“Looks pretty skulky.”
Fletcher barely swallowed an irritated groan. His dickwaddedness at least spurred her back into motion. She eased the bedroom doors apart, millimeters at first and then all at once.
Because Dyer wasn’t there.
On the far side of the room, patio doors had been strewn wide open, their gauzy curtains floating in the breeze. The savanna sprawled beyond a bricked seating area, and beyond that, a boundless sea.
Pillows had been torn off the four-poster bed, the sheets strewn across the floor and stained red. Russet puddled on the hardwood. A few drops at a time. A trail, maybe, but Fletcher was no forensic scientist. She couldn’t even look when she got her blood drawn.
A gasp caught halfway up her throat. “Dyer? Are you okay?”
“Dad?” Waylon asked, hovering behind her. The word sounded unnatural in his mouth, rusted over with disuse.
The room was empty.
Waylon pushed past Fletcher, practically shoving her out of the way. Tension rippled through the broad expanse of his chest. His mouth was fixed in a pinched line, indecipherable. “What happened?”
On the wall next to Dyer’s bed hung an electronic panel—the kind that ordinarily controlled things like motorized curtains and thermostat temperatures. A little red light blinked. And blinked. And blinked.
Fletcher and Waylon gravitated toward it.
Fence disabled. Fence disabled. Fence disabled.
“Look,” Waylon said, shifting.
Dyer’s carved cane leaned against a bedside table. Hooked beneath its handle was a tiny silver drive and an envelope stamped with the company letterhead. Dyer’s slanted penmanship crooked across the lines:To my next of kin.
“You don’t think…” Fletcher started, but a roar snapped their attention outside.
The lions Fletcher had seen from her window were still working on this morning’s kill. Only now, Fletcher noticed the trail of deep maroon marring the soil, the trampled way the grasses bent. Her knees gave out, and she sagged against the doorframe.
The pride male stretched his haunches before digging back into the meat. It stripped flesh from bone, blood staining its maw. Muscle tissue dripped from its chin. An entrail, an esophagus. Bite after gruesome bite.
Fletcher’s heart seized. Her stomach bottomed out.
She wanted to look away but couldn’t.
Because the lion reared with a growl, standing, and clamped in its mouth was a shock of silver hair belonging to the CEO’s mauled head.
6
This was the most fucked-up all-hands Fletcher had ever attended.
Her screaming had scared off the pride, the last of them dragging Dyer’s bloodied leg through the dirt. But all the horrified screeching had also drawn the rest of her coworkers into the suite. Because what they’d been really missing was a crowd.
Shock waves rocked through the rest of the employees, each in various stages of the grief cycle—Molly had a trembling hand pressed to her lips, Deepti sniffled into the pocket square she’d stolen out of Raul’s suit jacket, and Melv started pacing, scrubbing the back of his sunburned neck.
“Someone call for help,” Fletcher said, knowing full well thatsomeonewould beher. It was always her. But, for once, her phone was upstairs charging on the nightstand. A version of herself whose boss hadn’t been eaten by lions might have been thankful for the work-life separation.
A familiar chime sounded next to Fletcher, and she dragged her eyes toward Sheila. The intern’s phone was glued to the end of hernose. A rainfall of confetti flashed on-screen as Sheila beat another level in her game, and Fletcher batted the phone away.
“Seriously, Sheila?”
“What?” A hot-pink chewing gum bubble pressed through her lips, and she bit it until it popped. “I can’t watch Netflix because my phone’s being so sketchy right now.”
Fletcher stripped the iPhone from Sheila’s sparkly gel-manicured grip. She had Carlotta’s direct line memorized. Her hands shook as she thumbed it in, but when she pressed the green call button, the phone didn’t even ring.
The bars at the top vanished.
