Page 189
“I know—”
“No.” His hand slam the table top. “I knew. But you two needed a goddamn forensic report.”
Elias closes his eyes for a moment before looking back at him. “Jace.”
“Don’t ‘Jace’ me. She stood in Nate’s office and asked both of you to believe her and you acted like cold assholes.”
“Enough.” The word comes out harder than I intend, and Jace rounds on me.
“Enough?” he challenges. “Why? Because it hurts? I asked you, Nate, begged you to stop for one second and just listen to her. I told you she wouldn’t do this. And you—” He jabs a finger at me. “Fuck!”
“Jace.” Elias’s tone cuts through the anger. “This isn’t helping.”
“Nothing’s helping!” Jace’s voice cracks, the anger giving way to something rawer beneath. “She’s gone. She thinks we betrayed her. We finally have proof she was innocent, and it’s fucking worthless now.”
Neither of us speaks, and I look down at Sloane’s name buried in the technical report.
No authorized user involvement detected.
Five words. That is all it took to clear her. Five words that arrived after I called her some woman. After she stood in front of me and begged me to choose her over my own fear, and I couldn’t.
I chose wrong.
Elias scrolls farther down the report. “There’s more.”
I force myself to look up.
“Sergio looked over the surveillance photos from the private investigator's report and found something interesting.”
Elias opens the collage of pictures but this time they're zoomed in. In every corner is a black car, and it's not one of ours, judging by the license plate. And in the very last one the back window is lowered and a camera lens is sticking out.
Jace’s expression darkens. “So, someone has been watching her.”
“Yes. Which means we need to find her.”
The ride to Trey’s apartment takes twenty-three minutes, but every red light feels like a judgment. Every street we pass is another second wasted.
Jace spends most of it trying to call and text her as if persistence might eventually make her unblock him. Elias drives with both hands locked around the wheel, his expression unreadable behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses.
I sit in the passenger seat with the report open on my phone.
By the time we pull into the garage beneath Trey’s building, the proof has been forwarded to my personal email, Sloane’s work account, and the address she used when she applied to SOLAÉ.
The elevator ride is worse; trapped in the small space, the silence feels like a physical weight pressing down on me.
Jace finally shoves his phone into his pocket. “Trey’s going to tell us to fuck off.”
“He’d be justified,” Elias says.
“That doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it.”
Trey answers on the third knock. He looks like he hasn't slept either. He's wearing gray sweatpants and a faded band T-shirt, with a crease from his pillow still pressed into his cheek. There’s no humor in his face when he sees us.
“Nope.”
Jace takes a step forward before he can close the door in our faces. “Trey, please.”
“Boy get the fuck away from my door before I give y'all the ass whoopins y'all deserve.”
