Page 67 of Liar & Champion
I sighed heavily. “You’re saying that you thought it would be helpful to bring her here?”
“She wanted to surprise you, thank you for the kitchen. She’s a real sweetheart. She probably went out the wrong way and got lost. I hope she’s okay, because she was looking particularly…”
“Edible,” Daniel said, standing there with his nose taped, t-shirt and jeans covering up the mess Quig had made of him.
“You saw Sunshine? Where? When? What direction was she going?”
He shrugged and looked down the hall. “You should probably get some pants on. She’s not going to enjoy seeing you like that. It was a clean fight, but you’re still bruised, and he gave you a shiner.”
I grabbed him around the neck and dragged him down the hall with me. I wasn’t playing. “You’ll tell me exactly where she was when you saw her, and what her disposition was at the time.”
“She was two halls down, outside my dressing room, and she looked hurt. Like her husband kept seriously relevant information about his character hidden so she’d feel like an idiot when the truth came out.” He gripped my arms, but he didn’t try to get away.
I released him and stalked towards my changing room, where my phone was along with my pants. I dressed one-handed while I pulled up the cams. There she was, coming out of Daniel’s room, looking… Was that really her? I’d okayed that yellow dress, but was her waist really that narrow, and her perfect breasts so close to falling out of the tiny dress? And she’d been in Daniel’s room? It didn’t matter. Maybe she’d known him at school. I checked the cams, her walking away, her stride all off because she was wearing men’s sandals, and then down one hall, the feed went black, and that’s it. That’s the last I could find of her. That feed shouldn’t have been taken down. We had a hacker on this job, which took money, a lot of money because thesecams were as secure as I could get them. My heart rate doubled as the thought of Dupre touching my wife filled my mind.
I called up Dirk. “The cams were hacked, hallway 3H, same time Sunshine disappeared. Look into it if you’d be so kind.”
“I’m on it. You should ask Jezebel if she’s behind her disappearance for a hazing or something.”
I hung up and then I called Horse. He took some time to pick up. “I’m missing my wife. I don’t suppose she’s returned to your hotel.”
“How long has she been gone?” He was already checking, because he wasn’t slow.
I went back and checked the cams for an exact time-frame. “Twenty-seven minutes.”
“I’ll check, but do you think that she’d go back to the hotel if she left after seeing you work over Bulldog like that? You were particularly ruthless tonight.”
I snarled and hung up. He’d let me know.
I went back to the cams, going over the feed, when she went into the restroom and then came out the other entrance, but she didn’t look lost, no, and the way she looked in that dress was enough to give me a heart attack. Any man would want her, and there were so many men who came to these things who were predators. Even if Michael Dupre hadn’t kidnapped her, something must have happened. I watched her, tracked her until she got to Daniel’s room, and then walked in like she knew where she was going two minutes before he walked inside. I watched that door, speeding through the feed until I saw the medic go in, come out faster than he should have, and then Kitten come out, her expression not difficult to read, even under all that makeup. Hurt. Betrayed. Lost.
I spun around and almost ran down Daniel, because he’d been watching the feed over my shoulder. He was unnaturallyquiet, could kill you without you noticing. “You had a conversation,” I gritted out.
“Not exactly.” He gave me a bland smile. That smile. I was going to kill him. I had him bent over backwards before I realized I was going to do it. He didn’t look surprised.
“Then what, exactly did you have with my wife?” I growled at him like a caveman, my fingers digging into his throat.
“Maybe we talked about what her plans were after the six months were over. No, it’s only five months now. Less,” he drawled with a smile that was growing in malice, even in that position. He didn’t mind pain, probably liked it.
I was going to kill him. I was going to peel his flesh from his bones and dry them in the sun. “Did you set me up to fail? Did you hurt her?”
He finally bared his teeth at me. “I didn’t hurt her. She came in and gave me a lecture on how wasteful it was for me to get beat up when my brain should be going towards something useful instead of something destructive. I knew her in school. I told you not to get involved, but you couldn’t help it. Because you can’t resist a challenge. But then your show came on the screen, and she got all hurt, said she was going home. The question is where she thinks home is, and whether she made it there or not.”
I released him and took two steps back, trying to breathe calmly, to think through the situation in a logical way. I called Jezebel. No, she wasn’t logical, but she was the second on the team, and I needed all her mental faculty when my thoughts were tangling in panic.
“I heard Kitten came to the fight,” she said, answering right away.
I growled. “And left. Maybe. The cam went out in the hall where she was last seen. That’s more than slightly suspicious, but it could have been a coincidence. Did you or the other girls see anything?”
“I did see her with Tom for a minute between crowds. She sure cleans up trashy.”
“Excuse me?”
She laughed, but it was hard and brittle. “Do you think it’s the stalker?”
I took a shaky breath. “I’d better call for some official eyes on the airports.” That would require me calling my mother, but if Dupre was behind this, I needed to get her back as soon as possible. The psycho taking her to a foreign country was absolutely out of the question.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
