Page 143 of Ricochet

“Kids tell the reporter it eats people.” He shuddered in his chair. “Locals say when they loom off shore, people go missing. But the reporter could never find any shipping vessels that shouldn’t be where they were.”

“Missing, how?” she whispered.

He lifted a suit-covered shoulder. “My family is from a place where folklore is important, and as crazy as it sounds,it always was founded on a grain of truth.”

“Where’s your family from?”

“Syria.” He shook his head. “The news is ugly. I don’t know why I even turn it on.” He forced the professional smile back into place. “You can tell. I let it affect me more than I should.”

Adelia placed the letter in between them and stared at it. “Why does a reporter think it’s news now, if it’s been folklore?”

“A fewweeks ago, a few women and children came home.”

Her eyebrows arched. “That’s good though.”

“They talked about mysterious men who saved them in the middle of the night, who brought them back and left like a whisper, firing the folklore to greater heights.”

“Why?”

“No one saw them come or go. The missing came home again.” His eyes dulled. “Or, some. Not all.”

“Oh.” She bit her lip.

“Podcastsaren’t a reliable source of news to some.”

“To you?”

“I listen to it.”

“Why were you listening tonight?”

He shrugged. “It was on my mind.” He nodded toward the escalators in the main lobby. “The event your boyfriend’s attending, perhaps.”

“Yeah, it’s been on my mind too.” Adelia bit the side of her thumb. The mainstream press needed to hear what Gloria had to say more than Colin needed tohear her profess her love to him. “I have to go talk to someone, but will you make sure this goes to a man named Colin Cole?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He blinked and had once again become the concierge who intimidated her, but this time, Adelia knew he was a normal person like her too.

“Are there always reporters here?”

He nodded. “The Stanley sees a great deal of events and celebrity.”

“Do you knowthe reporters who come and go?”

The corners of his eyes flickered. “For the most part, I recognize people I see on a regular basis.”

“Do you know…” She bit her lip. What did she want to know? Who she could trust? Who would be truthful? Were those the same thing?

“There’s a guy that, if I had something I wanted to talk about, I’d talk to him,” the concierge volunteered. “If my podcaster wasn’tavailable.”

They laughed uneasily, both knowing that she had kept something wasn’t shared.

Three broad men in dark jeans and leather motorcycle cuts with Mayhem emblems on the back strode into the hotel lobby and stood out like hulking thugs in a sea of elegance. Adelia’s thoughts stopped, and if she’d been saying anything, she’d forgotten.

They’d found her. She wanted to blame Gloria, ormaybe that stunt she’d pulled upstairs was enough to alert all the chapters on the east coast of her location, but either way, they’d arrived, and she didn’t recognize them.

“Everything okay, ma’am?” the concierge asked.

She stole her attention back to him. “Yes, absolutely.”

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