Page 50 of Troublemaker
The most important thing, Blake had called me.
Now it felt like a lie.
“Thanks for being a good friend and not spilling my secrets,” I told Emory.
“Thanks for being a good friend and not spilling mine,” he replied.
22
BLAKE
Iwoke up reaching for her, only to feel a warm, empty pillow beside me.
“Lucy? Come back to bed,” I called, yawning. It must have been early in the morning. The sun hadn’t risen yet, and all I wanted to do was curl Lucy up in my arms and go back to sleep for another couple of hours.
Except there was no response.
“Lucy? Troublemaker?”
Nothing.
Rolling out of bed, I grabbed a pair of sweatpants and searched the bathroom. She wasn’t there. The other bedrooms. Still no. My heart began to thump, faster and faster, as I called for her and searched for her, dread percolating in my stomach.
I knew before I knew.
The door to my office was open. Just a crack, but still open.
She wasn’t in there, and it looked undisturbed, but she must have seen. The photos, the dossier, everything.
Running down the stairs, I grabbed my keys with no real plan in place. Just panic. Then I saw it.
A note on the kitchen counter, covered by her panties—the ones I’d stolen.
I picked up her panties and placed them back in my pocket, as if by keeping them safe, I could reverse this whole hellish experience and she’d appear in my kitchen and say “just joking.”
But the note made it clear that wasn’t happening.
The queen never wanted to be locked away in a tower, especially not from a lying knight who watched her from the shadows but refused to be in the light with her. She wanted him, but she wanted an honest kingdom more.
So she left.
And she lived happily ever after.
Alone.
Unless you come clean and explain everything, asshole.
I stared down at the note. Her anger was clear in every word, but that wasn’t what had frozen me in the kitchen. I could barely keep from falling to my knees and roaring in anguish. I’d hurt her. Badly. So badly, she’d left without waking me. Obviously she’d discovered the photos and the dossier on her along with her panties. I should’ve come clean to her before, but would she even have listened? Understood something I didn’t fully understand myself?
It didn’t matter right now. All that mattered was that she was okay. Was safe somewhere. I ran back up the stairs to my office, not even bothering to sit down at my desk as I checked the cameras. She wasn’t in her dorm. I ran back downstairs to checkmy phone. The GPS app showed her at an unfamiliar address—and when I searched it, no name came up.
Where the fuck had she gone? Where was she? Who was she with?
“Lucy, where the fuck are you? Come home,” I said into the empty kitchen, barely aware what I was saying, or that I thought of it as her home too, now.
I called her phone multiple times. She didn’t pick up. Each time, I grew more worried, and with that, angry—and then angrier. Yes, it was my fault that she’d left. But to sneak out on me was childish. To ignore me, even more so. She had to know how worried I was, how the terror was an endless punch to the gut. How the fuck could she do this?
Are you angry with her, or yourself?that jackass of an inner voice asked calmly.
