Page 54 of The Forbidden Secret

After the first five hours, Jaimie started making calls to all her past clientele and various people around the different factions of the underworld to learn what had happened to Zeke. Nobody had heard anything. Nothing. I wanted to believe that if he were truly dead, we would have heard something by now. His body would have been found, or his next of kin would have been notified…

Except he didn’thavea next of kin.

And it was just as easy to dump a body in the bay as it was to dump it in an alleyway somewhere.

“No news is good news,” Jaimie said, though I could tell she didn’t believe her own words much either. Especially not as she compulsively checked her phone every couple of minutes to see if any of her sources had gotten back to her. “Zeke is really good at hiding out when things get hairy.”

“Have you had someone go and check out and around Clide Newton’s house?”

“There’s nothing out of the ordinary,” she said. “All the guards are on their usual posts. The rumor mill suggests that two of his guards were killed within the week, but there’s no rumor of an attack.”

If Clide were dead, the rumor mill would be going crazy.

If he weren’t dead…

“Jaimie, something isn’t right. He would have contacted us by now. It’s been a day and a half, and he wouldn’t just disappear like this.”

Jaimie bounced her knee up and down before nodding in confirmation.

“I have done everything I can do from here.”

“Thengo.Find him,” I demanded.

She shook her head. “If I leave you alone and you get taken because of it, I wouldn’t put it past Zeke to killmefor this. He doesn’t give a shit about being found. I see the way he cares for you, Evelina. If he were caught, he would do anything to ensure you stayed behind and remained protected.”

I stood and stomped. “That’s bullshit. I’m not someone to be protected when the life of someone I love is in danger. There’s got to be a way to figure this out. Someone has to know something.”

Jaimie looked at the floor, placing her head in her hands in exasperation. “We’re out of options. We’ve been out of options for a long fucking time, and Zeke knew it. That’s why he took this risk in the first place.”

“But we’re not,” I declared, pacing across the room. “There’s one person I can call and ask, and I’m sure he’ll have the answers. Or, at the very least, he’ll be able to get them.”

Jaimie’s brow furrowed for a moment before she realized exactly where my mind had gone. Then, she bolted to her feet alongside me. “Absolutely not. Not an option.”

“Encrypt your phone so nobody can track it, and I’ll call him.”

“No.”

“We will at least know if it’s worth continuing to look.”

“He will try to bargain with you, and he will end up with what he wants in the end. If you open up a line of communication with him, hewillwin. He’s manipulative and cunning. Hell, I’ve done jobs for the man in the past, and he lacks any empathy or compassion. He won’t care how you feel. He will take what he wants and leave nothing but death in the path.” She threw her hands up. “Hell, if he learns that you care about him, he might kill Zeke out of spite for you running away.”

That was something else I hadn’t considered—another variable in all of this.

“Do we really have another choice?”

“We can wait.”

“Wait for what?” I shouted. “Wait for him to be tortured to death? You want us to wait for someone to tell us what we already suspect has happened? If he has any chance, we need to find him.”

She rubbed a palm over her face as she stared at the ceiling.

“I don’t have a good plan, Evelina. I don’t know the best option.”

“I do, and I need your phone to do it.”

I sounded a lot more confident than I felt, but Jaimie handed me her phone with hesitation, which I had never seen from her. If I showed her how badly I didn’t want to call my father, though, she would never allow me to do this.

“Is there a signal scrambler?” I asked, recalling when Zeke had put it on his phone and then installed one on Jaimie’s for safe measure.

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