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I’m not sure what I’d expected to find in her home? Some sign that she was still here, or at least had been? A scrap of paper with one of our numbers on it? Something that would point us in the right direction? Anything at all would have been helpful at this point.
My gaze fell onto a single framed photo sitting on a shelf by itself against the wall. “What is this?” I asked Caden as I picked it up for a closer look. It was just one shot of Sera with what I assumed was her grandmother standing side by side in front of a lilac bush, both wearing gardening gloves and holding up bouquets of flowers.
Caden walked over to me and lifted it from my hands, his expression thoughtful as he looked at it over his shoulder while he walked back over to the door leading out into the hall again. “It looks like Sera and her grandmother gardening together,” Caden said. “I think they do it every year for Ms. Dara’s birthday or something? They call it Dara Day or some such thing?”
“How do you even know that?” I asked, suddenly a smidge jealous that the demon knew something about Sera that I didn’t.
Caden winked at me. “Pillow talk, babe. Never a better time to draw someone out.”
“You’re incorrigible, if predictable.” I sighed. “I’m not seeing any recent signs Sera has been here. Do you?”
He shook his head. “We should head out and call the guys.”
We were almost out the door when we heard a key in the lock. Caden and I shared a panicked glance, then we moved on silent feet to the balcony outside Sera’s bedroom. Caden closed the drapes behind us and then slid the glass door almost all the way closed.
I held my breath, straining my ears to hear what was being said inside the apartment.
“Another day, another wellness check. She’s still not here,” a female voice said.
“You didn’t expect otherwise, did you?” a male asked.
“No. She’s been gone long enough, I’m beginning to worry she’ll never show up.”
“Don’t say that to the boss lady,” the guy replied.
“I’m not the slow one, that’s you,” she snipped back, and her partner chuckled in response, but didn’t argue. “We should still keep looking around. I don’t want to miss anything by being overly hasty.”
The door to the bedroom opened, and I heard footsteps coming in our direction. Caden and I both tensed, ready to make a run for it if need be. But then there was a loud crash, and the footsteps halted.
“What was that?” The female voice asked sharply.
There was a pause and then the male associates replied. “I knocked a book off the shelf in the living room.”
The woman sighed and said, “Just be careful, okay? We don’t want to draw any attention to ourselves here or break anything of Sera’s. C’mon, let’s finish up our search and get out of here before any of the neighbors report us. Again.”
We waited until we heard the door close before we dared move again. Caden let out a sigh of relief, pointing at the decorative rock facing on the wall next to us.
“You’re kidding me?” Did the demon really think we could scramble down that wall? At least we were only on the second floor.
Caden arched his brow, taunting me, despite our precarious position. “Too much for you?”
A dare? Damn, but the demon knew how to bait me. “I followed you through the Netherworld, I think I can handle a few feet of down climbing.”
Despite my nerves fighting for mental airtime between worries of falling and hyper-vigilance around being caught, we both made it down the wall unscathed. Caden grabbed my hand as we took off down the street, not stopping until we were sure no one was following us.
We ducked into an alleyway and leaned against the wall to catch our breath before Caden finally spoke up again. “That was too close for comfort! Do you think they’re Ms. Lowe’s people?”
“They had a key, so I’m guessing yes,” Cade replied. “Besides, they referred to a boss lady, and they both sounded scared of her. Tracks for what we know of Ms. Lowe.”
I pulled out my phone, surprised to see a message from Liam on it which I’d missed. When I pulled it up, it read: With Lowe. No Sera. Watch Out.
Caden and I exchanged a worried glance. I dialed Liam’s number and waited as the line rang and rang, but it eventually flipped to voicemail.
“The Lowes took them,” Caden said as I hung up the phone.
“We need to find them,” I said, hearing the urgency in my voice. “We can’t let Ms. Lowe get away with abducting them.”
Caden nodded in agreement. “But where do we start?”
