“I can do that,” I reply, relieved to have someone else take over the situation.
“And don’t blame yourself. Parrish wouldn’t do that to someone he cares about.” Maxx gives my hair a tousle before sliding his phone from his pocket and heading down the foyer toward the kitchen. He’s right though, isn’t he? Parrish cares more about other people than he does himself. He wouldn’t run off, even if he regretted last night. He just wouldn’t; I have to believe that.
“Get going,” Chas says, gesturing with his head in the direction of the stairs. “Let’s find our fucking friend.”
As soon as I get upstairs, I take out my secret phone to look for messages. If Parrish were going to contact me, he’d probably do it via this number.
There’s nothing from him. But there is a text from an unknown number.
I click the message, just in case. Maybe he’s contacting me from someone else’s phone? Maybe he, too, woke up in a field like Lumen, drunk from the night before? Who knows what he did after I left his room? It’s possible that he had a crisis of conscience and panicked, tried to self-medicate or something. Much as I hate to entertain the idea that sleeping with me could cause so much distress.
Fortunately, the text seems to hold some answers.
I found Parrish. Can you call me right away? Don’t tell Tess.
A rush of relief fills me. He’s with someone, a friend probably. He’s okay. He’s safe. I very quickly make the call, but nobody answers. I’m about to try again when a video call comes through from the same number, and I accept it.
I’m smiling. At first.
The call connects, and it takes me a full minute to recognize what I’m looking at.
It’s Parrish, that’s for sure. Only … it’s Parrish tied to a chair and bleeding. And oh my god, there’s so much blood. It’s fucking everywhere. My head swims and my vision blurs as I blink through the panic and my mind scrambles to make sense of what I’m seeing.
“Dakota,” he says, his voice ragged and pain-riddled. He barely looks coherent, like he’s on the verge of passing out. What. the. fuck. is going on here?!
“Parrish.” His name is barely a breath, a promise, a desperate wish as it leaves my suddenly dry mouth. “Where are you? What’s going on?”
He shakes his head briefly, his body sagging against the chair. Behind him, I can see a wine cellar, row after row of glimmering bottles against a stone wall. But that’s about it. No other clues immediately present themselves, and I’m too freaked out to look for them anyway.
“I need you to do something for me,” Parrish continues, lifting his head up to look at the camera. His body looks worn out, but his eyes are sharp, glimmering with violence and unspoken things. “You need to go downstairs and ask Tess a question.”
“I’ll do you one better: I’m getting the detectives.” I stand up suddenly, but Parrish’s voice cuts through my resolve.
“No. Dakota, no.” His eyes flick to one side, like he’s looking at someone just off-screen before turning back to me. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?” I blurt out, my own body flooded with so much adrenaline that my hand is wracked with tremors.
“If you do that,” Parrish begins, licking the edge of his bloodied mouth with his tongue before refocusing on me again. “He’s going to kill me.”
Those words echo in my skull, like a bullet bouncing around my brain, destroying me from the inside out. I somehow end up in Parrish’s room, pacing ruts in the floor the way Tess was doing earlier. But she’s working on fears and assumptions: I’m working on facts.
Parrish is tied to a chair.
Parrish is wounded and bloody.
Parrish doesn’t want me to talk to the cops.
“Here’s what I need you to do. I need you to go downstairs, and I need you to ask Tess a question. Can you do that for me?” Even as he was pleading with me to save his life, his voice was calm, almost soothing, like he was trying to hold my hand through this.
That just about killed me, the way he looked at me like he was sorry for putting me in this position. As if he has anything to be sorry about at all.
“I can’t answer any of your questions, not yet. First, you need to find Tess. You need to ask her about a man named ‘Justin Prior’.”
Justin Prior.
I tried looking him up online, but it’s a common name. There wasn’t anything special or noteworthy for me to find. I even tried combinations like ‘Justin Prior Tess Vanguard Medina’ and other random collections of keywords. Nothing. Fucking nothing.
Now here I am panicking because I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I can go down there and ask Tess about some random guy while she’s in the middle of a crisis, wondering if her son has been hurt or killed while I know the answers to all of those questions. He’s alive. He’s hurt. He might be dead if I don’t do this.
