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CHAPTERTHREE
Madelyn
Icouldn’t peel my eyes away from Logan’s face. All the tightly suppressed emotions I’d worked so hard to avoid rushed to the surface with a vengeance. My hands had clenched at my sides, my heart thumping twice as fast as before, bracing warily against whatever move my stepbrother might make next.
But it wasn’t just alarm clanging through my body. No, there was even more anger than I’d known I was holding in. At him over the way he’d ditched me, at my bad luck that I’d come face to face with him with zero preparation.
Logan’s brawny body had gone as rigid as mine. He stared back at me, his mouth forming a flat line, his golden eyes turned hard as steel. Oh, he wasn’t happy to see me either? Well, he’d just have to deal with it.
I managed to wrench my gaze away to take in the rest of the room—and the two other guys who were witnessing our stare-down. The moment I caught sight of them, everything made a little more sense.
The guy perched on the edge of the small room’s central table was Slade Galvezo, Logan’s best friend. When I caught his eye, he grinned with a flash of his even teeth. His wavy, dark brown locks tumbled a little farther below his ears than they had in high school, and his body filled out his button-up and jeans to more impressive effect than I remembered.
I’d seen him in the halls of our high school, he’d still looked like a boy. Now he was all man. But his playful dark brown eyes and bronze skin remained the same.
He gave me a beckoning wave, hopping down from the table. “Come on in. You don’t need to be shy.”
He landed with perfect balance, but his pantleg shifted on the descent, drawing my gaze to his bright red sneakers—and the vibrant blue prosthetic that briefly showed above one.
Slade could handle himself on his feet so easily you’d never know it was there, but he’d never made any effort to conceal the prosthetic, often getting a kick out of telling other students stories about how he’d lost the bottom half of his leg. I seemed to recall “hacked off by a woodchipper,” “chopped in two by an ax murderer,” and “eaten by a tiger when I fell into the enclosure at the zoo” being among the assortment. I had no idea what the true story was.
At Slade’s beckons, I moved forward automatically, and Logan backed up just enough to let me in. Stepping through the doorway, I glanced away toward the other major pieces of furniture in the room: a long, narrow desk with a computer on it, with a matching wooden filing cabinet next to it. The third guy was sitting at that desk, peering at me much more pensively than Slade had, though his eerily bright green eyes flicked up and to the side every second or two rather than holding my gaze.
That was how Dexter Wright, Logan’s other closest high school friend, had been for all of the few years I’d known him. Eye contact was not his forte.Hestill looked almost exactly like the awkward, slightly gawky boy he’d been when he graduated high school, his curly black hair a jumble atop his pale, narrow face, although the lines of his features had sharpened with maturity.
A few more chairs were strewn haphazardly around the cramped room, and closed file folders scattered the table behind Slade. Books were piled seemingly at random on the small bookcase across from the desk. A corkboard hung on the back wall, the only thing in the space that was free from clutter… because there was nothing currently pinned to it.
Easing to the side so I wasn’t facing Logan quite so directly, I pulled down my hood. Slade blinked and then chuckled. “Madelyn! Long time no see.”
He must not have recognized me before with my face shadowed by the hood. We’d never exactly been close, since he was a year ahead of me and my close friend circle hadn’t overlapped much with Logan’s.
Even though his laugh had been warm, I had the impression that he’d flinched a smidge away from me before settling back into his casual pose. That was weird. Had Logan told him something about me—something off-putting?
My head jerked back around so I could focus on my stepbrother again. Logan was watching me. His stance had relaxed a little, but his eyes were still hard and guarded.
“What are you doing here, Madelyn?” he asked curtly.
I gritted my teeth at his tone. Part of me wanted to launch into a tirade about how he’d treated me for the past two years, but I didn’t really want to air our dirty laundry in front of his friends if they didn’t already know. Anyway, I’d come here for a different reason, and that problem hadn’t gone away just because I’d been reminded of a different one.
“This is where people come to get help with crimes on campus, right?” I said. “You’re the guys who call yourself ‘the Vigil’?”
“You obviously already know that, or you wouldn’t have come looking,” Logan replied with a thread of snark in his tone. He spoke slowly, almost patronizingly, and my jaw clenched tighter. If he was trying to make me feel as unwelcome as possible, he was doing a bang-up job of it.
It wasn’t really surprising that these guys were playing detective around campus, now that I’d gotten over my initial shock. Logan had at least used to be something of a crusader, and he and his friends had been at the center of a lot of the social activity at our high school. He knew how to make connections. And he’d always liked seeking out a challenge.
I willed my own voice to stay even. “Well, good. I just found out that my car’s been stolen off one of the residence lots. My roommate said the Vigil might be able to help track it down.”
Logan raised his eyebrows in a way that made me want to slam my fist down his throat, and I wasn’t normally a particularly aggressive person. “Did you park it somewhere new, maybe?” he asked, all nonchalance now. “It could be you just misplaced it.”
I would not scream. I would not yell in his face. I would be a picture of total calm in the face of his extreme jerkishness.
“No, Logan, I didn’tmisplacemy car,” I said. “I always park it in the same lot, and it’s not there at all, and I can see exactly where itwasbefore some prick stole it.”
He shrugged. “Well, we’ve got a lot on our plates right now. You should find out what the police can do for you.”
Slade’s head twitched toward Logan at that comment as if it’d startled him. Dexter’s brow knit for a second. Turning down people wasnotwhat made these guys so popular around the campus, and Logan was just going to send me away, knowing that I’d probably never receive justice without their help?
Dexter must have felt the need to support his friend, no matter what he thought of his answer. He spoke up, his voice quiet. “The city police are occasionally on the ball. It’s worth trying them.”
