"Okay." She set the mug down and straightened. "Tell me."
"Fuel line was tampered with. Done carefully, not enough to fail immediately but enough to fail after miles of driving. Someone who knew what they were doing and knew where you’d be going." He paused. "The marketplace account is fake. Three months old and the number he gave you is a burner phone. Dax is running it against two open cases out of Denver."
Emily felt the blood leave her face.
"Two open cases," she repeated.
"Yeah."
"So, he's done this before."
"We don't know that yet." His voice was even. "What we know is this isn't someone who acted on impulse. This was planned. You were chosen specifically, or you fit a profile he was looking for. We don't have enough yet to say which."
She sat with that for a moment.
Chosen. She'd beenchosen.And not in the way she’d always hoped to be. Someone had looked at her profile and had decidedshe was the right shape for whatever deviant plot they had planned. The hair on her arms stood up and she suddenly felt nauseated.
Then the soft, floaty thing that had been sitting in her chest since the parking lot, the one that made everything feel slightly unreal as if she was living in an alternative universe, started to sharpen into something harder. Less fear and disbelief and more anger.
Good, she thought. Anger was better. Anger was something to stand on.How fucking dare he.The curse word, even only muttered in her head, stopped her thoughts cold. She was not one to use that sort of language and it sounded foreign to her.
"What happens now?" she asked.
"You stay here while we run down the leads. You don't go home yet, we have a feeling the car was tampered with at home or your work, and you don't contact Marcus Delling for any reason. Don't respond if he reaches out, screenshot anything and send it to me directly."
"Okay." She wanted him stopped. If it meant heading to Chloe’s house for a few days, she’d do that.
"I mean it about not going home alone."
"I said okay." She held his gaze. "I'm not going to argue with you about my safety. I understand what last night was."
Something in his expression shifted. Barely perceptible, but there.
"Good girl," he said.
He pulled the door almost closed and then stopped.
"Lily is downstairs," he said, without turning around. “She's been where you are. Well, not the same situation, but scared, and blackmailed by some bad men. She asked if she could bring you breakfast."
Emily blinked. "She asked?"
"She asked me to ask you. Didn't want to push."
Emily thought about that. Someone who understood about not wanting to push. Someone who'd been scared too, who was now asking permission to bring a stranger breakfast.
"Yeah," she said. "Tell her yes."
He left.
Emily sat there listening to his boots retreat down the hallway and thought about the wordchosenand the two open cases in Denver and the fake profile that was three months old.
Three months.
He'd been building toward this for three months.
She'd almost made it easy for him.
Her phone buzzed. Madison in the group chat, sending escalating strings of concerned emojis. Then Holly. Then the whole group came online at once, everyone sending texts in the way they always did, the beautiful chaotic noise of women who loved each other loudly.
