The way she paled, her eyes darting to me with regret, told me otherwise. “Kai… where’d you get this? Did you know it was a Guild symbol?” She picked up the key pendant and rubbed her thumb over the twisted metal symbol in such a familiar way.
Kai blinked like he’d just been electrocuted. “What? No. It’s not a—” He shook his head in denial. “That necklace belonged to Charlotte. The girl I told you about.”
Danny winced, her gaze on me not him. “That’s what I was scared you’d say, Kai.”
His furious, perplexed glare swung back and forth between Danny and me as he tried to catch up. “I don’t understand. Why do you have Charlotte’s necklace? What does this have to do with this?” He waved a hand at the pile of thumb drives in front of me.
Danny was still watching me, assessing how much I already knew. Calculating how much I’d been withholding from her.
My phone vibrated in my pocket, and I gave a short sigh as I dug it out. Better to rip the Band-Aid off. Maybe now she’d let me kill him.
“Because, idiot, that’s not Charlotte’s necklace. It’s Layla’s. Shit, hold that thought, this is important.” I quickly answered the call and brought the phone to my ear. The caller was one of my personal employees… one with orders to only contact me in an emergency.
Kai started to blow his top, but I held up a finger to silence him.
“Sir,” my employee grunted, “bad news, I’m afraid.”
Dread pooled in my stomach as I locked eyes with Danny. “How bad, Boris?”
“Arson, by the looks of things. Elevators disabled, fires lit in every escape stairwell. No one stood a chance.” He gave a hacking cough, like he’d suffered some level of smoke inhalation himself.
I swallowed, knowing this development would make my girl feel like she was breaking. She wouldn’t truly break, she was too strong for that, but it’d hurt. “Any survivors?”
Boris coughed again. “None, I’m sorry, sir. No one made it out, my assignment included.”
I hissed a curse, then ended the call.
“What was that?” Danny asked immediately, ignoring Kai’s bewildered glares.
Steeling myself against her inevitable reaction, I put my phone down. “That was Boris, one of my personal mercenaries. I’ve had him watching Jude. Observing.”
Danny went rigid. She’d heard my side of the conversation, so she already knew what was coming. She was smart enough to put it together.
“I’m sorry, mon cœur, Judith is dead.”
45
Static rushed in my ears, and my vision went spotty for a second, then I shook it off violently. Because surely I’d just heard him wrong. Or he’d heard Boris wrong. Either way, this wasn’t fucking happening. No way.
“You’re wrong,” I whispered, unable to tear my eyes from Leon’s face. The depth of regret and apology in his green eyes almost made me choke, though. Leon wasn’t faking shit; he wasn’t hiding behind a mask. He was being truthful… but that didn’t mean he was right.
“Siren…” Kai reached out to touch my arm, and I jerked away. I didn’t want or need comforting because Leon’s intel was faulty.
“Danny, my love,” Leon said softly, “I’m not wrong. I trained Boris, he’s good. He wouldn’t report termination unless he was sure. It was arson. Sounds like her whole building went up, and there were no survivors. All exits blocked off.”
I shook my head, refusing to accept that answer. “Bullshit, no one is infallible, Marx. Show me proof. Bring up satellite imagery.”
Kai gave a soft sound, reaching for me again. This time, I let him take my hand, but I still didn’t need comfort. Because Jude wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be.
“Siren, you can’t just bring up satellite images without—” His sensible protest cut short as Leon’s fingers flew across his laptop keyboard, hacking into the UK government satellites to provide the evidence I wanted to see. Needed to see.
I tugged my hand free of Kai’s grip and sank onto the couch beside Leon, taking the laptop from him with shaking hands. The aerial image showed a massive plume of smoke engulfing the area where Jude’s flat was located, but it obscured any details.
“CCTV,” I demanded, handing it back to him. “There’s a camera on the storefront opposite. Um, a handbag store, I can’t remember the name.”
Leon obviously could, though. He typed at lightning speed, hacking into the store’s security and bringing up their real time footage on the screen for me.
Fire engines, ambulances and cop cars crowded the view, but Jude lived in a five-story building. Even though we couldn’t see the main entryway, we could see the upper floors. They were all burnt out, blackened, smoke still billowing from the freshly extinguished fire.
I stared at it for a long time. A really long time, and felt… empty. I was totally devoid of emotion when I finally glanced back up at Leon and Kai. They watched me carefully, like they thought I might break down, but I just wet my lips and tried to think logically.
“She probably wasn’t home. It’s…” I checked the time, then quickly converted time zones. “It’s only five in the afternoon for her. She will still be at work.”
Relief washed over me, because Franklin rarely let Jude off work before six. She couldn’t be dead, because she wasn’t home.
Leon silently took the laptop back and started cycling back through the camera footage, clicking through the frames faster than my eyes could follow.
Kai came closer, sitting on the edge of the coffee table and reaching out to touch me again. He clearly thought I was in denial, but I knew Jude, and I knew her schedule that rarely differed.
“Danny,” he said gently, reaching out to brush my hair behind my ear. “Beautiful, is it possible—”
“No!” I snapped, reeling back in outrage. “No, it’s fucking not possible, Kai. God, why are you two so quick to write Jude off? She’s not some weak damsel. Just because she’s not a mercenary doesn’t mean she’s not a fighter. She would not die like this. This is… bullshit. Total bullshit.”
Leon gave a small grunt, pausing on a frame and returning it to normal speed. He angled it toward me, and my eyes locked on the screen… watching as my best friend in the whole fucking world limped along the pavement and entered the building. The time stamp on the frame was from forty-five minutes earlier.
“Sh-she could have left again,” I said, sounding weak even to my own ears. “She might have gone home to get… something. But gone back to work again?” I shifted my eyes to Leon, silently pleading with him to give me good news. He did love dramatic pauses and suspenseful moments; maybe this was one of those?
His answering gaze was full of sympathy, though, and it made me want to vomit.
“If she did, it wasn’t out this door,” he told me quietly. “But I know you need proof, so just… gimme a sec.” He turned back to his computer and searched through some nearby security cameras until he found someone’s doorbell camera that faced the emergency exit of Jude’s building. The only other way out.