Page 28 of Claimed

She set up her camera and spoke into the mic, doing a slow sweep of the city in long view. In her finder she picked out the remarkable diversity of homes—from abandoned hulks to adorable cottages to freshly painted townhomes. As she panned, she thought of Ari, stumbling ashore in one of the region’s vast parks. Where had he gone from there? If it had been her, what would she have done? He had food and water, and he’d made it to a mainland. Even if he’d been disoriented, he would have wanted to find home. Would he have trusted the first people he met?

She grimaced. Probably. Ari had grown up in a loving family, with all the advantages of belonging to the royal ruling class. He would have an innate trust of others. And if he was already concussed, injured…

Her heart sank as she fixed on the cheerful homes high above the city, then swung the camera out to the beach again filled with laughing, happy windsurfers.

There was simply no way he was alive.

“Nicki.” Stefan’s voice cut across her gloomy thoughts and she jerked her head back from the camera, surprised to see him so close.

“Oh, sorry—I didn’t hear you come up.”

“Clearly,” he said, with a twist of his lips. “You were fixated on the homes overlooking the bay. Did you find anything interesting there?”

“No, not really.” She lifted one shoulder. “Unless you count amazing places where I’ll never live.”

His brows lifted, and he shifted his gaze upward as well. “Too close together,” he said, with a certainty that surprised her. “And too far from the water.”

“Ha! Don’t tell me you’re house hunting. I gotta assume you picked up some amazing oceanfront villa sometime around 1900 and have been letting it appreciate since then.”

It was his turn to shrug, but his expression grew thoughtful for a moment as he stared at the homes. Then it cleared as he glanced back at her. “Do you have enough footage for your posts?”

“I have enough for a week’s worth.” She peered down the beach. “Where’s Omir?”

“Attending to other business. We’ll be dining with him tonight at his hotel—both of us. I told him we would be honored.”

She grinned. “I’m sure you did.”

“To maintain the illusion that we’re here on holiday, I’ve also booked us into a private hotel. If you’ll pack your bag when we get back to the yacht, we’ll have it transferred later today.”

“Oh—of course,” Nicki said. They turned and walked back up the boardwalk, and when Stefan suggested they stop at a beachside café for lunch, she accepted, blinking in surprise as he rattled off an order in perfect Turkish as they were led to a tinytable. He lifted her camera equipment from her shoulder and slid it over his chair before settling in.

Something about this…felt a little off, Nicki realized suddenly. Her heart kicked up with an ominous flutter. Had she done something inappropriate? Slipped up in some way?

“What’s wrong?” Stefan’s gaze pinned her to her chair, and she offered him a weak smile.

“Nothing—nothing at all. I’m a little shaky for some reason. Too long out in the sun, I suspect.”

“I should have broken away sooner,” he said as a waiter deposited water, bread, and dates on the table. “Eat, please. Our orders will be here shortly.”

She didn’t argue with him. She was hungry, to be sure, and her skin was running hot and cold.No, no, no.This wasn’t the time for her to be weak. She needed to take better care of herself, or all of this would be pointless.

“I’ve heard from the guards,” Stefan said, interrupting her self-recriminations. “They report that despite what the scavenger dealer reported, there are far fewer squatters in the park than we’d hoped. The ones they’d found were cagey enough to stay out of sight, for the most part, until it became clear that the men were offering money. That isn’t totally reassuring, as people lie for money, but there was some useful information.”

Nicki perked up. “There was?”

“Not specific, but interesting.” Stefan nodded. “These men hadn’t heard of Ari, nor had they seen anyone matching his description. But when the talk turned to homeless wanderers and drunkards, they all said the same thing. Those people were locked up, kept out of the public eye. Alaçati thrives on tourism and on putting up a good face for the well-heeled aristos of the big cities. They suffer no drunks on their watch.”

She made a face. “I guess I can see their point, but what do they do with them? Shoot them at dawn?”

“They put them to work in some sort of local mental asylum. Guarded, they say, bymonsters.”

She almost dropped her fork. “Monster, monsters? Or, like, vicious animals who seem monstrous?”

“That we don’t know. I’d received some…previous intelligence that there might be some animal trafficking going on in Alaçati, but I don’t trust the source, here. The locals spoke of this asylum with certainty, and also with fear. Apparently, the threat is real enough to them. We haven’t been able to get any corroboration from external sources, however. Not yet.”

Nicki nodded, considering the quaint city around them. “I can’t imagine this place having a mental asylum. Let alone one guarded by monsters.”

“It doesn’t, not officially.” Stefan sat back in his chair, rolling his glass in his hands. “But there are several facilities that could be used in that role—abandoned warehouses, industrial buildings. The particular warehouse the squatters were warned to stay away from was on the southern range,” he gestured, and Nicki turned in that direction. She couldn’t make out anything on the ridge with the midday haze. “It’s next to a recently excavated ruin of an old temple that’s started to cause some buzz for the city, but isn’t open to the public yet. It will be soon, by all accounts. The squatters are hoping the site’s opening might force the Alaçati police to come up with a different policy on drunkards, not simply a different holding cell.”

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