Page 41 of Evil Villain (The Royal Court)

I turned and looked back at the suited man and raised an eyebrow. “I guess you don’t want my business.”

He smiled. “You’re right. I don’t.”

With that, I slid away from the area and started to scan the crowd for Felicity. It was harder with everyone masked, so I simply kept an eye out for her signature braids and the dark blue dress she’d worn. As I turned a corner, I risked a look to my right and saw that the two people, including one of my former captors, was still following me. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, but maybe Felicity was right, it was a bad idea to ask around.

Eventually, I came to a bustling corner of the show and saw Felicity standing amongst the fray. I tried not to raise any eyebrows as I slid and pushed my way towards her, and instead of reaching out to grab her, I just moved and stood at her side.

“Felicity?” I asked.

She turned and looked at me. “Hey. You good?”

“Um, not really,” I replied. “Remember when you told me to come find you if I ran into any trouble?”

“Yeah,” she said, nervousness in her voice.

I looked over her. “Well this is me finding you.”

15

Cherri

No one mentioned the dead end we found for a handful of days. Though none of us were willing to say it, I think the same one thing was true for all of us.

We weren’t expecting to still be searching for answers a month later.

Sicily was still trying to work his way through the muddle of information he ran into from the unknown number that had called Nathan and I, which turned out to be how Deon was communicating with Nathan, but the information he was getting was hard to stick to anything. The only thing he’d learned was that a majority of the pings from the number were in and around Maine, which meant Deon was likely still in the state, but he had no idea where. Just beinginMaine was useless to us.

The road we’d followed with Brayden trying to find Connor had hit the same brick wall. Wherever Connorhadbeen meeting with Brayden, it had been totally cleaned out. Apparently Connor was a man who liked to cover his bases.

Who knew?

Brayden had mentioned that there were a few different places he’d been brought to, but none of them sat as clearly in his mind as the one we’d found and now knew was of no use to us. We had made a couple of attempts that same day we hit the first dead end to find something else—it was Brayden’s way of trying to keep us all from getting too down in the dumps—but nothing led anywhere near as concrete.

Suddenly, it felt like we hadnothing.

Stalemate.

A knock on my door pulled my attention over, and I looked up to see Nathan walking into the room. “Hey.”

“Hi.”

Nathan walked in and sat down in the chair sitting at the desk and spun it to face me. “How you doing?”

“I’m okay. I just feel… out of options,” I said. “I feel like we’re no closer to finding Connor or Deon than we were a month ago.” Nathan slid his hands into his dark brown hair. It’d gotten much longer since we were dating. “You taking a stand against haircuts?” I asked.

He chuckled. “Nah. My therapist and I talked about it. I’ve always liked my hair longer, and Nikki likes it long, but it’s more of a control thing. It’s one thing I have control over, whether or not I cut my hair.” He laughed. “I know that sounds dumb.”

“No.” I smiled at him. “Are you really seeing a therapist?”

He nodded. “Yeah. It’s been great. I mean… I needed it.”

“I’d say so,” I responded.

“My dad used to do strange shit,” he said suddenly. “He’d blindfold me, or bind my hands, and I usually had to pass some test or recall specific information before he’d let me out. He said that if I had pressure to get the information right, I always would. He wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t even realize until I started going to therapy how much I’d repressed that stuff. I’d forgotten.”

“That’s probably why you always felt like the best way to communicate was to trap who you were talking to,” I said.

He nodded. “So I’ve discovered. Not doing that is hard. It’s scary not being able to control everything in my world, but I know now how unhealthy that is.”

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