19. Noah
When we leftthe house that Ruby and Jade were staying in, I had a sense of dread. It was just this gut feeling that something was going to happen. It was something that had been brewing inside me for days. When she revealed that she had gotten a text again, the feeling that this was somehow my fault didn’t dissipate. Instead, it got worse, the guilt increasing tenfold. I didn’t know what to do or how to combat this. Had I made her a target simply by wanting her and refusing to back down? Unfortunately, right now, I had a job to do and all I needed was to focus on playing this game to the best of my ability. It was something I knew had to do, and fortunately, I had learned to compartmentalize.
The game was grueling and the energy in the arena was high, making everything but playing escape my head. A little over an hour after the puck dropped, we managed to rack up a win. Cheering on the ice was short-lived because it wasn”t our home arena, so we took our excitement back to our locker room. While I was changing into my street clothes, the rest of the guys were doing the same. I expected the girls to be waiting for us outside of our locker room, but that was when the night went to hell. Ruby was standing there, looking like she had been crying, and was completely panicked.
When I got near her, she started sobbing again. “Noah, I don”t know where Jade is.”
My heart plummeted into my stomach. “What?” I asked.
I knew exactly what she said and what she meant, but I was struggling to understand how someone loses another person. The fact that it was Jade made little sense to me. Because if anything had happened to her, I would know. My entire world was her and hockey, so time wouldn”t continue to move on just like it was another day.
Ruby told me that Jade went to the bathroom during the last period and never came back. When the game was over, she went to check on her, worried that maybe Jade had gotten sick, but she couldn”t find her. I could tell she needed some sort of reassurance that it wasn”t her fault and she had done what she could have, but my brain was not connecting. Callum pulled her into an embrace, and I let him do that as I looked at Oli. Oliver appeared almost as shocked as me, but he shook himself out of it faster than I did. He came over to me and turned me around to face him, giving us some privacy.
“Did you give her the necklace?” Oliver asked, looking at me with a knowing expression.
While I had given that necklace to Jade because I wanted to, and I hadn”t been lying about the reasons, I had also attached a tracker to it and Oli knew. Finally catching up to what was going on and my emotions, I nodded. “Yeah, right before we left their rental.” I looked over at Ruby, and I tried to remain polite even though I was close to losing my shit. “Was Jade wearing that necklace I gave her? The one with the wolf?”
Ruby seemed a little uncomfortable, and I knew I was doing that intense thing Jade had told me about. I tried to dial it back, but the longer it took her to answer, the more I wanted to throttle her. Clenching my fists, I waited for her to collect herself and let her think.
She started nodding. “I believe so. I remember seeing her fingering the wolf pendant during the game. I need to tell you something else.” She seemed to shrink into Callum as I glared at her. If there was important information for her to tell me, she should have led with that. “She got a text message before we left the rental. She ended up telling me about the stalker. The message said something about how they had found her, and she was going to regret not heeding their messages and telling people about her secret relationship with you,” she said simply, like she hadn’t just blown my world apart.
“Oli, I need you to look up her location now. I have a feeling we are about to meet her fucking stalker face-to-face,” I pleaded to Oliver.
He nodded, pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, and started texting. I had no idea who his contact was for the tracker. Just that he had one and we needed to find Jade.
“How are you gonna find her? Did you put a tracker on her?” Ruby asked, a look of incredulity on her face.
“I get that she is your friend and you two are growing a bond. Feel violated on her behalf all you want later, when it’s not saving her ass,” I told her, my voice starting to rise. I took a minute to calm down because going off on Callum’s girlfriend and Jade’s new friend would be something I would regret later. I could be nice, but at the moment, Jade was my only fucking concern. “I knew there was a chance this sick fuck would break and escalate. I’m not glad they did, but I’m relieved that I planned for it. Otherwise, this conversation would be going more along the lines of, ‘I guess we’re relying on the police to find her.’”
“Maybe we should,” she replied as she looked like she was going through both sides of the argument in her head.
“They do nothing but slow shit down and they won’t help,” I said with finality.
Ruby looked shocked, but finally, she nodded and leaned against Callum again.
I hummed and nodded. I turned to Oli to see where he was with finding Jade and this motherfucker that decided to fuck around and find out. I was about 90% sure that they had no idea that I was willing to grab my hockey teammates and go to fucking war for Jade. They probably also were not banking on me putting a tracker on her. Guess their night was about to change and not for the better.
“Okay, we have a general area right now. To get a more exact location, we need to give him time. My thoughts are they are headed back to Chicago because that’s the direction that’s showing up on the GPS.”
“All right, you guys need to start heading that way. I’ll handle Coach. Take Ruby’s car. We will find another way home. This is more important,” Callum said, getting the keys from Ruby and handing them to me. Before Finn, Ryder, Oli, and I all headed toward where Ruby told us she was parked, I grabbed my hockey stick. I was pretty sure that I would need it.
When we made it to the garage, I hit the key fob to unlock the car. The guys started to make their way toward it, and I had a moment of pause. How did this crazy person find out where she was? I mean, the fact that I was playing against Michigan wasn’t a secret, so it wasn’t unreasonable for them to be led here, but it still didn’t make sense how they knew when she left. It was a long shot, but I had an idea.
“Do any of you guys have an iPhone?” I asked, pretty sure one of them had to have one.
“Yeah, I do,” Finn answered, his eyebrows furrowed. He was probably wondering why I was asking about an iPhone when Jade was missing.
I made a gimme motion, waiting for Finn to hand over his phone. He rolled his eyes and gave his cell to me. I turned on the Bluetooth and immediately got a notification that another device was close.
“The car has a tracker on it. We need to find an Apple AirTag,” I told the guys. Even though this creep had to be close to track it, I didn”t want them to have the chance.
We all looked around the car and underneath until Ryder yelled out he found it. I told him to just put it on the ground. It wasn”t coming with us. We all piled into the car, and soon we were on our way back to Chicago with Oliver periodically checking the location of Jade’s pendant. I just hoped that we”d get there before anything too traumatizing happened to my girl.