Page 107 of Ruthless Possession
"Bathroom." I'm already moving. "She went to the bathroom."
Carter and Kane are on their feet. The scrape of chairs and the low, urgent sound of multiple people standing at once fills the private room behind me as I push through the door into the main restaurant.
The hallway is narrow and bright and completely normal. A server passes me with a tray and looks startled by my expression.
I hit the bathroom door with my palm. "Morgan."
Nothing.
I push it open. Empty. Two stalls, both doors open. The tap dripping. The paper towel dispenser half unrolled on the counter.
The smell of her perfume, faint, already fading.
She was here.
But she's not here now.
I back out into the hallway. Trenton is right behind me.
"Not there," I say.
His jaw tightens. One small movement, barely visible, and then it's gone and his face is back to that controlled flatness. "Her phone."
Right. The app. The one we set up after the cabin, after the safe room, after the night three hired men came through our perimeter and Harris left a severed deer head on our porch. The one Morgan rolled her eyes at and then admitted, two days later, made her feel better.
I pull out my phone. My hands are steady. I notice that with a kind of detached awareness, the same awareness that kicks in when everything goes wrong and the body decides that shaking is a luxury it can't afford right now.
The app loads. Her dot appears.
Stationary. Behind the restaurant. Not moving.
"Back door," I say.
We move fast, not running yet, because running means panic and panic means mistakes, but we're fast, with Carter and Kane flanking us as we push through the emergency exit at the end of the hallway.
The cold air hits me first. The loading area is dim, lit only by the red glow of the exit sign overhead and the distant orange wash of the parking lot lights beyond the dumpsters.
I see it immediately.
The crack in the screen catches the light. Her phone, faced down on the concrete, a spiderweb fracture spreading from one corner. Lying exactly where it fell, or exactly where it was dropped, three feet from the dumpster.
I crouch and pick it up. The screen is still illuminated.
A text from Trixie's number: Back entrance. Let me in? Surprise! Couldn't miss this after all.
The cold in my chest has nothing to do with the November air.
I read it again. The punctuation is wrong. Trixie texts in fragments and capital letters and strings of emojis. She once sent me seventeen consecutive exclamation points to express her feelings about a parking ticket. This message is clean. Measured. Every word placed.
"It's not from Trixie," I say. My voice sounds far away. "He has her phone."
Trenton is already on his own phone, moving away from the door. I hear him say Greyson's name, hear the clipped efficiency of a man issuing orders, hear the word perimeter and the word now.
Kane crouches near the edge of the loading area, examining the ground. "Tire marks. Fresh. They went east."
I look at the tire marks. Then I look at the text again. Then I look at the door we just came through, the door Morgan pushed open without hesitation because she thought her friend needed her, because that's who she is, and Harris knew that and built this entire thing around it.
He planned this.
