Page 106 of Bought for Blood

I sit with that thought. Time passes.

Outside, somebody sets a ladder against the wall.

The first screw comes out and drops to the ground below. Then the second.

I don’t look at the window. I sit in the corner with my back against the stone, and I turn my right hand over, and I keep my eyes on the mark she left on it.

Chapter 32

Serenity

Grace is folded into the armchair under a blanket with her boots still on. She wouldn’t leave. They gave me a room with a bed in it, and I sit on the floor with my back against it and watch her sleep, because I spent a year believing I’d never get to watch her do anything again.

I don’t sleep.

The pull doesn’t sleep either. It sits under my ribs all night, dragging at the same spot, pointing the same way. My wolf has been pacing since we got into this room, and it’s making my skin itch. Sitting here is going to make us both crazy.

He’s alive. He was alive at ten past one, and he’s alive now.

Sometime after dawn, Grace opens her eyes and finds me looking at her.

“You didn’t sleep.”

“No.”

“Sery.” She pushes the blanket off. “You have to eat, then. Pick one.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“It’s how it works today.”

She marches me to a dining hall full of strangers and puts a tray in front of me, and I eat because she watches every bite. It’s the first time in a year that anybody has fussed over me.

A young man in a gray jacket finds us before noon.

“Miss Sangrey. Viktor’s asking for you. Both of you.”

The same room as last night, with the same people I met then. The map is still on the screen, but there’s a new mark on it now, a red circle a long way north of the compound. Viktor stands at the head of the table. Jericho has his laptop and three empty coffee cups. Craven is by the wall. Nadia. Decker, who pulls out a chair for Grace before she reaches the table.

“Sit down,” Viktor says to me. “We found where the call went.”

Jericho turns the laptop around. “The night Bastien watched the manager phone his superiors, the call went out from the desk line. I traced it through the network. It rang at a gravel quarry a hundred and fifty miles north of the compound. The quarry’s been closed for twelve years, but the power was never cut, and there’ve been truck deliveries going in for at least the last two.”

“You think it’s their headquarters?” Viktor frowns.

“Unlikely. No office calls out of it, just short check-ins on a schedule. It’s a place they move people through.”

North.

I look at the red circle, and my wolf homes in on it.

“That’s where he is,” I say.

“That’s where the call went,” Viktor says. “It may be where they took the people from the compound. It may be a way station. It may be a dead office with a phone in it. We don’t know yet.”

“I know it.” I stand up. “I felt a pull. It started the minute his transmitter went dead, and it hasn’t stopped. It drags in one direction no matter which way I’m facing. I couldn’t have drawn your map. But I could have drawn that line.” I put my finger on the red circle. “It points there.”

Viktor takes his time answering. He doesn’t argue with me. That’s worse than arguing.