Page 104 of Own

SOMEWHERE IN IDAHO

The road was long, flat, and soaked in gold. Sunset stretched everything out—shadows, silence, the distance ahead of us. Alphabet had one hand on the wheel, the other tapping out a rhythm on the console.

We’d indulged in a hotel after our flight landed. Showers. Food. And twenty-four hours of rest. It would be easier on his leg and Goblin definitely needed the break. AB was handling me and I let him.

As much as I’d tried, sleeping on the plane had proved impossible. It wasn’t much better at the hotel. I kept going over everything in my head. I kept replaying the last several days on a loop that I couldn’t turn off.

Bones explained we wouldn’t hear from them until their missions were done. There were reasons for the choices they made. Iunderstoodthat. I even respected it.

But it was so much harder in practice. If Alphabet wasn’t right here, I might have lost my mind. We weren’t talking, but it wasn’t a foreboding silence. It was almost comfortable, or it would be if my thoughts weren’t so jumbled.

“Gracie…”

“What if I approached Amorette’s boss?” The idea just popped right out of me. The moment I said it, though, was the moment I realized how much I had been thinking about it.

“What?” He shot me a sideways look. “See herboss?The attorney dick who is pretending she quit?”

“Yes. Him. I go as Amorette, ambush him.” The more I thought about this, the more I liked.

“I am so going to regret asking this,” Alphabet said, his attention on the road ahead of us. “Why?”

“Well, I could say ‘why not,’ particularly when we know something is going on there. No one has reported us missing, no one is looking, and they are acting like she quit.” Play devil’s advocate, I told myself. Logic and reason over emotion. Except…

I twisted in the passenger seat, so I could face him. “I would like to preface everything with, I am going a little crazy right now because it’s killing me that we found so much but nothing about Amorette. Does that make sense?”

His expression gentled as he slanted me a look, then he reached over to take my hand. “Yes, that makes sense and you don’t have to explain wanting to find your sister.”

Squeezing his fingers, I blew out a breath. “Thank you. Okay, so… I keep replaying everything that happened in France the past few weeks. Everything that happened before. The phone calls, the dismissals. What happened to Eleanor. But more than that—I called Rachel to ask her for a favor and she didn’t even react like something had happened.”

“Your friend the photographer.”

“Yes, my friend with the apartment in Paris. I reached out, asked for that favor and she was all in. But not once did she ask me about Eleanor or being missing or anything. She didn’t even seem to know there had been a problem.”

“Which is a pretty key reason, I know there is some conspiracy behind your disappearances. That we found so much about you in France and nothing about her makes it even more suspect.” His tone had turned grim, but his grip remained comforting. A lifeline.

“Yes. That takes us back to Amorette’s law firm. My manager was killed. Photographers I worked with have been killed. Ihaven't really dug in to see if any more people connected with me—people who would notice if I was missing and would say something—have been killed.”

Eleanor would have. Without one iota of doubt, she’d have hunted me down herself if only to verify that I was the one who walked away. Not someone else.

Then she might have reamed me a new asshole.

God, I missed her.

I swallowed the lump of tears trying to form. “But you didn’t turn up anyone missing at Amorette’s firm. You didn’t say a partner died or a secretary or a law clerk.”

Alphabet frowned.

“When we were talking to Reznik, he mentioned Amorette. Not by name, but by profession.”

“I remember,” Alphabet said, stroking his thumb against the side of my hand. “In theory, researchingyouwould have turned up information on her.”

“Yes.”

“So, just Reznikknowingabout her doesn’t mean he knew she was taken. It also doesn’t let him off the hook.” What Alphabet didn’t add was Reznik admitting nothing about Amorette. Even when they broke him and he sobbed out answers in a wretched voice. She never came up. Hedidn’tknow. “That said, in their efforts to clean up your disappearance, they have eliminated people.”

“So why haven’t they eliminated her boss? Because you’d think by virtue of having to cover her cases, they’d be pissed that she just disappeared. Not to mention the story that she just randomly quit and left. That’snotAm. You’d have to be a complete and utter moron with your head so far up your own ass you could tickle your own tonsils to miss how committed she is to her clients.”

Isdammit. Is.

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