Chloe doesn’t strike me as the party type, which is why when I pull up to the house with a driveway full of cars, I’m surprised.
Maybe she’s on the hunt for her next victim.
I know her Bug is still at the station, so I don’t bother looking for it. If her goal of leaving it parked there is to ensure I think of her every time I see it, joke’s on her. I’m never not thinking about her.
I parallel park my truck between two other cars on the curb directly in front of the house, eyeing the people I can see through the front windows. None of them are her.
I eye every car littering the area, looking for one of the cars that I saw in her driveway when I left her house earlier. I was so blinded with tunnel vision—knowing there were witnesses that put what I’m assuming to be her mother’s vehicle at both crime scenes, as well as the fact that I needed to get within twenty feet of her to activate our Bluetooth connection—that I did not process the fact that there were cars in her driveway indicating there may have been other people in the house with her.
That’s a mistake I won’t make again.
Her friends—apart from me being mildly suspicious of them, as well—seem to be fairly docile. But the way I touched Chloe, hand around her throat and holding her hostage against the wall on her own property, that’s so far out of professional territory it’s laughable. The last thing I need is someone else in Chloe’s inner circle threatening to file charges against me. Or bringing to the attention of my captain that I indeed am not leaving Chloe alone, as I’ve weakly promised.
The truck in front of mine looks like the one that was in Chloe’s driveway this afternoon, so I return to my search through the windows, looking for any sign of someone fitting the description of Maeve or Stella, or that Stone guy who seems to have broken The Terror Trio’s barrier and infiltrated their man-hating group. I don’t see any of them, either.
I open up the app that Micah installed on my phone this afternoon, clicking the button I’m only assuming will open Chloe’s camera. Almost immediately, an unfamiliar male voice sounds from the speaker.
“Do you remember me from school?” he asks, his voice muffled. The screen is black, so I’m assuming her phone might be tucked away in a purse or pocket. “I sat right behind you in physics,” he presses.
Considering Chloe and I went to school together, it’s possible I know who this person is, too.
“Not really,” Chloe eventually responds, her words slurred.
She hums as I stare at the black screen until it suddenly lights up, and I’m staring at her face as she squints at the bright screen. The exterior of a house shows in her background, and I lift my head to the house in front of me, comparing the colors and details. When I turn my attention back to the phone, Chloe looks dazed, her eyes seemingly unable to focus on the screen.
Something vicious begins gnawing at the pit of my stomach.
It occurs to me I’ve never actually seen Chloe drunk before. Even the times at the bowling alley when I know she’s been drinking, she’s never seemed to have so much as a buzz—beyond the normal buzz of energy she constantly carries.
I keep the sound running in the background as I navigate to the camera feeds I have in her house, scrolling the bar back to the time I left. Maeve says they’re going to a party and then Stone and Stella leave with a promise to return and pick her up. Maeve paints the scene where Chloe and I found the deer, but throughout the whole recording, their voices are muffled by staticky music playing in the room. So much for hearing her conversations.
Chloe flits around her house in the hours after that, showering, dressing, doing her hair. At no point does she appear to be pre-gaming, and according to the GPS monitor on her phone, she’s only been at this party for an hour.
So how is she already so drunk?
I click back to Chloe’s camera. “What time is it?” she mumbles.
“Don’t worry about it,” the faceless man says, his hand coming into the shot to brush her hair behind her shoulder.
I’m moving across the lawn before I realize it, my feet burning a path in the grass as I continue past the front of the house to the side gate. Thedetails of the front and back of the house look the same, and since I don’t see Chloe and this mystery man sitting anywhere out front, I’m assuming they’re in the back.
I come around the corner so quickly, the man jumps when he sees me, eyes wide in surprise as if he’d been counting on having Chloe all to himself for the foreseeable future.
Chloe’s head wobbles as she slowly turns in my direction. It takes her a moment to recognize me, but when she does, her features light up, her lips turning up into a smile.
“Colin,” she whispers.
“Who the fuck are you?” the man growls as I cross the yard and pull Chloe up from where they’re seated at the edge of the pool.
“This is my friend,” Chloe sings, which almost makes me laugh, because we are not friends. “He’s a d—”
“Designated driver,” I interrupt.
“We were right in the middle of a conversation,” the man argues as I pull Chloe by her wrist toward the door at the back of the house.
“Conversation’s over.”
Our arms are stretched about as far as they can get as Chloe struggles to keep up with my pace. I don’t even know what I was planning to do once I got to this point, but I couldn’t ignore the little voice in my head that was telling me something was wrong, and Chloe was in trouble. Regardless of how I feel about her, no woman deserves to be taken advantage of. I couldn’t just sit by and let something happen to her.
