“Not yet,” Emmett said, but I caught the slight drift of his brown eyes down to the surface of the desk behind him. They landed on a bright pink sticky note with an address written on the front.
86 Ren Pkw NE
Emmett followed the track of my eyes and slid his hand over the sticky note.
“I pinpointed the address of the person who got into your socials,” he said. “I still have to do some follow-up, but we’re closer.”
I was suddenly very glad that I had an excellent memory—and that I’d gotten a glimpse of that sticky note before Emmett covered it up.
I had some planning to do. I didn’t care about Silas Creed, but if I wanted my life back, I had to find the man who’d killed Emily Shaw, even if I was the only one looking.
Chapter Twenty-One
ELI
Everything was spinning out of control faster than I could manage to hold on.
Fucking Emmett.
Sylvie stood there, inching away from me. And after the way Emmett had thrown Silas’s name out there, I couldn’t explain, because now I looked like a liar. How did I make her understand? I hadn’t been lying. I just…
“Sylvie,” I said, flinching at the ragged pain in her eyes when they met mine. “I can explain.”
Her hands came up, waving, palms out as if warding me off. “It’s fine. I don’t need an explanation.”
What she meant was that she didn’t want to hear it.
But I wasn’t backing off. I could make her understand. She had to understand. My gut clenched, feeling her slipping away, her pain drawing her further from me—but it was only because she didn’t get it.
“Sylvie,” I said again. I closed the space between us, sliding an arm around her shoulders, steering her to the side of the room to an empty office. I herded her inside, closingthe door behind us, then turned to drop the blinds and block out everyone else.
Fucking traitors.
I leaned back on the door and crossed my arms over my chest. “Just give me a minute to explain.”
Sylvie shifted to face me, standing with her hands in her back pockets, her shoulders braced, her chin lifted. “Explain what? How you let me believe that I had to sign an NDA because you were protecting a client’s interests? How you let me think that this was only a case to you—that it was about finding Emily Shaw’s killer, the same person who tried to kill me—when really you’re looking for Silas Creed, and Emily is your best lead?”
When she put it like that, it sounded damning.
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
“It sounds pretty simple to me,” she shot back.
“That’s because you’re not listening,” I snapped, hearing the frustration in my own voice.
Tone it down, man, I told myself.She’s already pissed off. Getting defensive isn’t going to help.
I dropped my arms to my sides and took a deep breath, trying to slow my racing heart, anxiety spiraling through me.Goddamn it.I didn’t get anxious. I didn’t get scared. I handled my shit. I thought before I talked. I was not this guy—nervous, palms sweating, feeling everything that mattered to me slipping away, and unable to stop it. I didn’t even recognize myself.
I braced against the door as if I could keep her here and somehow fix it by shutting us in this room together.
“Sylvie, look. I should have told you about Silas,” I said. I lifted my palms, feeling suddenly helpless. “I didn’t want you to think?—”
“What?” she interrupted. “That you hada conflict of interest? That finding your missing mentor might be more important than solving the murder of a random woman in Tennessee?”
I didn’t know what to say to that, because she wasn’t wrong. When this started, when Sylvie was just an annoying podcaster whose situation connected to our search for Silas, I hadn’t felt bad about keeping information from her. Who was she, that she deserved everything we knew anyway? In our business, we didn’t exactly walk around sprinkling bits of knowledge on people who didn’t need to know. And in the beginning, Sylvie hadn’t needed to know.
“Look,” I said, wishing I could defuse Sylvie as easily as I could a bomb, “I should have told you. Maybe not day one.”
