”
I’m dizzy with relief and joy. Laughter peels out of me and Rhett joins in with a rough chuckle.
“I’ll remind you,” I promise when the laughter finally subsides. “And yeah, let’s go to dinner.”
Rhett gives me a small but genuine smile before climbing over me to get out of bed.
“Good. Now, let’s go. We should probably be getting ready for work,” he says as he stands and takes a step toward the door. He pauses, however, when he glances at the nightstand.
I follow his gaze to find a glass of orange juice and two white tablets sitting beside a note.
Rhett-
You’re probably going to need these to settle that headache you’re bound to have. -Blair
Neither of us say anything but I smile at the thoughtfulness. Rhett starts to walk away from the gesture but pauses, sighsdramatically, then turns and heads over to the nightstand. Quickly, he downs the pills with the orange juice.
“She’s as bad as Wesley,” he grumbles before stomping out of the room.
I grin after him. I’m about to climb out of the bed myself but my phone rings. It takes a second to find my pants, which were thrown on the floor, and then to dig around my pockets to find it. I answer it before the call goes to voicemail.
“Hello?” I greet, then pull the phone away to check the number. It’s from an unknown caller.
“Hi… is this, Santiago?” The voice on the other end is a woman’s, scratchy and unsure.
“Yup, that’s me who’s?—”
“You called me the other day and left a message—I’m just calling you back. This is Ashleigh Burr.”
I freeze, the joy from the morning’s blowjob and Rhett’s one-eighty disappear in a blink of an eye.
Ashleigh Burr. The woman on the missing person’s flyer.
When I grabbed that flyer off of Molly’s bulletin board, I had no intention of calling Ashleigh or really doing anything else with it. In fact, I’d almost thrown it away after asking Ledger about her.
But something, I found something.
I’d been working on pulling encrypted messages into my software that will help me crack it from Ledger’s hard drive when I accidentally clicked on an inconspicuous folder that I accidentally stumbled upon.
In it were black and white photos of Ashleigh.
In the photos, she was either sleeping, or on her knees, trapped in a cage in what appeared to be in a basement. It took staring at the pictures in horror for several minutes before it clicked. Rhett had mentioned there being a secret room in the basement, one with a cage.
During lunch a few days ago, I went to look for that room myself.
And I found it.
Comparing it to the pictures, there’s no doubt in my mind that Ashleigh had been inourbasement, inthatcage. The question was, why? Why was there a Blair look-alike here in the first place? And how did she manage to walk out a free woman? Morbid curiosity got the best of me and I called Ashleigh the other day and left a message.
I don’t know why, but didn’t think she’d return the call.
Shooting an anxious glance at the door, I lower my voice and reply, “Thanks for calling me back. I just wanted to reach out because I found pictures of you… on a friend’s device. I wanted to make sure you were, ah, um… okay, I guess?”
“You mean, if I’m still alive,” she deadpans.
