Page 80 of Faking It with the Forward

“What are you going to do?” Her voice raises. “Twy—”

I hang up and immediately press another number. Reese picks up on the first ring.

“On the way?” he asks.

“No, something came up.” I search for my keys. “I need to go find Nadia.”

“Babe, I’m sure she just flaked. Just let me come down.”

“She’s in trouble.” My voice shakes when I say it. “I think. I don’t know. Ruby sent me this video of her and I’m going to go look for her.”

“Now?”

“I just need to make sure she’s safe.”

“Okay,” he pauses. “I’ll get my keys.”

“Your keys?”

“I’m coming with you.”

* * *

“It lookslike it’s a house off Miller Avenue.” My eyes are glued to Nadia’s icon on the app tracking feature. It hasn’t moved in the last four hours.

“That’s where the off-campus football players live,” Axel says from the backseat of Reese’s car. “I’ve been to a few parties over there.”

“Does Brent Reynolds live there?” I ask.

“Yeah, he’s one of them.”

When Reese picked me up, I’d asked him why Axel was crammed in the back of the sports car. He’d simply replied, “He was the only one that wasn’t shit-faced.”

“Son of a—” a string of curses comes from the back seat. He’s watching the video, getting angrier with every second. “There’s no fucking way she agreed to this.”

The truth is that I don’t know what’s true. Nadia has put herself in some pretty high-risk situations before, but my gut is telling me something isn’t right.

“You didn’t have to come,” I tell them both again. I’ve been saying it since Reese arrived at my door.

“Yes, we did,” Reese answers unequivocally. “You definitely weren’t going into whatever situation this is alone.” His hands grip the wheel. “And something tells me if I show up at an off-campus football house asking questions, I should probably bring backup.”

The closer we get, the tighter the knot gets in my belly. Nadia is notorious for going off grid. I’d begged her more than once to keep her tracker on if she met some guy in the middle of the night. She rarely did—in fact, for some reason she’d do the opposite. Go dark the second she left. The fact she left it on tonight… well, that’s triggering my spidey-sense. Something’s not right.

Reese stretches his arm across the center console and rests his hand over mine, threading our fingers together. Despite Axel being in the car, I let him reassure me. Fuck the rules.

“There are other movies on this account,” Axel says, the screen lighting up his face. His blond hair dips in front of his eyes and he brushes it back. “All paid access. All the same angle—making it impossible to know if the girl is aware of the camera. Whoever this guy is, he never shows his face.” He grunts. “Seems shady as fuck.”

I take a deep breath and tell him to take the next right. He slows the speed as we get closer to Nadia’s icon.

“That one,” Axel says, leaning between the seats. “I came here for a party right before the semester started.”

He points to a one-story brick house. It’s nice, which isn’t surprising. Brent is the quarterback and that comes with some nice perks. The lights are on, but there are only a few cars out front—a big white pick-up and a smaller sports car. Definitely not a party.

“I know they didn’t have a game this weekend,” Reese says, pulling his car up to the curb in front of the house. He turns off the car and looks at me. “Stay here, okay?”

Um. No. “Not okay. I’m coming.”

“Twy,” he frowns, “we have no fucking idea what to expect in there.”

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