Page 50 of Pretty Vile

Unless my punishment for not taking her seriously, for not listening to her concerns when she tried to tell me something was wrong, is to live the rest of my days with this aching loss eating away at me.

“Son, is there anyone I can call?” a paramedic asks, kneeling in front of me.

I shake my head, scraping out ano.

My throat is raw, my voice hoarse. I vaguely recall screaming. Screaming and screaming until the sound of sirens eventually drowned out the racket. Or perhaps I lost my voice at some point. I don’t remember.

All I remember is how her honeyed eyes stared up at me, lacking their usual warmth and charm. None of the vibrancy that made herher.I couldn’t take my eyes off her, but she wasn’t looking at me. She couldn’t see me.

Because she was already gone.

* * *

Leaning against my desk,I watch my team hard at work. There are eight of us. All men and women I’ve worked with numerous times before. Some of them have done stints in the military, like myself, while others are simply excellent with computers or finding information. The one thing they all have in common is that I trust each and every one of them implicitly.

They've all been pulled away from whatever case they were working on to focus on Emilia. Even I’m not technically back at work. I’ve been doing paperwork and consulting on cases, but the majority of my time is spent here, in this room with these people, trying to find out everything we can about Mel and keep Emilia safe. I’ve already told Hawk I won’t be taking on any other cases or going out in the field until Mel has been caught.

He easily agreed. In fact, I’m pretty sure he was planning to tell me exactly that if I hadn’t beat him to the punch.

“Give me an update,” I order my team, crossing my arms over my chest and staring around the room. After our failure yesterday, I’m desperate for some progress. I see the strain all of this is taking on Emilia, and it infuriates me that I can’t seem to help. At every turn, I’m outsmarted by this woman, and it’s pissing me the fuck off.

"I can confirm that Mel isn’t her real name," Connie, my tech girl, says. "Her application to Halston was forged. I’m not even sure if she actually applied or hacked their system and just gave herself a place."

I frown, taking in what she’s saying. That information raises new possibilities, such as: did Mel know Emilia before she started at Halston? Or did she just so happen to be going there and end up as Emilia’s roommate? Was Emilia simply unlucky enough to get the roommate from hell?

“Any leads on her real identity?”

Connie shakes her head. “Not yet.”

“Okay, keep looking. Let me know if you find anything.”

She nods and gets back to work.

“Does anyone have eyes on Mel now? Do we know where in the city she’s staying?”

My question is met by murmured no’s.

"Most of the time, she’s a ghost. However, we have seen her in a couple of cameras," says John, the man in charge of tracking Mel. He pulls up several screenshots from security footage. All of them show Mel. I recognize one from one of the cafes on Ridgeway’s campus. Another is from a traffic cam near the restaurant Hadley and Emilia went to on Saturday.

“She seems to know where the cameras are as we only get partial views of her face, and in most of them”—he pulls up the traffic cam of the street outside the restaurant—“she keeps her face down, so it’s not caught on camera. However, you see here in this one”—he flicks to the tape of the screenshot—“she lifts her head.”

He plays the moment where Mel lifts her head to stare brazenly into the camera on repeat, and on the third time, it clicks with me. Furious, I slam my hand down on the table. “She’s taunting us,” I growl. “She knows we’re watching.”

I’m just not sure what that means.

She’ll know by now that Hawk owns Nocturnal Enterprises and that I work here, but does she know about yesterday’s stakeout? If she knows we’re watching her, does she suspect Emilia is involved, too? Or does she presume Hawk and I are acting on our own initiative because Emilia has distanced herself from us? She deluded herself into thinking Emilia was only staying close to us for protection, but did she really believe that we’d just turn our backs if she pushed us away? Hawk, perhaps, given his and Emilia’s complicated past, but me? I have to give Mel more credit than that. She might have a blind spot where Emilia is concerned—thank fuck—but she’s not stupid enough to think I’d wash my hands of her.

As possibilities swim around in my head, I leave my team to it and head to my office, intent on distracting myself by making some headway with the ever-growing pile of paperwork on my desk.

The words are all blurring together on the pages, when a knock interrupts me, and I call out, “Come in!”

“Afternoon,” the man who distributes our mail greets. Walking into the office, he sets a small stack of white envelopes on my desk.

I thank him without taking my eyes off the case report open in front of me.

“One sec, there’s one more.”

He hurries back to his mail cart and grabs a larger, thicker, brown envelope before setting it on my desk and wishing me a good day as he strides out the door, closing it behind him.

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