Page 110 of Mayhem and Minnie

She’s not here.

At this point, I’m not overly concerned. She could have very well returned to cleaning.

Leaving the bags on her bed, I head to my office and pull up the camera feed from around the house.

I scan every single frame, looking for her, but she’s nowhere to be found.

I gulp down.

Something slides beneath my skin, worming its way right under the surface of my epidermis. Discomfort settles deep in my gut.

She wouldn’t leave.

Where would she go?

We’re basically in the middle of nowhere here. She’d have to walk miles to reach the highway.

Once more, panic pokes at my usually calm demeanor, causing me to become frantic in my attempt to find her—any trace of her.

I rewind the video footage until I see her exiting the house. I access the feed from the outside cameras, but they only show her going into the back field before the same static as before appears on the screen.

Fuck.

I need to get the system checked out. It’s not normal for static to appear so often, even after countless upgrades.

Cursing at the fact that technology is failing me, I head outside, looking for Minnie in the last place I’d seen her go—the field.

It’s cold out.

Much colder than I expected. So cold, in fact, that I wonder how the fuck Minnie would have gone out wearing only my old shirt. As she exited the house, her legs and arms were bare. The flimsy material of the shirt would have hardly provided any boundary against the chilly wind.

Fucking hell. The moment I get my hands on that little heathen, I might just wring her neck.

I stride across the field determinedly, looking right and left for her. The entire expanse of the field is covered in white, so a small, black dot would certainly be rather conspicuous.

Except, what I see is not only one small black dot but two.

I can spot her in the distance, some five hundred feet away.

She’s close to the fence surrounding my property. But she’s not alone.

There’s someone else with her. Someone not so small. Someone who looks like…a man.

A man who is hugging her.

I can’t make out more than his stature and build and the fact that he’s wearing all black.

Despite the cold, my blood boils in my veins. I increase my pace.

I’m around three hundred feet away when Minnie half-turns, almost as if she can hear me—though it’s impossible from that distance. She makes some gestures with her hands and just as I blink, the other person disappears.

I don’t even get to process my disbelief as pure rage overtakes me.

She was talking with another man. On my land. While living with me.

Who was it?

How did he know to come here?

---