Page 69 of Retribution
‘It’s too dangerous. Sauvage?—’
I snort. ‘That girl attracts danger whether we like it or not. She saved my life by killing a guy. She’s no shrinking violet. At least ask her for her advice.’
He looks down. ‘I already did. She…didn’t answer. You don’t think…’
‘What?’ I ask with a frown.
‘You don’t think she’s so mad at us for taking over Envy that she’s…done with us, do you?’
‘No way,’ I say immediately. ‘There’s just no way. She cares about us the same as we do about her. We’re together. We’re a family.’
I realize my fists are clenched, and I’ve taken several aggressive steps toward my friend.
‘Okay,’ he says, putting up his hands. ‘Okay. We don’t have to talk about this anymore.’
I nod jerkily. ‘I’m gonna shower and then get back into my research. Have you or Shade heard anything on the stalker? Has Sauvage said anything?’
‘Nope. Nothing. I’m guessing Daisy would have told us if she’d gotten any more notes?—’
‘Yeah, right.’ I interrupt with a roll of my eyes. ‘I love that girl but she’s not Trudy Truths-a-lot.’
He gives me a look.
‘You know what I mean,’ I say. ‘She keeps secrets. She doesn’t tell us everything. I’m sure she has her reasons, but we never seem to have the full picture where she’s concerned.’
‘Yeah, that is true,’ he concedes.
He sighs, rubbing his eyes. ‘Okay, I’m gonna hit the gym for a while. Maybe then I’ll be able to sleep. Later.’
He leaves the room and I take off my wrestling suit. As I wrap my towel around my waist, I hear a timid knock on the half-closed door.
‘Come in.’
A KIP guy enters the room slowly, carrying a stack of thick hardbacks. ‘Uh, I had to grab my kid sister from school, Captain. When I dropped her off, I went ahead and grabbed the yearbooks you wanted while I was at my folks’ house.’
‘Thanks, Ryan. That’s great. Put them on the bed there.’
He does what I ask and then does a kind of bow as he backs out into the hallway and disappears.
I glance at the four books and hurry to the shower, impatient to take a look through them.
I’m back in my room within five minutes, and I throw on some clothes quickly, sitting on my bed and opening the book in the pile from the earliest date. I quickly discard it. They were too young to really even be included that year. I grab the next, and they don’t appear at all, except for in the background of one grainy photo. I think it’s them. Except there’s four of them, not three. I squint at it, but it’s too fuzzy to make out any of the details. The third year, when they would have been juniors, has nothing in it either.
I start on the final book, the one from when Mark, John, and Applegate were seniors. I find their mugshots right away, all dressed up for their senior pictures. And then I see a girl who looks familiar, and I do a doubletake. She’s the spitting image of Daisy. I look at the name. Evelyn Carmichael.
With a frown to myself, I snap a pic with my phone, and I keep going through the rest of the book. I find a few photos of the three boys and this girl, Evelyn. In most of them, she’s cozied up to a very young John Novelle. If I look closely, I can see that it’s him from his cold, arrogant face.
I need to know more than these pictures tell me, so I message Ryan, the guy who brought me the yearbooks, and ask him if he could find out more about Evelyn for me from his folks. He responds so quickly that I’m sure he was waiting by the phone for me to message him, but he tells me that he’ll forward the pic to his mom and ask her for me. I stare at the girl, wondering if it could be a member of Daisy’s family. A cousin of April’s maybe. If April had family in Richmond, maybe that’s how she met John and the others.
I look at my phone again to see if Daisy has messaged me back. Nothing. So, I message the guys quickly to tell them what I found and then I hang out my open window to smoke a cigarette.
I’d almost quit before the last stressful couple of months. I should probably get some patches or something. Daisy has wrinkled her nose at the smell of me after one a couple of times, and I’d rather she nuzzle and smell my neck the way I’ve seen her do with Mav and Shade, like she loves the scents of them. She hasn’t really done that with me.
I frown at my cigarette. Silently blaming it, I fling it, half smoked, from the window. I follow that with the rest of the pack. I’m done. I want my girl to love the smell of me, the same as she does the others.
7
DAISY
