Page 40 of After All The Wreckage
Rory shook off my hand and kept walking, telling me what she’d seen on the video in the control room. My emotions flew all over the place as we retraced our steps to the Pathfinder. Dunn and West had lied, no surprise there, but the look Dunn had given me in his office made a hell of a lot more sense. It was like… he knew me somehow.
What the fuck had Demi done now?
The hair on the back of my neck rose as I realized Monte’s vision hit closer to home than ever before if somehow Dunn and Demi knew each other.
“It’s worse, Gage,” Rory said quietly as we climbed back into the SUV and sat in the darkened garage.
How the hell could it be worse? Monte was gone. Demi was involved. Dunn had lied. Jesus.
“The video feed…” She took a deep breath and then continued, “It disappeared while we were watching it. Someone erased it.”
I stared at her for several seconds before letting out the words on a stuttered breath, “We scared them.”
Shit… My fear for Monte’s life grew impossibly larger, wiping out any hope Rory had brought me this morning. I should have been there when Monte had talked to Dunn. I should have fucking got into the car with him last week when he’d had the first vision and had been determined to warn the congressman. I should have done anything to protect him. Instead, I’d let himgo to school every day haunted and tortured by what he’d seen in his dreams.
If something had happened to him…I swallowed. The pain dragged through my middle. I’d vacillated between fury, frustration, guilt, and fear for days now. Ivy’s tormented voice saying Monte was hurt and scared ran through me again like a bell going off. An alarm.
But then it hit me. She’d said,Monte is scared.
She’d said it like it was happening right at that moment. She’d been practically inconsolable when I’d simply cut my hand. If anything worse had happened to Monte, Ivy would have known.
A measure of relief wafted through the ache.
“He’s not dead,” I said. The strength of my conviction made my words come out as a growl.
Something crossed Rory’s face. Worry…doubt…who the hell knew? But I could tell she didn’t entirely believe it.
“He’s not dead,” I repeated. “If he was, Ivy would know. She said Monteisscared, notwas. She isn’t desolate with grief. She’d know, Rory.” Doubt crossed her face, and I sighed. “I know you don’t believe me. I get it. No one ever does, but I’m telling you, my brother is alive. He’s scared but alive.”
She swiped through a few screens on her phone, thumbs going a mile a minute as she typed messages. When she looked up, there was a steely resolve in her eyes. The grit I’d seen over and over again since I’d first met her at twelve.
“Take me to where his phone last pinged. I want to see it in person and make sure we aren’t missing anything.”
I turned the engine over, backed out of the spot, and headed out of the garage into the snarling traffic that surrounded the Capitol Building corridor. A few blocks past the Metro station, I pulled into the alley where his phone had last pinged. Riverand I had come by the spot four times yesterday, scouring the doorways and the dumpsters, while fear sped through us.
Two buildings towered on either side, both going up four floors. One was apartments and the other an office building. I barely had time to put the Pathfinder in Park before Rory was climbing out.
Instead of looking at the ground, searching for his phone as River and I had, Rory had her head turned upward. She jogged along the apartment building to where a fire escape wound down, the bottom rung hanging several feet off the ground.
“Give me a boost,” she said. I simply raised a brow. “Monte’s tall, right? Taller than me by at least a couple of inches. I bet he could have reached that bottom rung no problem.”
I understood where she was going and gripped her waist, lifting her. She was such a force of nature that I expected her to be heavier than she was. Instead, even with her lean muscles, she was light and easy to maneuver. My skin burned every place we touched, the heat of her soaking into me, speeding through me like aftershocks.
Our gazes locked for a long beat, then she grabbed hold of the rung on the bottom of the escape and hauled herself up. I waited until she’d reached the first landing, and then followed her. As we wound upward, she checked each of the windows, but they were locked. At the top, we pulled ourselves onto the roof. The wind whipped against us, colder than it had felt down between the buildings.
Above us, the puffy white clouds that had led us into D.C. had been replaced with dark gray ones. The air seemed to crackle with the strength of the oncoming storm. I almost expected a tornado to be forming off to the right.
Chasing them back in the Midwest had always come with a wild risk. There’d been a thrill to it, standing on the edge of something large and untamable, and that wildness seemed tosurround us now. A promise of violence hovered about us that threatened lives and limbs.
Damn if I’d let it take my brother’s.
Rory moved away from me, ducking into the dark spaces between the equipment boxes and ventilation shafts. She came around the corner with a blanket and a bag of Mother’s Circus Animal cookies in her hand.
I jogged over to her, touching the blanket. We had one just like it. Green and red plaid. A Christmas blanket that had been in our family for almost as long as I could remember but that was rarely used. I wouldn’t have missed it for weeks or months.
I grabbed the bag of cookies, but even before I opened it, I knew what I’d see—all the pink cookies had been left behind. My heart spasmed. A rush of tears hit my eyes, and I had to swallow hard to keep it all inside.
“He was coming home,” I told her over a lump in my throat. She raised her brows in question. “He left all the pink ones for Ivy.”
