Chapter 31
Sunlight streams into my room, jolting me awake.
“Here,” Jax says, walking away from the curtains he just pulled open and handing me a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin from the nightstand. “They’re supposed to call soon with an update, and I figured you’d want to be awake for it.”
Fuck, I barely even remember Blake driving Tracy and me back to the city last night. I’d been lying on the living room floor, staring at the ceiling and six shots deep, when Jax walked in early this morning before the sun was even up.
It was only out of pure exhaustion that I eventually fell asleep, just as the sun had started to rise.
“What time is it?” My throat feels like I swallowed nails. Sitting up against the headboard, I take a handful of aspirin and down the water.
“Almost noon. I talked to Sheriff Miller earlier, and he said they expected to have some answers by this afternoon.” Jax sits down on the bed beside me. He rests a hand on my knee, giving it a quick pat before pulling his hand away.
He doesn’t offer empty promises or words of consolation. We’ve never been like that, both having a mutual understanding that we’d be there for one another no matter what, but we’d never lie to each other.
And anything he tries to tell me right now would be just that–lies. Because we don’t know that Riley will be okay. We don’t even know if she’s alive.
I set the glass back on the nightstand to keep myself from shattering it in my fist, and clench my hands instead. It does nothing to ease the tension pulling on every single one of my muscles.
Hatred heats my chest, eating at me like a disease and consuming me piece by piece. Hatred toward myself, because I didn’t keep her safe.
She can’t be dead. I won’t accept that outcome.
Riley is mine, and even death won’t steal her from me.
Jax’s phone buzzes, and he pulls it from his pocket. Answering it, he puts it on speaker. “Sheriff, I’m here with Emmett.”
Sheriff Miller’s voice flows through the phone. “Your doorman let me in. I’m on my way up.”
He ends the call, and Jax and I stare at each other. If Sheriff Miller drove all the way out here to talk to me in person, the news isn’t good.
Throwing my legs off the side of the bed, I get up and frantically start pacing, my hands running through my hair, tugging at it.
“She can’t be…” I can’t bring myself to say the words out loud.
Jax rises and stands in front of me, putting both hands on my shoulders and forcing me to stop moving. I hang my head, in too much pain to look at what might be on his face.
My eyes zero in on a dark spot on my thigh. I’m still in the same clothes I wore yesterday, blood staining my t-shirt and jeans from the beating I gave my knuckles last night.
“She’s not,” he says softly, gripping the back of my neck and dipping down to force eye contact with me. “If someone’s been stalking her for months, they wouldn’t just kill her right away. They’d want her alive.”
While his words are meant to be a beacon of hope, they’re anything but. Instead, they instill a burning hot anger in my chest at the thought of what she’s being subjected to right now.
But that anger quickly returns to pain when Sheriff Miller sits down in a chair opposite us in my living room.
“We found remains,” he says gently, not breaking eye contact with me. “They appear to be female and similar in size to Riley, but are too disfigured for any positive identification. It will take a few days to get DNA results back.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a bag. “We also found these.”
He hands me the bag, and I thumb the three bullets inside it. They’re from Riley’s Glock. Instinctively I know it.
“Where did you find them?” I ask, my voice barely my own, as my mind tries to sift through everything. This doesn’t make sense with the video footage we watched last night.
“Two of them were found in the front yard, not far from the porch. The third was found inside, near the front door.”
Tossing the bag onto the coffee table, I lean forward in my seat, fisting my hands in front of me to keep the tremors at bay. But then…
Another glimmer of hope.
“What direction were they fired from?” I ask, my skin prickling at what I know Sheriff Miller is about to say.
The corner of his mouth just barely tips up as he says, “They were fired from inside the house.”
Jax sits up straighter beside me. To Sheriff Miller, he says, “You said the camera footage showed Riley in bed just as the fire went up and the cameras cut out.”
“It did, which means—”
I finish for him. “Which means either a gun fight went down in the few minutes between the cameras cutting and the house going up in flames, or that footage was altered.”
The sheriff and I had watched the footage last night. And I’d watched it again obsessively as I drank myself into a stupor after I got home.
When Riley had finally gone back into her house last night, she went straight up to bed. I’d assumed she was emotionally drained from dealing with the chickens because of how attached to them she was, and had decided to just sleep at her place instead of driving back to Tracy’s.
She’d been lying on her side, blankets pulled over her head as the fire started. It was quick; the flames flicking up rapidly and consuming the entire first floor within minutes. Riley hadn’t even woken from her sleep when the cameras finally cut out.
“Let me see the footage,” Jax says, reaching out his hand for my phone.
I pull it from my pocket and hand it to him.
His eyebrows dip in concentration as he watches the camera feeds. He taps at my phone’s screen, probably adjusting playback speeds and angles until, finally, he looks over at me.
“The footage has been altered,” he says, handing the phone back to me. “Look at what she’s wearing when she walks out, then look at what she’s wearing when she walks back in.”
My heart skips a beat as I grab the phone from his hand and rewind the footage. Riley walks out of her house in the afternoon wearing black leggings and the gray, oversized sweater she typically wears when doing chores or yard work. But when she comes back in, right before dark, I see the same thing. Just as I had last night.
“I don’t see the difference,” I say, looking up at Jax.
“Here.” He takes the phone from me. “When she goes out, she’s wearing a solid gray hooded sweater. But when she comes back in, she’s wearing one with a small logo on it. You can’t see it from the angle of the camera pointing at the front door.” He taps the screen, changing to the living room feed. “But when we look here from off to the side, there’s a small logo on the edge of the hood. That wasn’t there when she walked out.”
He changes to the feed from her bedroom next. “And look at when she crawls into bed. When she gets in and pulls the covers up over her, the glass of water on her nightstand is half full. But when we skip ahead here.” He fast forwards ten minutes, and that’s when I see the tiniest blip in the footage. “It’s almost full. Yet she never moved.”
My heart races as I jump up from the couch. “She wasn’t there last night.”
Jax looks at me with a spark of hope on his face. “No, I don’t think so. Someone spliced this footage together to make it look like her walking up to bed and being there during the fire.” He looks toward Sheriff Miller. “But that still doesn’t explain what happened to her. Or who’s remains you found.”
I barely even register Jax and Sheriff Miller’s words as they continue to discuss the footage.
She’s alive.