57. Jude
57
JUDE
Light stabbed at my eyes and I flung an arm over my face, trying to block it out.
“Where’s Lilah?”
I turned my head and cracked an eye to look at Nolan, standing over me like a disappointed father who’d caught his son passed out after a night of partying.
I searched my brain for the answer and found it a few seconds later. “She said she had to use the bathroom.”
“How long ago was that?”
Something in Nolan’s voice sent an alarm ringing through my body. I sat up.
“I’m not sure.” It hadn’t been light out, and it had been colder. “A while ago, I think.”
“What’s going on?” Rafe asked, sitting up on one of the other lounge chairs and scratching at his facial hair.
“Lilah’s gone,” Nolan said.
Rafe’s eyes were instantly alert. “What do you mean ‘gone?’”
Nolan thrust out a piece of paper, words scrawled on it in blue ink.
“‘ I’ll be back, don’t worry ?’” I read.
Nolan held up Lilah’s phone. “She left this.”
I jumped to my feet right behind Rafe.
“Unlock her phone,” Rafe said.
“I don’t have the?— ”
“Don’t fucking lie to me,” Rafe said. “Now’s not the time to play Boy Scout. We all have the password to Lilah’s phone.”
Nolan looked pained as he opened the phone. I didn’t know whether to feel more guilty that I‘d had the password to Lilah’s phone for the last month or less guilty since apparently I hadn’t been alone in worrying there might come a time when I’d need it.
Right now I was just glad we had it.
“Anything?” Rafe asked.
Nolan swore and held it out so we could read the text on the screen: a username and invitation code.
And there was only one place I could think of where Lilah would need a username and invitation code.
Rafe stalked into the house and into Lilah’s room, then opened her computer and started typing in a passcode.
“Wait, you have her laptop code too?” Nolan asked.
“I added a secondary passcode when I gave it to her,” Rafe said. “Just in case.”
There were a whole lot of violations of privacy going on here — and I was as guilty as Nolan and Rafe — but now wasn’t the time to hash them out.
As soon as Rafe got past the log-in screen my heart dropped out of my fucking chest. Because it wasn’t the familiar pink door. Instead it was an all-pink screen, and if there had been instructions on it before, instructions for Lilah, they were gone now.
“Fuck,” Rafe said.
Lilah had been on the Imperium Fratrum site.
And from the looks of it, they’d let her in.