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TEN
Blaze
Once Dess left the apartment,we were all on edge.
I tracked her from the city’s security cameras, though with her disguise and her skill at stealth, I could only find her in brief glimpses because I knew exactly where she’d been going.
Julius lingered by his board of army figures, moving them around sporadically as if he had a full mission to plan. He did so with vicious swipes of his hand and a lethal intensity in his expression. I knew he was preparing for the possibility that Dess would be caught.
Garrison strode past me a few times as he paced around the house. He didn’t say anything to indicate he was worried, but the fact that he was so quiet at all instead of snarking away at us showed his uneasiness.
Talon shut himself inside the workout room. Every once in a while, we heard a particularly thunderous sound of his fist hitting the punching bag or the clank of metal weights returning to their racks.
Only when I told everyone that Dess was approaching the covert entrance to the building did they seem to calm down enough to get back to their normal lives. Garrison strode out of the kitchen and toward the roof, almost as if he’d been waiting for this confirmation before leaving the main room. Julius slid his figures back in place and left through the front door, heading down to retrieve her. Talon gave the punching bag a few more swings and then headed into the bathroom to shower.
I couldn’t peel my eyes away from the laptop screen until I saw Dess vanish near the entrance, approaching the spot where Julius would be waiting for her. It didn’t take long before she came striding through the door. She had a pensive air to her that made it hard to tell whether she’d found what she’d been seeking.
She looked at me the moment she entered the room, and the gray in her eyes seemed to lighten. She veered toward me immediately. Julius, coming in right behind her, looked her up and down as if double-checking that she’d returned in one piece before heading to the fridge to grab one of Steffie’s premade sandwiches.
Did he know what Dess had found already, or was she telling me first?
She sat down at the dining table kitty-corner to where I was sitting with my laptop. The guys—well, mostly Garrison—often hassled me about how little I used the workstation actually devoted to my work, but I focused better with the ability to move around as a whim took me.
“I didn’t turn up much, but there was one small thing that might lead us somewhere,” Dess said. “At least the trip wasn’t a total bust.”
“You can show me everything you saw there,” I told her. “There might be more significance to some item than is obvious at a glance.”
She shook her head. “It’s not that. There was nothing. Everything had been cleaned up and cleared out—I mean, the furniture was there, but the drawers and shelves were pretty much empty. There was no sign of the murders either. But someone was monitoring the place—there were new cameras outside and one inside.” She sucked her lower lip under her teeth in a gesture that sent a little flare of desire through me. “All I got was this.”
She brought up a photo on her phone and set it on the table for me to see. It was a symbol carved into a molding somewhere in the house—a teardrop shape with a line bisecting it at a diagonal. And maybe a tiny notch at the lower part of the line? It was hard to make out. But something about the design gave me a vague twinge of recognition.
Where had I seen that before?
“It was in the living room, and also on the bookcase that hid the secret doorway into my quarters in the house,” Dess said. “Maybe other places, but that’s all I found in the time I had. Do you have any idea what it could mean?”
She flipped to the photo of the bookcase with the symbol carved into the dark wood. Seeing it on that surface made something click in my head. I stared at it for a moment longer and then turned to her.
“It’s the same as your tattoo.”
Dess blinked at me. “Tattoo? What tattoo?”
I guessed it wasn’t surprising that she wouldn’t know. She hadn’t known about an awful lot of things her “household” had done to her, and the tattoo had been placed somewhere it’d be almost impossible for her to discover on her own.
“Come here,” I said, beckoning for her to stand. I walked her over to the full-length mirror near the front door and switched my own phone to selfie mode so it would act as a second reflection. “Lift your hair up from the back of your neck.”
Dess looked puzzled, but she did it. And there was the little black tattoo I’d remembered, marked into her skin at the base of her skull where her hair mostly concealed it. Carefully, I parted the strands to reveal the shape a little better, not even touching her skin, and held my phone so she could see the image that was reflected in the mirror.
Dess drew in a startled breath with a hiss. “What the hell?”
“We saw it when we were checking you for injuries after your crash,” I told her. “It’s hard to make out the details through your hair, but it looks incredibly similar to that carved symbol to me. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
Dess let her hair fall. Her eyes flashed. “They did this to me. The people from the household—whoever took me. They fucking marked me like I’m their property.”
My chest clenched at her anger—not because it bothered me, but because she was so justified in it. “You’re nobody’s property,” I reassured her firmly. “And you can get it removed. I’m sure there are services that could manage it, just shaving the hair there first.”
But in typical Dess fashion, she’d already moved on to the next part of the problem. She spun toward the table with my laptop. “The symbol has something to do with the people who ran the household. It could lead us to more of them.”
“Absolutely,” I said, glad to have something concrete to focus on that might help. “Send the photos to me, and I’ll get some image recognition searches running.”
