Page 11 of Darkness of Mine
“What’s he doing?” Jennifer asks, eyeing Jude.
River holds up a finger. “Give him a moment.”
Jude paces over to the fire exit corridor. He looks up at the security camera facing out into the arcade, positions himself behind it, then turns to face us. His hand disappears inside his pockets, coming back out with a piece of paper he folds into a small rectangle. He flicks his wrist, throwing the paper like a frisbee. It flies through the air before landing on the dance platform, skidding to a stop on top of the tiles.
I look back at Jude, my gaze catching on the fire exit sign above his head and the door at the end of the corridor. “He didn’t take her out the front.” I turn to Captain Roarke. “I need access to the security cameras. Now.”
Jennifer steps forward. “But there was a witness that saw them leaving.”
River shakes his head. “There would have been dozens of kids coming and going with adults and witnesses are unreliable.”
I give River a nod and follow Captain Roarke through to the security office at the front of the arcade. One of the local PD’s tech guys is fast-forwarding through the footage from the entrance cameras, but he moves aside when Roarke tells him to. I take his seat and fiddle with the controls to switch cameras to the one in front of the fire exit.
The camera is positioned too far forward to show the corridor itself, but it’s angled low enough to capture anyone entering the corridor. I rewind through the footage, back to the time Harley disappeared. A flash of gold crosses the screen, and I hit play.
Knots twists inside my stomach. I don’t need to get confirmation that the girl on screen is Harley, even through the crappy security camera I can see that she’s the spitting image of a young Freya. My chest aches as the footage plays out.
Harley picks something up off the floor. She frowns at someone off screen then steps into the corridor and out of sight of the camera. I run the footage forward, but she doesn’t come back out. No one does. “The fire exit,” I mutter.
The tech guy shakes his head. “Security said the fire doors are alarmed.”
“Did you check?” I spin to face him. “Because unless they’re still in that corridor, they left through the fire exit.”
Captain Roarke curses but I’m already on my feet, striding back into the arcade and down the corridor. Jude’s beat me to it though. He pushes the door open with a gloved hand. Nothing. No alarm.
I follow him out the fire exit into a maintenance yard. There’s a delivery entrance right in front of us that leads straight out onto the road. I look around for cameras but the only one in sight is above the fire exit and it’s been knocked off kilter, staring straight up at the sky. This is bad. Really, really bad.
Jude looks over at me. “He’d have been gone before they put the roadblocks up.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Two hours is one hell of a head start.”
I push my glasses up with my fingers, my temples aching. “I’m going to get my laptop, see if can pick them up on the traffic cams.”
Jude shakes his head. “He’ll have been careful. You won’t be able to track them.”
I glare at him, hating this new pessimistic Jude with every bone in my body. I know my chances of being able to track them are slim, but I have to try.
I may have failed at finding Freya and Millie, but I won’t fail again. I can’t, because if we don’t save Harley, Freya will never forgive us.
6
ELI
It’s past midnight and the mood is fucking dire by the time we get home. We’re no closer to finding Harley but there’s nothing more we can do tonight. Finding people seems to be our fucking Achilles heel lately.
We stayed in Danville for the first week after Freya ran, trying to track her while also harboring fucking futile hope that she’d come back. When she didn’t, we returned to Virginia and it’s like living in a ghost house without her here.
I don’t know how we used to function before Freya but we sure as hell don’t know how to now. Oz, Jude, and I sink down onto the couches around the coffee table, mulling in the silence. The atmosphere was tense enough before another fucking kid was taken. Now it’s borderline macabre.
River closes the front door and comes into the living room. He takes one look at us and shakes his head. “Enough of this. You’re acting like she’s already dead. If Zach sticks to the same timeline as with Millie, then we have three weeks to find Harley. We can do that.” River’s confidence falls flat among us.
Jude lies back on the couch and throws a ball up towards the ceiling. “We didn’t manage to last time.”
The reminder sits heavy in my gut but River brandishes a piece of paper between two fingers. “Last time, we didn’t have Freya.”
Oz and Jude sit up straight, and I stand, crossing the room to meet River as he heads to the kitchen island. “You found her?” A spark of something I thought died weeks ago flickers in my chest.
