Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
Tony
I COULDN’T HELP FEELING a little guilty about leaving Knox on his own at the hospital. After all, I’d promised to stay with him until one of the others showed up to take over.
Still, I reminded myself repeatedly that he was going to be tied up with doctors and tests and medical questions for the next little while.
More importantly, it wasn’t as though my presence was going to, I dunno, bring him comfort or anything.
I was just some random beta guy that did errands for Heath sometimes. Knox barely knew me.
I hadn’t received a call back from either Heath or Gage, almost two hours after I’d left them both voicemails.
No matter how hard I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t a big deal.
.. I knew that it actually was. It didn’t matter how tired they were or how little sleep they’d gotten since the attack.
There was no way in hell that one or the other of them hadn’t heard their phones ringing and checked for messages.
So, here I was in my old Volvo, driving out to the pack house to find out what the heck was going on.
My head was pounding after the long, sleepless night—not helped by the early morning sun that had peeked out from behind the clouds seemingly for the sole purpose of burning out my retinas as I’d negotiated my way from the hospital’s visitor parking area toward Lake Shore Drive.
Everything was probably fine, I told myself for the dozenth time. There would be a reasonable explanation for why I couldn’t contact either of the alphas. Maybe their phones batteries were dead, and they hadn’t noticed. Or... something.
Whatever the case, I’d find out soon enough.
I pulled into the winding driveway leading to the old house and parked by the front door. Nothing seemed out of place. There were no other vehicles out front, but I was pretty sure the others usually parked in the back, where an old carriage house had been renovated into a detached garage.
Heart in throat, I jogged up to the door and rapped my knuckles against it until they ached. “Heath?” I called. “Gage? Wake up and get down here!”
When that didn’t immediately bring someone down to let me in, I leaned on the doorbell buzzer. I honestly had no idea if the damn thing was even hooked up—but sure enough, the muffled electronic tone reached me faintly through the heavy door.
I was pacing back and forth on the porch, trying to figure out what I should do next, when the door swung open to reveal Gage standing there in rumpled clothes and bare feet. I whirled to face him, my eyes immediately drawn to his gaping fly before I wrenched my attention up to his face.
“Tony,” he said blankly, as though I was the last person he’d expected to find at his door. His scruffy stubble had long ago left the land of five o’clock shadow in the rearview mirror, and his square-jawed face was so pale that he looked like a ghost. His hazel eyes were very wide.
“Gage?” I asked stupidly.
He swallowed hard, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing. “We’ve... um... we’ve got a problem. A big one.”
I held up a hand, unable to take any new crises on board until I’d delivered my news. “Okay, but I have to tell you. Knox is awake. He seems... mostly okay? The doctors are with him now, running tests and stuff.”
Gage blinked, opened his mouth, and blinked again.
“Oh. That’s... that’s great news. The best, actually.” He took a deep breath and let it gust out, although it did nothing to ease the tense line of his shoulders. “See? I knew he’d be all right.”
I nodded, feeling like someone standing beneath an overhanging boulder on a narrow mountain trail. “Yeah. It’s fantastic news. I’m really happy for you all.” I braced myself. “So, what’s this ‘big problem’ you mentioned?”
Gage’s look of profound relief twisted back into worry. And... guilt?
“I may have... um... let Jez get away,” he said.
The words took a second to penetrate. “What?”
I stared at the sheepish alpha, who rubbed a hand restlessly over the back of his neck like a schoolboy dragged in front of the principal. How was I supposed to feel about this? Alarmed? Relieved?
“But she was locked in the attic,” I said.
Gage’s hand dropped to hang limply at his side. “There was a storm. She was scared. I couldn’t leave her up there all alone.”
Okay. There was probably a totally rational reason why he was half-dressed and his fly was unzipped. And besides, this was none of my business, even if it involved someone I’d once thought was my closest friend. The important part was that Jez was gone.
“Are you sure she’s not hiding somewhere in the house?” I asked.
Gage seemed to shake himself back to the present. “The front door was unlocked when I opened it just now,” he said. Then he hesitated. “But you’re right, we should search to be sure.”
He stepped back, inviting me in. Then he seemed to realize what state he was in, and two high spots of color heated his pale features as he quickly zipped and buttoned his pants closed. I jerked my attention away, staring at the opposite wall as my ears burned.
He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Sorry. Um, don’t take this the wrong way, but why didn’t you just call me from the hospital instead of driving all the way out here?”
“I did,” I told him. “Called you, called Heath... no one answered, so I left voicemails. When no one called me back, I started to worry.””
His face, which had been bloodless before, went positively gray.
“Shit,” he said, and went running down the hall toward the main stairs with way more speed than someone that big should have possessed.
Unsure what else to do, I followed him, puffing a bit by the time we reached what I assumed was his bedroom.
He rushed over to the bedside table, shoving around books and other miscellaneous odds and ends before coming up with a worn leather wallet.
He opened it up and rifled through the contents before straightening.
“She took my phone. Some money, too.” He sounded completely shellshocked.
“So, she’s probably not hiding in the house, then,” I concluded. “Your phone’s locked though, right?” When he didn’t immediately reply, I asked again. “Right?”
Another pause.
“It never reads my face or fingerprint on the first try, and I hate having to enter a code every time.” The words were a quiet mumble.
I opened my mouth to read him the riot act, only to catch myself just in time. It hardly mattered at this point. “Please tell me you know your cloud account login,” I said instead.
“Yeah, of course.” He sounded a bit defensive.
That was something, at least.
“Okay.” I pulled out my phone, wincing at the red battery warning. “Here, I need to plug into your charger. There’s a phone finder app; I think it’ll let me look for yours if you use it to log in to your account.”
I didn’t stop to second-guess whether I should be helping Gage find Jez, or silently cheering that she’d gotten away. The truth was, she’d nearly killed Knox... even if she’d been tricked into doing it. And I knew all too well how effectively she could disappear, if left to her own devices.
Knox deserved the chance to make his own decision about what to do with her, and that wouldn’t happen if she vanished into Chicago’s underworld like she had after she’d killed my stepdad.
I plugged in my phone and pulled up the app, scrolling down to the ‘help a friend’ option and tapping it.
Gage crowded close, taking the phone when I handed it to him and painstakingly typing in his account information.
I supposed with fingers as big and thick as his, it probably was a pain in the ass to type on a phone screen.
I’d never really noticed how comforting the huge man’s alpha scent was.
Heath’s scent had always meant the best kind of forbidden danger, in whatever part of my lizard brain was wired to process that kind of shit.
But Gage smelled like a bakery at Christmas, and I had to sternly prevent myself from taking a surreptitious sniff.
The phone pinged success, and a map popped up with a red marker pin in the middle. I didn’t immediately recognize the area, but Gage scowled.
“Fuck. Is that the old silos out by McKinley?” he asked, pinching and zooming the screen.
I peered at the map. “I thought those were getting demolished? Wasn’t it on the news a while back?”
He shook his head. “It got tied up in red tape or something. How reliable is this app?”
I shrugged. “It’s not like it’s going to randomly show your phone in some old derelict area miles from here if it’s actually hidden under a couch cushion downstairs.”
Gage straightened. “Okay. We’ve gotta go, then. I need to get Jez back here before Heath comes back from wherever the hell he stormed off to.”
“Heath’s not here?” I asked, although of course if he had been, he would’ve heard the commotion and come running before now.”
Gage huffed out a frustrated breath. “No, he’s... well, I don’t know where he is. Pretty sure I pissed him off earlier.”
I didn’t really want to poke at that if I didn’t have to. “Right. So, my phone’s running on fumes. Have you got a charging port in your car? Because my car’s too old to have one.” I waited for his nod, and glanced down pointedly at his feet. “And, um, you might also want some shoes.”
He followed my gaze. “Oh. Yeah. Shoes would probably be good.”
Forty-five minutes later we were hurtling down the Stevenson Expressway in Gage’s white GMC Yukon, while I babysat the finder app to make sure the phone’s location didn’t move somewhere else while we were on the way.
“Why would she come all the way out here?” Gage muttered, as he took an exit to cross the river.
And that did seem pretty weird. But...
“After she rescued me by killing my stepfather, I tried to find her,” I said. “But it was like she’d disappeared off the face of the earth. Maybe she was here? Could there be, like, a homeless encampment in the silos or something?”
“Maybe,” Gage replied, although he didn’t sound convinced.
Silence stretched for a couple of minutes as we drove toward 28th Street. Then Gage spoke again.
“Look... this is none of my business, but I been meaning to ask you. It seemed like you shut down pretty quick when I mentioned Heath earlier. Is everything okay there?”
My breath caught, even as my heart did a stupid little stutter. Did Gage know that I’d slept with his packmate?
I tried to play it casual. “What? Yeah, of course everything’s okay. Why wouldn’t it be?”
Gage didn’t answer for long enough that I started to squirm.
“No reason,” he said, and jerked his chin at the windshield. “That’s the silos over there. I think this is the turnoff.”
I pressed my lips together tightly and followed the gesture.
The massive derelict structure towered over its landscape of grass and weeds in the middle distance, gray and brown and dingy against the morning sky.
As we approached, I could see the tall chain link fence surrounding the property, some of its posts bent with age like drunken sailors.
“Wait. That ain’t right,” Gage said, as he slowed the Yukon and pulled off the road, coming to a stop next to a pair of massive double gates. Inside, parked next to a bleak rectangular warehouse set next to the cylindrical grain silos, sat a dark van and a couple of high-end SUVs.
Only one kind of person drove expensive black SUVs with aftermarket rims that cost more than my monthly income, and also hung out in places like this abandoned urban hellscape.
Would Jez have connections with people like that?
And if she did, would she have run straight to those people immediately after escaping the pack house?
Clammy sweat broke out on my chest.
“Gage,” I whispered. “I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.”