Chapter 22 – Ender
ENDER
There’s nothing better than waking up next to a beautiful woman. Opening my eyes, I find myself staring face-to-face at Grey’s ugly face. Scowling, I roll to my other side and find Journey snoring beside me.
Fuck.
Are we all naked in bed together?
Uh, pretty sure we’re missing the jam in our little bread sandwich. Where’s Celaeno?
I sit up, scratching the back of my head and frowning. My gaze runs over our room, but the tiny woman is nowhere to be found. Crawling out of bed, I head for the bathroom. She’s not there either.
“Guys?”
They don’t move an inch.
“Guys!” I go back to the bed and yank the covers back. Grey sits up, and as soon as his feet hit the floor, he’s swearing up a storm.
Journey’s eyes flash open, annoyance coloring his expression. “Is there a reason we’re staring at your naked junk in our face this early in the morning?”
“She’s gone.”
Grey stops swearing. “What are you talking about?”
But he knows.
Ender gets up and it’s the three of us, scrambling around naked, looking for a woman who’s not here.
Grey finally comes to stand in the center of the room. I sit on the edge of the bed, watching him. Waiting for him to snap.
“She left.” I open my mouth to speak, but he continues. “We are the biggest fucking morons in the world. We took off her collar. We let her seduce us into a sex-coma, and then she just strutted out of here.”
“No,” I tell him, shaking my head. “She wouldn’t do that.”
He whirls on me. “Why? Because she’s beautiful? Because she makes you hard?”
“She makes all of us hard!” I shout at him. “But that’s not why. I don’t see her doing that. She cares. About people and her birds. She wouldn’t just abandon all of them.”
“She could be pursuing the case without us,” Journey says, his words soft.
“No,” I tell them both. “Something must have happened to her.”
Saying the words aloud makes me realize that they’re probably true. There’s no doubt in my mind that she didn’t leave of her own free will, which means she was taken, but by who?
“Just because you don’t want to believe that the little monster took off to protect her own ass doesn’t mean it’s not true.” Grey starts dressing, his movements jerky and angry.
Journey and I dress too. More slowly.
“So what do we do?” Journey says.
“We hunt her down, that’s what we do!” Grey says. “And then we don’t take our eyes off her again… until it’s time to take care of her in a more permanent way.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” I shout back at him. “You can’t still be planning on killing her. Not after—“
“Sleeping with her?” His eyes are cold. “You bet I plan on killing that manipulative monster the first chance I get.”
He storms out of the motel room, and I’m left staring after him. I challenge Grey a lot, but it’s mostly to get a reaction out of him. The thing is, if he tries to hurt Celaeno, I won’t let him.
Even if it rips us all apart.
I follow him out of the motel room even more slowly, but freeze when I see the key outside our door. Kneeling down, I pick it up and swipe it in our door. It works.
Celaeno’s key. But why would she toss it on the ground?
The sense that something’s wrong intensifies.
Journey shoves open the door a second later, nearly smacking me in the face. “You guys need to see this!”
We hurry back inside. He shows us a phone plugged into the corner. On the floor near it, Candy’s wallet, with her ID still inside, and a business card from the candle shop lay.
“What does this mean?” I ask.
Grey grabs the card and crumbles it in his hand. “It means we might know where to find our little runaway.”
I follow after him, heart hammering. I want to find her.
I just don’t want Grey to find her.
So what do I do?