Page 108 of Chasing Your Ghost

Noah and Chris shared a look that told her they weren’t nearly as excited as she was about the prospect of sneaking into their prime suspect’s house. Asher’s frown sat him firmly somewhere in between.

Chris raised a brow. “You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, I never joke about B&E,” Riley replied, injecting as much gravity into her voice as she could.

“Well, Nancy Drew,” Noah drawled. “It just so happens that I do know his address.”

“Great, let’s go.”

“What? Now?” Chris asked, his eyes widening and moving to the window.

Riley nodded, grabbing her phone from her bedside table and unlocking the screen. “We know he’s preoccupied. Now’s the perfect time.”

“Shouldn’t we make a plan or something?” Chris asked. “What if he has an alarm system or a dog?”

Riley waved away his concerns. “I know how to hack into an alarm system, and if he has a dog, we’ll just bribe it with some ham or something.”

“You can do that?” Noah asked, his voice high with either disbelief or shock.

Riley rolled her eyes. “Of course. Dogs love ham.”

Noah blinked at her. “That’s not—I wasn’t.” He groaned into his hands. “You’re so frustrating.”

She sighed and pinned her stepbrother with a stern look. “I doubt he has an alarm system, and I’m even more certain that he doesn’t have a dog. He doesn’t seem like the type to have a pet. So, we could either stand here and keep second-guessing and worrying about what we’ll find when we get there, or I can call Ella, and we can all go to his house and potentially find Asher.”

Both Chris and Noah looked suitably cowed by her speech. Sure that she had their support, she tapped the call button on her screen. Ella’s phone rang, and rang…and rang until Riley got her voicemail. She tried again with the same result.

“Dammit. She’s not answering.”

“I’m not surprised after what went down this morning,” Chris muttered. “She probably hates us.”

“I’m not a big fan of hers either right now,” Asher said, his scowl and heated words for Riley’s eyes and ears only.

Noah grimaced. “She definitely hates me.”

Riley pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers. Her first instinct was to defend Ella and point out that she’d been through something traumatic, but they didn’t have time for a discussion of the validity and morality of Ella’s choices.

“Let’s leave without her. I’ll text her so that she knows what’s happening, but we don’t have time to wait for her to call me back. We need to leave now while Gabe still has a few hours of work left to do.”

Chris nodded. “I wasn’t planning on earning a rap sheet any time soon, but why not? Let’s do it.”

Noah shrugged. “I’ll do anything to get Asher back.”

“You really think Gabe was behind this?” Asher asked her.

She fixed her gaze on him, reading the flicker of hope on his gray-tinged face. Seeing it made her choose her words carefully. “I think there’s a good chance that he is, and we’d be stupid not to look into it.”

He nodded, that flicker not burning any brighter but not dying out either. “Okay. Please just be careful.”

“Of course.” She smiled, but she knew it didn’t reach her eyes. If she was right, then Asher could finally be returned to his body. But if she was wrong, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to bear the crushing disappointment that would surely follow.

???

Gabe’s house had been disgustingly easy to break into, what with the living room window he’d left open, but perhaps that should have been the first clue that they’d find nothing there. People with things to hide didn’t leave their windows unlocked. It was far too easy for a woman of her size to slip through it and open the front door for her two larger accomplices.

Breaking into a house in broad daylight should not have been that easy. Yet it was, and that should have told them all they’d needed to know.

“There’s nothing here, Riley,” Asher said.

---