Page 149 of No Good Fight

The cab is empty.

The spare key is sitting in the cup holder.

I stare at it through the open door.

“She left the key,” Carter says quietly.

Of course she did.

She didn’t want us wasting time searching for it if we found the truck.

There’s nothing else dramatic inside. No bloody message. No note telling me goodbye. Alex doesn’t need one because she already left everything that matters at the house.

A continuous line leading straight from the bed we shared to the building in front of me.

She planned for us to reconstruct this.

Remy closes the truck door carefully and looks toward the tree line. “We know she got here. We don’t know whether she walked straight in or he met her outside.”

I look at the wet ground beside the driver’s door.

The rain has blurred almost everything, but there are marks in the mud where someone stepped away from the truck toward the building. Small tread, then a larger disturbance crossing over it.

Logan crouches without touching anything.

“One set could be hers.”

“And the other?” I ask.

“Could be Preston. Or it could be older. We can't guess, and there’s no room for making assumptions right now.”

My phone vibrates again.

Casey: Utility door’s open.

A second message comes before I can answer.

Casey: Fresh scrape on latch. Josh found shoe print inside threshold.

Remy reads over my shoulder.

The five of us have been careful for twenty minutes because Alex needs us careful.

Now we know she’s inside.

Logan rises and turns toward the building. Carter draws his weapon but keeps it down at his side. Remy checks the distance between us and the south wall, then looks at me.

“This is where you listen.”

I nod because I’m not a fucking idiot. I can do a lot of things, and I’m handy with a weapon, but I’m not a trained expert like these men.

My hands are steady now.

That scares me in a completely different way, because I know this feeling. I know what happens when fear gets so large my body stops wasting energy showing it. Fire does this to me. Collapsing buildings do it. People trapped behind doors do it.

Alex does it better than anything ever has.

We move into the trees toward Casey and Josh, keeping the maintenance building between us and the road. I can see the south wall now, the dark utility entrance cracked open beneath a rusted metal awning. Casey is crouched near the corner with Josh beside him, both of them watching the doorway.