Something moved behind his eyes. Then he tilted his head slightly and inhaled slowly through his nose. Indy watched him do it and felt his stomach drop all the way to the floor.
“He’s here,” the stranger said with a deep growl. “Or he was. Recently.”
Indy kept his hands flat on the counter, his expression mildly puzzled. “I’ve had a few customers in this morning. Mrs. Park, a couple of walk-ins. I don’t know everyone’s name.”
The guy studied him for a long moment then walked toward the counter, moving closer like he was about to round it.
“You’re not allowed to do that!” Indy squeaked. “Customers stay on the customer side. It’s some kind of law.”
The stranger didn’t slow down.
He moved around the end of the counter with the unhurried ease of someone who had never in his life encountered an obstacle he considered worth acknowledging. Indy’s fox launched itself against the inside of his skin so hard he actually took a step backward.
“That is genuinely not allowed,” Indy said again, louder this time, because apparently volume was the strategy his brain had selected. “There are rules. There’s a counter. The counter is a boundary. Boundaries are important.”
The jackass passed the register and kept walking, heading toward the back of the shop, and Indy realized with a lurch of his stomach what the man was angling toward.
The office door.
“Hey!” Indy hurried around the counter, tempted to jump onto the goon’s back but stopped himself from getting pulverized. “Hey, you can't go back there. That’s a private area. That is extremely not open to the public. This is not a self-guided tour.”
The guy’s hand closed around the office door handle.
Indy was right behind him, feeling the wrongness, like walking into a cold pocket of air.
“I’m serious!” Indy’s voice squeaked even higher. “Whatever you’re looking for back there, you’re not going to find it. That room has flowers and a broken office chair and exactly four hundred rubber bands. I know, I’ve counted. There’s nothing interesting back there.”
The door swung open, and the guy stepped through.
Indy followed because he was either very brave or a goddamn moron, but he would fight Mr. Scary to defend his mate.
Except…Malik wasn’t there.
The room was empty.
Huh?
Indy glanced at the hanging bundles, the buckets of stems, the worktable with both coffee mugs still sitting on it. His gaze swung to where Malik had been not five minutes ago, and then he looked at the other corner, as well as the ceiling because his brain had run out of places to check.
His mate was gone.
The empty room made Indy’s stomach drop through the floor and keep going.
Malik been right here, and now he wasn’t. The other door led to the alley, but the door was closed. Indy had no way of knowing if his mate had used it.
The stranger moved through the room, nostrils flaring. He walked the perimeter, taking it in.
Indy stayed near the door, quietly having a meltdown.
The guy stopped at the worktable, gaze locking onto the mugs.
Fuck.
Indy watched him study the cups and felt something cold move through him.
Then a sound came from deep in the stranger’s body, from somewhere sounds weren’t supposed to reach. It was quiet, and it was brief, and it was the single most wrong thing Indy had ever heard with his ears. Every instinct he had pointed in the same direction, away, fast, now, making him gripped the doorframe with one hand.
The stranger pivoted, his malevolent gaze moving over Indy, the cold he’d felt inside returning.
