Page 94 of Shattered Veil

Liam voiced to his sister, “If you think your friend knows anything about these missing women, why don’t you just tell her it’d be best for her to go to the police?”

Colton pointed at him. “Ooh. That. So simple, we won’t even have to go into much detail, and then the cops are involved without any of us being questioned.”

“Well, you’re gonna question her, though,” I said. “She’ll probably ask why you’re so damn interested.”

“Maybe I’m dating a stripper who works at another club.” Colton looked to me with a secretly mocking smile, and Cassie grumbled something unintelligible from behind me as he continued, “Call her Peyton…Peyton’s a good name.” He murmured the latter half softly to himself, and then powered on with, “That’d make me emotionally invested enough, right?”

Cassie exhaled a bitter, succinct, “Sure.”

Without even a pause, Colton abruptly swung the subject. “But I’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Since she’s not here yet…” He glanced at Zoey. “You look through that laptop?”

“Mhm,” she replied. “Nothing else that I could see.”

“Nothing else that you could see?” he repeated back to her with a narrowing of his eyes. “Saved pictures?”

“Nope,” she muttered.

“Emails?”

“No saved passwords.”

“Messages?”

Her expression pinched. “Messages?”

“Texts,” Colton clarified with purpose. “Text messages.”

“How the hell am I supposed to check his text messages?”

He stared at her for all of two seconds before stating bluntly, “It’s a Mac.”

Zoey hesitated. “Uh huh…and?”

“And those have the ability to sync up with an iPhone.” His head cocked to the side as he looked to us all. “Did y’all not know that?”

Zoey said nothing in return while Liam blinked rapidly, murmuring, “Don’t look at me. I’m not rich enough for that shit.”

Claire mumbled, “I don’t have a computer,” and Cassie agreed.

Luke shook his head as expected, showing off his technological ineptitude.

I, however, was well aware of the feature…I had just been far too distracted to think of mentioning it.

I groaned, “I do. I didn’t even think about that.”

“’Kay…hoping ya didn’t burn it yet,” Colton told Zoey.

“No, no,” she replied.

He began to say, “You should probably—”

“I’ll check it again,” she cut him off sharply. “I got it.”

“Okay.” He held up his hands in mock defense at her tone, let them fall back to the table, and set his eyes back on Cassie. “So…thoughts on time here?”

She shrugged, lifting her phone to peek at the time once again, and immediately began to tap across the screen. Raising the phone to her ear, she waited for a beat before letting out a gritty, frustrated noise, and she dropped her cell to the counter with a loud clack.

“One ring. Silenced to voicemail,” she griped, pressing her hands to her eyes. “God dammit, Sky. For all we know, she’s tied up in some dude’s basement somewhere—”

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