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“Indeed I do,” he said.
I didn’t want to let him go just yet. He’d be more likely to stay in place if I kept him talking. There was no way he could know that we were descending on him right now.
“If I call you again, will you pick up?” I asked. “Or will you be busy with your government business?”
“I suppose that depends on when you call. I’m afraid there’s nothing else I can tell you right now.”
We’d almost reached the marker on the map. “Wait!” I said. “I need to know—is it just my father you’re worried about, or the rest of the family too?”
Julius pulled over to the curb outside what looked like a normal two-story house, a little shabby with pale yellow paint that was flaking off the bricks, but nothing horribly rundown. He jerked his head toward it.
I slipped out of the car, not even shutting the door so I wouldn’t make much noise, and darted around to the back door. There were no signs of occupation, no vehicles in the driveway, no lights gleaming through the windows under the overcast sky.
“It’s difficult to say without delving in more,” the Hunter said. “But for now I’d be wary of all of them.”
He was just a bucket of joy, this guy, wasn’t he? I whipped out my lockpicks and had the back door open in a matter of seconds. After I’d eased it open, I padded silently through the first-floor hallway, confirming there was no one in those rooms before heading up the stairs.
“Even my brother?” I prodded, letting skepticism color my voice. “The kid’s only eighteen.”
“I’ve met killers who were twelve,” the Hunter said. “Don’t put much stock in age as an indicator of innocence.”
The idea of my grumbly teenage brother being on the same level as a killer—a killer like I was—nearly made me snort. I swallowed the sound and darted along the upper hall to the room at the front of the house. The door was ajar.
I didn’t bother to say anything else into the phone. I sprang into the room—
And found nothing but a vacant chair with a folded paper sitting on it.
A low chuckle reverberated from the phone as I picked up the note. Nice try, it said in neat letters.
Amusement colored the Hunter’s voice. “It seems you’re good at this, Miss Malik, but you need to be ready in case someone turns out to be even better.”
Then the line went dead.
My fingers dug into the paper, creasing it, as I lowered the phone. “What happened?” Blaze asked through the headset, but I didn’t know what to tell him. The Hunter’s last words were still whirling through my mind.
He’d been here. Obviously he had—who else would have left this note? But somehow he’d either faked his signal or managed to get out of here just before I’d arrived without any of us noticing.
And now he knew that Damien Malik’s recently rediscovered daughter was more than just a restaurant hostess with a fraught past—that I had the skills to track a man like him down.
A chill tickled over my skin. Just how much about myself had I inadvertently revealed to this man with his tricks and his warnings? About the real me, not Rachel Malik?
