Page 19 of Ruin

I squeezed his hand again and started walking back toward the door, praying that Brock was somewhere else. At a woman’s house, maybe, or out for a drink. Someplace safe and out of the way, where he hadn’t heard what had happened tonight.

We got through the doorway again before Knight turned on the flashlight from his phone, and I paused for a moment, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the sudden presence of light. Then we were stepping forward lightly, Knight leading the way and me following closely as we walked through the entryway into the kitchen, and from there into the living room. The kitchen was dead quiet, everything looking shockingly neat and tidy for a place where (I assumed) a man lived by himself. The living room was your typical bachelor pad: all couch/TV/place to set your beer, and little else.

At least it made it easy to check the floor for any signs of struggle. Or blood.

We didn’t see anything there, though, and soon we were moving into a hallway that had a bathroom off one side—empty—and a bedroom on the other. We snuck into the bedroom, being as quiet as possible, and moved around slowly, searching one side of the bed and then the other for anything that might give us a clue to where Brock was or what he was doing.

The room, though, was just as spartan as the rest of the house. No clutter, no shoes thrown in the corner, no clothes on the bed.

No Brock lying dead on the floor.

We made quick work of the bathroom attached to his actual room and moved forward. Three additional rooms, each with a bed and nothing else, and each as empty as the first. One of the rooms had another bathroom attached, making the house bigger than anything I’d ever been in before, but that too was empty of anything except the bare necessities.

By the time we got back into the hall, I was both mystified and surprised at how neat and tidy the big man evidently was. Or maybe he didn’t keep much here because this wasn’t actually his home when he had the clubhouse.

Regardless, he hadn’t been hiding out here, keeping himself safe. Or if he had, he’d left before we arrived.

“Doesn’t look like he’s here,” Knight whispered.

I felt a sudden, completely irrational need to laugh out loud at how ridiculous that statement was but pushed it down. “No shit,” I said instead. “Also doesn’t look like he left in a hurry. No sign of struggle. So where is he?”

“You’ve got me,” he returned, his head moving from left to right as he scanned the hall, no doubt looking for any hidden doorway we’d missed. The portal to some escape room or something.

There wasn’t anything like that here, though, and we started moving back toward the door, evidently both thinking the same thing: that if he wasn’t here, we were better off getting out into the night and searching for him.

We’d just crept back through the door, my eyes on the driveway in front of us, when Knight’s phone started screaming.

I jumped, and he cursed and yanked it out of his pocket, moving to silence it in the same motion. Then he paused and stared at it.

“What?” I hissed.

“It’s Brock,” he answered.

CHAPTER 14

KNIGHT

BY THE TIME BROCK ARRIVED, the light of his bike sweeping across the driveway as he pulled in, I’d nearly worked myself into a frenzy. Brock hadn’t said anything on the phone except that he’d be at the house soon and for Saraya and me to sit tight and wait for him.

Sitting tight and waiting for him was not exactly high on my list of things to do on the best of days, and on a day that had already seen so many things go wrong...

Well. Suffice it to say it wasn’t easy to just hang out in the house and wait for my friend to arrive. And Saraya wasn’t much better. She was jittery and nervous, jumping at any sound and staring into the darkness like she was expecting trouble at any moment. Not that I could blame her. The girl had been attacked and chased tonight, and though she hadn’t said anything about it yet, Gemini had told me in a text that she’d stabbed the guys who were attacking them. I didn’t know if she’d killed them or not, but the act of hurting someone else on purpose had to be grinding on her conscience.

I’d killed men before, and it had left dark, twisting scars on my heart. Saraya was three times as bright as I’d ever been. Doing damage like that had to be nearly killing her.

I’d taken her into my arms at some point, and then pulled her into my lap in the chair where I’d decided to rest while we waited for Brock’s arrival. She was shaking and breathing shallowly, her skin nearly as twitchy as the day I’d first found her.

I hadn’t asked, though. Hadn’t said anything. Instead, I’d held her as close as I could manage and tried to calm her just with my presence.

I was relieved when Brock arrived, though, and we were out of the house in a flash to meet him in the driveway.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked, clasping his shoulder and bringing him in for a hug. The man had to be a foot taller than me, and therefore not the sort of person I could easily push around, but he came in easily, like he needed the contact just as much as I did.

“You first,” he said gruffly. “Why is there a downed bike in my driveway, and what’s with all the bullet holes in my house?”

Shit. I hadn’t realized he’d be able to see them that easily, but I was guessing his headlight had showed him more than I’d expected.

And I guessed it was his house. He had a right to know what had happened.