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Touching herself,I correct myself.She was in there touching herself.
“She’s not here.” Hali backs out of the bathroom, her nose wrinkling as she pulls the door closed.
I glance at Rune.
He stares back and then turns away. “The garden.”
I try to shake off my growing unease. Everleigh has only ever been in her room alone, with Hali, or with us. So where is she?
We follow Rune back down the stairs and out into the garden. Along the way, Kylian checks the home theater in case Everleigh wanted to snuggle on the cushions. He returns, shaking his head.
Everleigh isn’t floating in the pool or relaxing on a lounger.
I don’t see her anywhere.
“Everleigh!” Kylian calls out, his voice ringing out across the garden.
Silence.
“Everleigh!” I try this time, shouting louder in case she wandered down to the bottom of our garden and is too far to hear Kylian’s call.
Silence.
We glance at each other.
“Do you think she ran?” Kylian asks, frowning. “Maybe her heat started, and she’d rather be away than be with us?”
Before he’s finished speaking, I’m shaking my head. “She wouldn’t leave when she wanted to know about her mom. And if her heat has started, there’s no way she’d risk going to a heat clinic with what she knows.”
“She was getting ready to tell us that she wanted to stay,” Rune adds. “I know it.”
Until I interrupted.
“So where the hell is she?” I frown as I scan the garden. “Everleigh!”
Silence.
“Do you think someone took her?” Nancy’s voice comes from the open back door, pulling our attention from Hali, who’s wandering toward the herb garden.
“We were all in the house. There’s no way someone could have just walked in and taken her,” I say.
“Maybe they lured her out here,” Hali calls out.
We all turn to her.
She’s standing at the edge of the herb garden, a small, torn scrap of blue between her fingers floating in the wind. “I thought I saw something that shouldn’t be there.”
“That’s the same blue as Lawrence Wentworth’s uniform.” Rune stalks toward Hali, the rest of us following.
Hali hands it over immediately. “The soil is all trampled over on the way to the back gate, and it wasn’t before.”
That’s all she says. That’s all she needs to say.
None of us has seen Everleigh. She isn’t answering any of our calls, and now Hali finds a scrap of Lawrence Wentworth’s uniform in our garden.
“Lawrence was on a fishing expedition,” I say quietly. “He saw something or someone told him Everleigh was here. And he took her. Everleigh is gone.”
Chapter40
