Because of Ezio, or because Pandora blew us off?
Either way, Blaze drops his messenger bag on the couch and stalks to the kitchen. “You want a drink?” he calls out.
Normally, I’d say no, but it’s been a long day.
It’s been a long month, honestly, and if there was ever a time to soothe my nerves, this would be it.
“Yeah,” I reply.
I set my backpack on the floor next to the couch and sit down.
We obviously knew Ezio had been sniffing around, but I hadn’t expected him to go for Pandora.
At least he’d done it in public.
I look at my phone, half-expecting a text from her, but there’s nothing.
Blaze returns from the kitchen, holding two bottles of beer.
He hands me one, and I nod. “Thanks.”
Fuck, I missed this.
“So this went from bad to worse,” I say after a pause, watching Blaze.
“Yeah.” Blaze presses the cold bottle against his temple. “Fuck. Bad enough he was looking into her. Now Ezio is on Pandora’s radar. There’s no way we could explain away Ezio’s disappearance.”
I exhale slowly, looking down at the bottle in my hands instead of at Blaze. “Do you think he had anything to do with Rachel?” I ask. “Not that she’s going to care. He’s Kappa Alpha. She’ll blame him anyway.”
“He didn’t pick her. That wasn’t his job. That was… well, Zayden and Logan last year. You remember him?” Blaze lets out a small laugh. “Shit, I should reach out to him and ask if he knows Rachel.”
I do remember Logan. He’d been one of the senior brothers, and something about him had rubbed me the wrong way. I couldn’t place it though, because he wasn’t openly hostile. He was just boisterous, and overly friendly. He was also really popular with women.
I want to say I must have sensed he was involved in all this stuff, and that’s why I didn’t like him, but if I’m honest… I resented how much time Blaze spent with him. Secret frat meetings and party planning I was never involved in.
Now I understand why, and I’m uncomfortably grateful about being left in the dark.
The sex clubs themselves don’t bother me. The women are there of their own volition.
At least, I’d thought they were. Some of them might not be.
Now that I know the terrible secret, I look at the whole business with new eyes. I haven’t been able to bring myself to ask Blaze how many of the missing girls are dead, and it’s a level of cowardice I hate associating with myself.
“What good is that going to do now?” I point out. “It’ll just put one more person on Pandora’s radar.”
“If we help her find out what happened to Rachel, maybe she’ll back down,” Blaze suggests. Two seconds later, he sighs loudly. “Okay, fine. I know, that’s fucking unrealistic.”
“There’s no way she’s going to be like… ‘Okay, I know who killed my best friend, so now I’m going to drop it,’” I say. “So the question is, what the fuck do we do when she finds out?” I eye Blaze. “Because she is going to find out, whether you tell her or not.”
The front door opens, and River trudges in. He takes one look at us, then says, “I take it those aren’t celebratory beers.”
I snort. “No. No, they aren’t. Get one and join us, I guess.” I glance at Blaze. “Might as well tell him, too.”
Blaze raises his beer in River’s direction. “Yeah. You’re not officially part of Kappa Alpha yet, but I think I can trust you not to do anything that would fuck things over. Seeing as how it would also blow back on Pandora.”
River sets his bag down by the door. “Great.” His voice makes it clear that it is not, in fact, “great.”
Nothing about this situation is “great.”
