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I slid my phone from the bedside table and checked it. There were several messages.

You still alive? That was Mags.

Willow’s text was more restrained. Let me know if you need anything.

Rose’s simple, Miss you. And Mom’s, I’m so proud of you. Had had me fighting back tears.

Then I had to bite back a laugh when I read Else’s. Let me know if you want some of my castration elixir.

Draven stirred, so I rolled to my side so my phone light didn’t wake him, and he instantly rolled toward me in his sleep, pulling me into him. He was warm and muscled, and I could admit it was nice being held.

Brody hadn’t liked to cuddle much—

That’s because he was a freaking psychopath who’d planned to kill you.

God, I needed to get my head on straight. As distracting as this whole thing with Draven was, I had to focus on the most important thing happening in my life right then, my task, and finding Amy and Marina. The vines had been closer this morning, and I still had no idea who’d taken those females or why they’d buried Imogen’s body on our property so close to Charity.

I opened my photos and clicked on the documents I’d taken pictures of at the council’s public records library and read over them all again, but nothing new popped out at me. I opened Nightscape and searched Cesare Sartori’s name.

Amy had no pictures of her father, and the only mention of him was a picture of a new Mercedes he’d gotten her for her twenty-second birthday a couple months ago. And soon after, it looked like Amy had moved out of the family home and into her own apartment in the city.

A lot of our histories weren’t confined to “our world.” We lived alongside humans, pretending we were the same as them, which meant there were alternate versions of a lot of things that happened to us, events, news, that were also recorded in their history books and in the human media.

I did a Google search for Cesare Sartori. He was lorded as a slick businessman, smart and wealthy. So, pretty much the same as in our world, only we knew he used magic to his advantage, that he’d used it to get ahead. The male was hungry for power in both ours and the human world, and he went after it with a single-minded focus.

Draven growled in his sleep and shoved one of his thighs between mine. My breath escaped on a rush and my body, which was still recovering from what he’d done to me earlier, started to heat up all over again.

I did my best to ignore it and searched The Missing Maidens.

I got quite a few hits. Human experts, historians, amateur sleuths, and murder podcasts saying that whoever was behind The Maidens disappearances was the first serial killer ever documented.

There were debates over whether the perpetrator was a woman or a man and their possible motivations. Unfortunately, none of the human theories helped me.

Whoever was behind the original disappearances had a reason for doing it. Maybe some kind of power grab? A ritual? Sacrifice? That had to be the focus of my research next. There had to be a link to the disappearances happening now. I just had to find it. But first, there was somewhere I needed to go. I pulled back the covers.

“What are you doing?” Draven’s sleepy, growly voice rumbled behind me.

I needed his help, and he’d already made it clear he would be going wherever I went when it came to my task. “Looking at some documents I got from the council library.” I turned to him when something occurred to me. “Were you the reason they had a late meeting?”

He rested his head on his hand. “Yeah.”

I was right, I had sensed him there. “I bet Sapphire Eldridge loved every moment of it.”

Draven frowned.

“A small, angry woman with piercing blue eyes.”

“She was the only one who didn’t try to change my mind or seem the slightest bit outraged by it.”

“I’m not surprised. She probably cracked open a bottle of bubbly tonight to celebrate. A Thornheart being torn from her family and taken to the big bad wolf’s lair.”

His gaze darkened. “My lair?”

I shrugged. “Sorry, your gothic castle on a hill surrounded by woods and demons who want to eat me.”

He pushed me to my back, took my phone from my hand, and placed it on the bedside table. “It’s not all that bad, is it?”

“Your keep is actually very cool.”