If abject humiliation was the result, it would still be an improvement. And I owed her some brutal honesty.
“I’ll be back,” I said.
Leaving my coffee cup on my desk, I headed up to the apartment, letting myself in after a quick rap on the door so I didn’t take her by surprise.
I wasn’t expecting to find the kitchen table empty.
There was a light on in the hall, but otherwise the apartment was dark, silent, and unoccupied.
A bolt of panic hit me. Things weren’t anywhere close to stable enough for Sylvie to be out there on her own. We didn’t know where Emily Shaw’s killer was. He’d already tried to kill Sylvie twice, and I knew just how persistent someone tying up loose ends could be. Where was she?
I strode through the small apartment, checking her room, my room, the bathrooms, the closet, the coat closet, behind the fucking couch. Nothing.
Sylvie was gone.
Fuck.
I sprinted out, stabbing my finger at the elevator button, considering bolting down the stairs before the doors opened.
“Sylvie’s not there,” I said as soon as I got back to Maddox and Emmett. “Pull up her location.”
Emmett was already on it, tapping furiously at his keyboard. “Fuck,” he said.
“What? Where is she?” I demanded. Sylvie wasn’t a prisoner. We hadn’t been monitoring her like one. Of all the possibilities that had occurred to me, her walking out of the building on her own hadn’t made the list.
“Last place I have her is 86 Renaissance Avenue Northeast.” Emmett’s voice was heavy. It was clear he knew something about that location.
“What’s there?” I asked, staring down at the map on his screen, Sylvie a round red dot superimposed on the outline of a building at that address.
He tapped a bright pink sticky note on his desk, and I saw86 Ren Ave NEscrawled on it. “It’s the fucking address I traced the IP to that hacked her website.”
“How did she know?” It would take me at least fifteen minutes to get to Midtown, if the traffic gods cooperated. Too long.
“Because she’s fucking observant and I was careless,” Emmett said.
I didn’t bother swearing out loud. It would waste time, and given that my brain was already splashing up very reasonable images of Sylvie blown up or bloodied or not breathing, I focused on what we needed to know. The hacker could be Sylvie’s would-be assassin, or not, but logic dictated they were at least connected. Which meant she was in acute danger. “What are you tracking? Did you put something on her or is it just her phone?”
“Both,” Emmett said. He tapped the red light pulsing on the screen, overlaying a map of Atlanta zoomed in to a few blocks of Renaissance Avenue. Beside it, half overlapping, was a green light, also pulsing.
“And what’s that?” I asked, tapping the green dot on the screen.
“That’s the tracker. I put it in her shoes.”
Clever Emmett.
“When the fuck did you do that?” I asked, then realized it didn’t matter. At least we knew where she was. “How long ago did she leave here?”
Emmett flipped to a new screen showing a view of the side door to the street, the one most convenient to the safe house apartments. It only took him seconds to scroll back to the moment Sylvie slipped out the door, clearly of her own volition, blending into foot traffic on the sidewalk and disappearing. She’d been gone thirty-seven minutes. If I’d given in to my urge to talk to her instead of fighting it off, I would have been there before she left. I could have stopped her, or gone with her.
“I’m going to get her.” I turned for the door.
“You don’t know that she’s in trouble,” Emmett said, his voice level, almost emotionless. He was saying it because that was how we operated—we reminded ourselves that we couldn’t make assumptions. We had to think about every angle.
I could tell he didn’t believe it either.
“I don’t know that she isn’t. Let me know if she moves before I can get there.”
“What’s your plan? Just show up and go barreling in shouting her name?” Maddox asked, a half smile curving his mouth. He loved violence.
