Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
ELI
Isucked back another sip of tepid coffee, the liquid sour in my mouth. Nothing tasted good. I was tired of searching through files, tired of spinning my wheels.
I was trying to give Sylvie space. I didn’t know what else to do.
I got it. I did, finally. I’d thought I was keeping things simple—making it easy, playing by the rules, keeping Sylvie on a need-to-know.
I could compartmentalize: look for Silas, find Emily’s killer, and get Sylvie her life back.
I’d compartmentalized my whole life, and I was damn good at it.
There hadn’t been any reason to change anything about the way I operated, or so I’d thought.
I hadn’t thought about trust. Sylvie’s trust, and what it would mean to have it, and then lose it.
I just hadn’t seen Sylvie coming, hadn’t imagined that I’d ever feel like this about someone.
Now she was here, and I couldn’t let her go.
But she needed space, and I needed to figure out how the fuck I was going to get her to trust me again.
All of that made sense in my head. Still, a dark ball of worry had settled in my chest. Giving her space felt wrong.
Leaving her alone in the apartment felt too risky, despite the fact that it was a safe house in the middle of the Sinclair Security building.
No one could get to her. I didn’t need to hover to keep her safe.
I knew all of that, but I didn’t like it.
She’s probably sitting up there, thinking up more and more reasons to hate me, to shut me out.
I pushed my chair back, intending to go get a new coffee, but as I looked down into my mostly empty, cold mug, I knew that wasn’t where I was going.
“Any progress?” Maddox asked, looking up from his laptop screen.
“No,” I said shortly. “I’m going to check on Sylvie.”
“I got used to having her down here,” he said. “Started to feel like she was one of the team.”
“Yeah, well, I fucked that up,” I said. “You were right. I should have leveled with her. I thought I could keep it simple.”
“Women are anything but simple,” Emmett said, spinning around in his chair and giving me a surprisingly sympathetic look.
He wasn’t one to dole out compassion, which made me feel even shittier. This wasn’t in my head, this rift between Sylvie and me. This was bad enough that Emmett felt sorry for me.
Fuck.
“Now I have to figure out how to fix it.” I looked to the door at the end of the hall, urgency to get to Sylvie pulling me to her.
“Honesty usually works,” Emmett said blandly.
I raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. “Just throw yourself at her feet. You know, bare your soul.”
I started to shoot back a sarcastic remark and then stopped, considering.
I wasn’t exactly a bare-your-soul kind of guy.
I didn’t love the vulnerability of putting it all out there.
I was more of a make-a-joke-and-hold-things-close-to-my-chest person.
But that clearly hadn’t worked, because it had led me here.
Not a lot could feel worse than this—her shutting me out, me not knowing how to get back in.
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 saw 86 Ren Ave NE scrawled 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.
I wasn’t in the mood to be teased. Maybe Sylvie was fine.
Maybe she wasn’t. What mattered was that she was the target of a fucking killer.
So even if she was okay right now, there was no guarantee she’d stay that way.
Especially since she was following up on the only lead we had about the person who wanted her dead. And especially without me at her back.
“If you go rolling in there, guns blazing, you could fuck up the whole investigation. Anything we might gain about Silas could get burned once they know we know where they are. You realize that, right?” Maddox asked.
For the first time in my professional life, that thought hadn’t even occurred to me.
Because fuck the investigation. And fuck Silas. Whatever he was up to, he could take care of himself. I’d spent so much time worried about him. Was he in trouble? Did he need an assist? What was he doing?
Now Sylvie was out there, no one watching her back because she didn’t fucking trust any of us anymore. Because she thought we were more worried about Silas than we were about finding the man who was trying to kill her.
Goddamn it.
“As long as Sylvie’s okay,” I said, “I don’t care about the investigation.”
“Too bad you didn’t figure that out sooner,” Emmett muttered under his breath.
“I swear to God, man. I’m going to knock you out cold if you don’t shut the fuck up.” My hands curled into fists at my sides.
Emmett just smirked at me. I was reasonably sure I could take him, but then again, Emmett was a dangerous motherfucker—cold as ice when he needed to be and almost unstoppable in a fight.
Still. If he didn’t shut up, I was going to take a shot.
I might not be able to beat him, but I could make him regret opening his mouth. Later.
“I don’t have time for this,” I said. I was done. The only thing that mattered was finding Sylvie and making sure she was safe.
Maddox glanced at the map on Emmett’s screen. “I’m coming with. At the least, you need a driver. There’s not going to be any parking, and you don’t have time to burn looking.”
“Keep an eye on her,” I said to Emmett as I turned to leave. “If she moves, let us know.”
Emmett nodded, his eyes locked on the screen. “Go. Get your girl and bring her back.”