Page 30 of Nico

Which made me wonder how much the stalker knew. Had they simply changed their approach by coincidence, or had they somehow realized we'd examined the first gift?

I couldn't prove either possibility.

The similarities between the gifts were circumstantial at best. The references to Ailwyn and the theme of devotion were enough to make me suspicious, but they didn't prove the gifts had come from the same person.

And even if they had, this gift wasn't giving us anything we could use to identify them.

All the new mail, including the flowers, had been cleared by security. Unlike the first gift, there was no missing security sticker to make us wonder how it had gotten into the pile in the first place.

We had no way of knowing whether someone had bought them locally and slipped them into Logan's mail, or had arranged for them to be sent from somewhere else entirely.

Until the stalker gave us something we could trace or did something serious enough for the authorities to act on, there wasn't much they could do.

If all the stalker intended to send were ordinary flowers and printed cards, we could spend weeks going through them and still end up exactly where we were now. With nothing.

A knock sounded at the door, and I looked up to find Isaac peeking inside.

“You guys can come in,” I said.

He opened the door wider, and he and Logan stepped into the trailer. Logan looked like he'd just gotten out of costume and makeup, his hair still slightly tousled from the long day of filming.

He looked exhausted enough that I wondered how he'd even made it back here without collapsing.

Isaac directed him toward the sofa at the back of the trailer, where Logan dropped down with an audible slump and covered his eyes with one arm. Without being asked, Isaac reached over and turned down the brightness of the lights.

“Better?”

“Much.” While Logan settled into the sofa, Isaac came over to me.

“Anything?” he asked quietly.

Up close, I caught his scent. Sun-warmed grass and something deeper underneath it, a faint trace of sweat and musk after a long day spent working outdoors.

I tried not to think too much about how much I liked it. Instead, I handed him the card and gestured toward the flowers.

Isaac pulled the card from the envelope and read the message, then turned the envelope over and checked inside, as though there might somehow be something we'd missed.

Finding nothing, he looked back at the flowers. “So... more of the same.”

I nodded. Isaac let out a long breath, and I could see the frustration settling over him. It was different from Logan's exhaustion.

Logan looked as though he simply needed sleep, while Isaac looked like a man who knew exactly what he wanted to do and hated that none of it would make a difference.

I couldn't stand seeing how defeated he looked.

“The gifts aren't random,” I said. “I mean it. I'm pretty sure they're all from the same person. They're all connected to Ailwyn, and there are patterns in the way the messages are written.”

“Even if the gifts themselves have changed?” Isaac asked.

“Especially then.” I gestured toward the flowers. “This is different from the first one, but it's still connected to the game. If they keep sending things, eventually we'll have more information to work with.”

I knew it probably sounded like I was trying to reassure him. Maybe I was, but I believed it, too.

Something in Isaac's expression softened.

“Thank you,” he said. “For all this. You've done a lot more than you had to.”

I shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable with the sincerity in his voice.