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“Right. Downstairs, you’ll find a scruffy-looking blond guy sulking around.” Yasmeen’s complaints and concerns would keep Dylan busy while I made time to figure out what the hell he wanted from me. “Whatever it is you need to tell me, tell him instead.”
I reached the door to the room, tugged it open, and slammed it behind me.
The silence that greeted me was bittersweet. Inside my head, half a dozen voices were still yammering with complaints. But there was no Felicity here. Just a freshly made bed and the faint scent of her perfume.
My mood blackened while I dressed. Boxers. Jeans. T-shirt. Every move felt mechanical. These days, my body was a poorly kept machine, run ragged and put away wet, left to rust until I got up to run it ragged all over again. When I sat down on the bed to pull on my socks, it took every ounce of strength I possessed to get back to my feet.
If I lay down now, I doubted I’d ever get up again.
When I opened the door once more, I found five bodies waiting for me. Clinton, Aubrey, Dylan, Yasmeen, Malik—
But no Felicity.
Their words erupted at me all at once, a barrage of voices clamoring to be heard. My head panged at every syllable. I held up a hand to try and quiet them, but they ignored it.
“Have any of you seen my mate?” I barked over them all, scowling at the congestion.
Five blank faces stared back at me.
Wherever she was right now, Felicity clearly didn’t want to be found.
I growled. “All right. Fine. Let’s go to the dining room. You can all air your grievances and give your reports there.
Chapter2
Felicity
In nursing school, we learned about the golden hour. A pretty name for a precarious thing.
The golden hour referred to the slice of time immediately after someone sustained a traumatic injury. If one could intervene before that time was up, there was a significantly greater likelihood the patient would survive. Rapid intervention was the more official, more accurate term. In some cases, you had several hours before a trauma victim’s chances began to falter. In others, only minutes. Seconds.
The important thing was acting. Quickly. Doing the right thing, and doing it fast.
In missing persons cases, they said the first forty-eight hours were the most crucial. Perpetrators were at their most erratic. They were nervous, afraid, or riding a sick adrenaline high, which meant they were most likely to make mistakes. Witnesses still had their clearest memories and could give the most accurate accounts. Discovering the first lead in that critical time window was imperative. After it closed, the chances of solving the case were slashed in half.
Out in the gardens of Morrow Manor, where our golden hour had started, I sat on the ground and stared at the time on my phone, watching the last of our first forty-eight slip away.
I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the earth beneath me, on the heat of the sun on my skin. The sounds of the birds in the trees, the bubbling of the fountain, the scent of roses on the humid wind.
It was what self-help books said to do—the advice of a thousand mindfulness coaches, therapy blog gurus, and glow-up influencers.
Live in the moment. Clear away the cobwebs of your thoughts. Twelve simple steps to getting better. Buy your inner peace, only $49.99!
It didn’t work. The more I focused on my body, the more I felt it.
The knife in my heart. The ache in my sinuses. The stains that had been etched on my cheeks from so many tears. The empty place in my womb where my sons had been safely nestled.
The hedges rose at my back like fortified walls. Even the semblance of protection they provided was a joke. Not so far away, police tape still marked the plot of ground where Samuel Morrow had buried the bodies of his human victims. Before me, more yellow plastic.
CRIME SCENE. DO NOT CROSS.
There was the gap in the paving stones where Melony Houghton had plucked a rock to bash over Gena’s head. And there, on the grass, there was a matted, bloody stretch where Kingston had crawled after Melony when she’d mauled his leg.
I turned my gaze back to my hands. They were shaking. My nails were ragged, stinging from the way I’d gnawed them to the quick.
“Mrs. Miller?”
I looked up to find a dark-haired woman in a white button-down and navy slacks approaching from beyond the police tape that crisscrossed the lawn.
