She started typing back.
Down the hall, she heard voices. Then a laugh. It was deep, unexpected, and gone quickly. Rampage, she thought, though she couldn't be sure. She hadn't heard him laugh before.
She wanted to hear it again.
She pushed that thought down and kept typing, incredibly grateful once again for this group of girls who’d become more than friends. They were her chosen family.
CHAPTER 6
RAMPAGE
Lily came back downstairs with an empty plate and a look on her face that Rampage recognized.
He was at the kitchen table with Irish, Blade and Savage, laptop open, three different browser tabs running searches on Marcus Delling's phone number, and he didn't look up when she came in. But he clocked it, the particular expression of a woman who'd gone upstairs to do a kindness and come back with something unexpected.
"She okay?" he asked.
"She's—" Lily set the plate in the sink. Paused. "She's holding it together really hard. You know that thing where someone issookay that you can tell they're absolutely not okay?"
"Yeah."
"That." She turned around, leaning against the counter. "She laughed at my joke about the squat rack, though. Like a real laugh. She's funny."
"Focus," Blade said, not looking up from his own screen. "Delling."
Lily threw a dish towel at him. He caught it without looking. “Behave yourself, little girl.” He said lightly and then winked at her.
Clover appeared in the kitchen doorway, assessed the situation, lifted his head and gave a dramatic sigh, as if knowing these humans didn’t have time to play right now, and left again.
"The Denver connection," Irish said, pulling up a tab and turning the laptop so Rampage could see it. "Dax sent the cases over for us to look at it. Two cases, both open. Women went missing after Facebook Marketplace transactions. Different fake profiles, different product listings, but the methodology is identical. The listings targeted at women, solo transactions, vehicles disabled after first contact. They stopped to help and the women disappeared."
Rampage stared at the screen.
"Same guy?" Savage asked.
"Same network, at minimum. The profiles were created on the same IP before it got masked. Whoever's running this has done it enough to get better at covering tracks, but not enough to be perfect."
"Ages?" Rampage asked.
"Twenty-two and twenty-seven. Both women. Both living alone." Irish paused. "Both curvy blondes."
The kitchen went quiet. Emily fit the description to a T. Whoever it was doing this most definitely had a type.
Rampage closed the laptop like closing it would change the information on it. He knew he didn’t have to tell the men anything, but Lily was still in the room. He turned to her. "Emily doesn't hear that part yet."
"Agreed," Lily said immediately, and her voice had lost all the lightness.
"She hears that she was targeted, that it's organized, that we're running it down. She doesn't hear she fits a specific physical profile until we know more." He looked at Irish. "Get this to Phantom. He needs to loop in his federal contacts today, not tomorrow."
"Already drafted the message."
"Send it."
Savage leaned back in his chair. "We keeping her here?"
"As long as it takes."
"She going to be okay with that?"
