I read the note twice, rubbing at the ache in my chest with the heel of my palm.
I shouldn’t be so hurt. It was stupid. Eli never made me any promises. I’d signed an NDA, for fuck’s sake. I knew they were working on a confidential case. Was it really such a big deal that he hadn’t told me who the client was? That there wasn’t a client?
Yes, my heart shouted. Yes, it was a big fucking deal, because while I thought he was looking out for me, it was really about finding his missing mentor. While I was feeling safe for the first time since?—
I swallowed hard as I forced myself to recognize it. For the first time since the carjacking. Which was wild, because I was in arguably the most unsafe situation I’d been in since then. My freaking van had been blown up. Someone wastrying to kill me. I’d been locked out of my bank, my credit cards, my socials. My career was on the line. Everything was falling apart.
And I’d felt safe with Eli, right up until I found out that I was just the smoke screen so he could do what he really wanted: find Silas Creed.
I could take care of myself. I’d been doing that for a long time. I didn’t need Eli Bishop to keep me safe. I was fine. I still had the safe house, and Sinclair Security was on the case.
It just… It just wasn’t what I thought.
He never promised me anything, I reminded myself for the ten millionth time since Emmett had spoken Silas’s name yesterday.
I forced myself into the kitchen, made a cup of coffee, rummaged through the refrigerator, then swung the door closed without taking anything out. I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t really want the coffee.
What I wanted to do was run away to a tropical island and never come back. Go home and sleep in my childhood bed at my parents’ house, or just curl up in a ball and cry for a week or two.
I couldn’t do any of that.
It just— It fucking hurt. It shouldn’t. I barely knew Eli. Sex wasn’t love. And none of that mattered because my heart was a fucking bleeding ache in my chest, and all I wanted to do was scream at him and sob until he promised never to hurt me again. I needed to get it together. I’d cried myself to sleep last night, and it hadn’t done a fucking thing to make me feel better. Eli was still playing me, and I couldn’t rewind to before, when just being with him felt better than anything ever had.
Crying wasn’t going to change anything. Throwing things at Eli couldn’t turn back time or undo his lies.
So I did the next best thing: sat at my laptop and worked on the case I thought might be my next season ofEvidence & Echoes. A teacher, twenty-eight and beloved by students and fellow teachers, who’d disappeared on an overnight field trip. At some point after everyone else had gone to sleep, she’d left her tent and had never been seen alive again.
I worked my way through the information I had on her murder, but I couldn’t focus on the story. I shoved back my chair and went to make another cup of coffee. Came back, sat again, pulled up my research file, and stared at the blinking cursor, tapping my fingertips on the table.
This wasn’t getting me anywhere.
I mean, it was. I needed to research if I wanted to hit the ground running as soon as we had things tied up here. But first, for me to have any kind of freedom—any kind of life after this—we had to find Emily Shaw’s killer.
My brain locked on the one thing I was truly interested in.
86 Ren Pkw NE
86 Renaissance Parkway Northeast.
That was the address Emmett thought he’d traced the killer/hacker to, assuming that the person who locked me out of my socials was the same person who’d killed Emily Shaw and tried to kill me. While I normally didn’t jump on assumptions, this one seemed fairly solid, and I didn’t have anything else.
I stood and started to pace, thinking furiously. I wasn’t a prisoner. I could leave the building. Probably. The truth was, I hadn’t really tried.
But I was going to. I realized I was definitely going to try to leave.
I sat back down at my laptop. I wasn’t under any illusion that my movements weren’t being tracked—my phone, my laptop, web searches. If they wanted to, Sinclair Security could see everything I did on any of my devices.
But they weren’t monitoring me moment to moment. They had too much else to do, and why would they? One search would disappear in the pile of sites I visited while researching.
Just to be safe, I opened private browsing. Not that I thought that could defeat Emmett or Maddox or any of the other computer geeks at Sinclair. I did it anyway. Just in case.
I didn’t have a vehicle, and couldn’t use my phone or cards for a rideshare, so if the mysterious address was too far?—
I typed it in, hit enter, and clicked on the icon for a walker instead of a vehicle.
Yeah. Too far. I was in Buckhead, and 86 Ren Pkwy NE was just south of Midtown. I could walk it if I had to. But looking at the map, I caught the symbol for the MARTA station in Buckhead and another a few blocks from the address. An idea bloomed.
I could get a MARTA ticket with cash at one of the machines at the station. Not entirely untraceable, considering I wasn’t leaving my cell phone behind, but close enough. Before I could think better of it, I changed clothes, twisted my hair into a bun, grabbed my jacket and my backpack, shoved my feet into my shoes, and headed for the elevator.
