Page 36 of Resurrection

I nod. “I’m not from here.” Unlike the situation with his daughter, my killer reputation won’t be a useful piece of information now. The last thing I want to do is drop Carys any deeper into this shit.

He grunts and then examines Carys again. “She’s valuable to you, no?”

She takes a beat. “She is.”

“You’ll find her?”

“We will,” I chime in from across the room. We make eye contact, and the unspoken communication is so loaded I wonder if Demid can sense the weight. Does she want me to help her? Now, she doesn’t have a choice.

“No stone will be left unturned. You have my word.” I cross the room and offer Demid my hand. He takes it in a firm shake, straightening his shoulders.

“You have kids?” he says. “You understand?”

I release my grip. Carys tenses beside me. When we were together, she wanted it all. The kids. The husband. The home her parents hadn’t provided for her. I’d never been sure what I wanted, what I could give someone, and so I’d said nothing in return. Life hadn’t worked out as she’d expected. Sometimes I want to ask her what happened, but the timing is always off, and her answer probably won’t satisfy me.

“No kids.” I rock onto my heels. “But I understand what it means to love a person beyond reason. To do anything to keep someone safe.”

From the corner of my eye, she turns her head away, her fingers pushing a strand of her hair back in place.

“I’ll give you a week to find her. If you don’t”—he eyes Carys, who is focused on her feet—“I will send out my more aggressive people.”

If we haven’t managed to track her or narrow her potential locations in the next forty-eight hours, the search is a lost cause. Anyone who has ever hunted someone knows the first forty-eight hours are gold. Everything after is a crapshoot.

“That’s fair.” I lead him to the door.

Carys has been oddly silent, and Jay took up the search of the apartment I abandoned. He’s banging around the bathroom even as I get Demid to the exit.

“We’ll check here more for clues,” I say. “Trash, diary entries, whatever we can find. She has her phone. Keep trying to call her. She might pick up.”

When I shake Demid’s hand in the doorway again, his man approaches from the hallway. When the guard gets to us, Carys hovers by my shoulder.

“Security footage?” I say.

It’ll be one less thing we’ll have to mine.

The man checks for his boss’s consent before speaking. “She left alone, phone in hand, about three hours after you came here yesterday.”

“Bags?” she asks.

“Nothing. Just the phone.”

“Can you send the video to Carys?” Hopefully their technology is good enough we don’t have to go looking again ourselves. Sometimes there are clues to a location or direction nobody sees at first.

The guard takes the outstretched phone from Carys to copy her email address.

Demid is lost in thought for a moment. Then he half turns back to Carys. “Was she in trouble with you?”

“We don’t know,” she says, her voice steady. “We came to see whether she could help us track our missing product from the warehouse. She was… evasive.”

He grunts. “You don’t fucking touch her when you find her. If she did something wrong, I’ll deal with her. She’s screwing with my business too.”

“I appreciate how these things work.” Her voice is firm. “I didn’t think you realized what was going on.”

Promises are dangerous, so I’m not making any. His daughter is on the run. Who knows what’ll happen when we track her?

Demid gives me a last appraisal, as though he’s assessing my trustworthiness. I don’t blink. The only person I owe any loyaltyto is Carys, and if someone is threatening her, that trumps everything else.

He wanders along the hall with his men, his back hunched. A brief surge of longing for my father zips through me. The man I’m mourning isn’t my father though, it’s some idealized version of him I let live in me for a while. He was never the man I needed, and I wasn’t the son he wanted. I take a deep breath and roll my shoulders, trying to keep the past buried.

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