by Danah Logan
"Hey, guys," her hesitant voice comes through the speaker. "God, this is weird." She chuckles to herself, wringing her hands. "Um…I know you are worried about me, and I'm so so sorry that I haven't been able to contact you sooner. I, uh… I just wanted you guys to see that I'm fine." She points at her head. "This is from the accident. A fox ran across the road when I left school after the whole Kat thing, and I crashed my Jeep. We all learned you're not supposed to swerve the wheel to avoid an animal, but as you can see, I did it anyway." She shrugs sheepishly, and I feel the all too familiar flutter in my belly when I look at her. "I promise it was an accident." She takes a deep breath, and her eyes flicker briefly to the side. "Which I told Rhys during my brief call with him. I can't tell you where I am or with whom, but I want you to know that I'm ok and that I'll be back soon. I will make everything right. For everyone. I promise." Lilly's eyes start glossing over, and she wipes them—it is clear what she is thinking, or more likely of whom. "All of you are receiving the same video, but I wanted to say something to each of you individually." She pauses and glances to the side as if waiting for a signal. "Wes." The boy next to me makes a choked sound while she continues. "I want to thank you for being there for Rhys and for letting him crash on your couch. Being there with you gives him a lot of, uh, comfort. Den…hey, babe. I'm pretty sure you're at Wes’s right now, and that also means the world to me, knowing the three of you are together and there for each other." Den's hands are covering her mouth, and tears are running down her face. I wrap my arm around her shoulder, and she leans into me. "Rhys. None of this is your fault. I'm fine, and everything will be ok." I read between the lines; she means us and our relationship. George told her that I got cut off yesterday. "I need you to do me a favor. Please show this video to Mom and Dad, but no one else. I need them to know that I'm fine and that I'm coming home soon. You cannot tell anyone about this message, and I apologize in advance about what I have to do to make sure unwanted eyes won’t see it. Den and Wes, I really hope you backed up your phones." What the—? While Wes dives for his phone, Lilly continues, "Rhys, once you play this video again, your phone will wipe itself. I’m sorry."
Man, Nate is good. Or is it Lilly who’s doing all this?
"One last thing." She doesn’t attempt to hide the tears now. "Mom, Dad, Rhys, Natty, Den, Wes, I love you. Please trust me. I’ll see you soon."
The video goes blank, and I hear Wes cursing under his breath.
"What the fuck. My phone is reset to factory setting." He looks at me incredulously.
Den is not moving away from me. Instead, she turns into my embrace and faces me. "You are not surprised."
I narrow my eyes at her. "What do you mean?"
"The way she worded everything. The way you acted when you got back. You've been in touch with her since…" Den states it so matter-of-factly that I'm at a loss for words.
My eyes hold hers, and I'm pleading with her to stop asking questions.
"I don't want to lie to you," I whisper so low that only she can hear it. Still engrossed in his phone, I doubt Wes is even paying attention.
Lilly's best friend stares at me for several moments before she disentangles herself from my arm. The unspoken message is clear, though; she will get her answers sooner or later. Denielle doesn't concede that readily; however, she trusts her best friend. She reaches for her phone and is not even phased when it’s reset as well.
"Thank goodness I have it set to back up every night." She shrugs and winks at Wes with a smug smile. That's the Denielle I know. She swipes a few times, types something in, and puts it back down. Glancing over, I see the small bar that indicates she's restoring her backup.
Wes is not that lucky and spends the next few hours copying over phone numbers from Den’s and my phones.
It’s been a week since I’ve last been home. The closer I get, the more my heart rate accelerates. Only one black SUV is parked in front of the house, and I pull straight into the garage into my spot. Agent Lanning and Agent Camden are in their usual places at the kitchen table.
Do they ever go home?
"Where is my father?" I address no one in particular.
Camden, the only female agent assigned to Lilly's case, looks up. "He is upstairs with your mother."
If she’s surprised to see me, she doesn’t let it show.
Climbing the stairs, my phone feels like it's burning a hole into the back pocket of my jeans.
I knock on the door before turning the knob and let myself into my parents’ room on the third floor. Mom is sitting on the bed, legs covered with a throw blanket, book on her lap, while Dad is in one of the chairs in the small sitting area, typing on his phone.
Mom straightens. "Honey!" The surprise in her voice is audible.
I'm frozen inside the doorframe. I force myself to unclench my jaw. " Can I come in?" I don't think I've ever asked to enter my parents' bedroom, but at this moment...
"Of course." Mom pats the spot next to her. Slowly, I make my way across the room, inhaling and exhaling through my nose. Dad tracks my every move.
I lower myself down next to my mother, and she wraps her arm around me. Leaning into her, my pulse calms a little. Mom has always had that ability.
I allow myself to relish in the sensation for a few heartbeats before turning toward Dad. "I need to show you something."
Bile rises in my throat, and I swallow several times.
Mom places a hand on my forehead. "Honey, you are covered in sweat. What’s wrong?"
Dad's eyes haven’t left mine, and I can see the wheels turning in his head. I shift so I can pull my phone from my jeans.
"Dad, you want to come over for this."
Eyebrows raised, my father pushes himself out of the chair and makes his way over to the bed. He sits on Mom’s other side.
I place my phone in my mother's hand; the video is already pulled up. She glances down and notices Lilly's frozen face immediately. "Oh, my God!" She grips the phone, glancing between my face and the screen.
Dad leans in and draws in a sharp breath. "Rhys?" His tone is almost detached, yet he is asking a million questions at once with just my name.
I press play for them, and my parents watch Lilly's video with wide eyes. Tears are streaming down Mom's cheeks, and even Dad is stunned. It's the first time since this all started that I'm seeing him with unfiltered emotion.
When the video finishes, my phone immediately goes dark.
Mom keeps pressing on the screen, but besides the little bar indicating that the phone is being reset, nothing else is happening.
Her gaze flicks between her husband and me. "What does this mean? She is ok? When is she coming home? I don't understand. Where is she? Why can't she tell us?"
I gently pry my phone from my mother's hands, and she turns to Dad as if he has the answers. "Tristen?"
My father stares at me like he knows that there is a lot more I'm not revealing—the same way he’s been keeping secrets from us. I hold his gaze, waiting for him to yell or interrogate me. Instead, my father stands up and storms out of the room.
Well, that’s not what I expected.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I'm glued to the screens. All six wall monitors in the NCC show the security feed, and I follow Rhys’s every move. When the tracker on his phone alerted us about movement fifteen minutes ago, my heart rate immediately doubled. By the time he pulls into the driveway, my hands are clammy, and I keep counting my breaths.
With Nate being coerced to host Celeste's birthday party, we knew he wouldn't be able to help today. Instead, he walked me through the necessary steps ahead of time. Before he went offline, I probed if my brother wasn't happy to see his fiancée this weekend, but he just grumbled something about "fucking Courriers everywhere" and "no privacy."
O-kay, then.
George chuckled but remained otherwise mute. He'd been planted on the leather couch in the NCC all day, reading a weathered-looking paperback. At one point, I asked flat out if he is suppo
sed to shadow me the entire weekend Nate is gone, to which he simply ignored me.
The feed doesn't have sound, but nonetheless, I haven’t looked away since the first picture appeared on the top left wall monitor hours ago. At one point, I maximized the kitchen to get a better look at the two strangers in the house. When Nate revealed the cameras to me a few days ago, a lot more agents were sitting at the table. I wondered why the number changed but then got distracted by movement in the master bedroom. I switched to that camera and watched Tristen place a throw on Heather's legs on the bed. Heat crept up my cheeks; I was invading their privacy.
But they have invaded your privacy for years, the voice piped up inside my head.
A beeping sound brought my attention to the screen on the desk. George got up and walked around to stand beside me.
"He’s on the move."
It’s time.
"What just happened?" I ask George with eyes that must resemble saucers.
Rhys sits with Heather on their bed, arm wrapped around his mother, while Tristen rushes out of the room. They watched my video, and the wipe routine activated as soon as the signal came through. I can't focus on the satisfaction that I was able to run all the commands and steps without Nate's guidance, because Tristen's reaction has completely thrown me off. I was prepared to see him be angry, question Rhys, maybe get upset like Heather, but as soon as the video finished, he jumped up and left.
George looks just as confused as I am. "I don’t know."
I focus on the other cameras in the house and find Tristen in his office, typing away on his laptop.
What the—?
An hour later, Heather looks like she is taking a nap, and Rhys makes his way to his room. The urge to talk to him is all-consuming. I want to know if Heather is okay, if he has any idea why Tristen has locked himself in his office, but I can't risk it. Rhys needs to initiate contact when it's safe.
My stomach rumbles, and George scowls. "When was the last time you've eaten?"
"Umm…" I rack my brain but come up blank.
"Let’s go," the man next to me commands and leaves the room without a second glance.
I look at the wall monitors one more time and decide to leave the feed up—no one is going to come in here.
I spend the rest of the afternoon between watching the camera feed of my house and working on a small project to keep myself busy. I’m not sure if Nate will be proud or upset if I manage to pull off what I set my mind to.
I'm updating another line of code when a video call pops up on the second screen on the desk. I glance over, expecting it to be my brother, but instead, I see Rhys’s name on the caller ID. Welcoming the familiar hornets in my belly, I answer the call, and Rhys’s face fills the screen.
A smile tugs on his mouth. "Hey, babe."
God, I’ve missed him looking at me like that.
"Hi," I sigh. Warmth is radiating through my body, our last conversation forgotten. I do a double-take. "Where are you?" It's dark around him, and his face is illuminated only by the phone's screen.
"In the car. Dad wants me home from now on, and the only way to call was telling him that I'm going to get my stuff from Wes’s."
"Oh." I’m biting my lip. "What happened? I don’t have any sound on this end."
Rhys snorts out a laugh. "Of course you were watching. Why am I not surprised?"
I grin sheepishly. "I was worried."
"Riiiight." He winks at me. "So, what did you see?"
That’s a good question.
"I saw you showing Heather and Tristen the video, Tristen running out and locking himself in his office, you in your room, and, uh, Heather taking a nap…" I trail off.
"You didn’t see Dad giving me the third degree?" Rhys asks surprised.
"No. When was that?"
He shrugs one shoulder. "As soon as I went to my room."
Crap.
"That must’ve been while I was in the kitchen."
A quizzical expression flits over Rhys’s face, but he doesn’t say anything.
"How is Heather? Please tell me I didn’t make it worse. I was just trying to help." I wrap my arms around myself, wishing it could be Rhys holding me.
He exhales slowly. "Mom was upset. She doesn't understand. She kept asking how I got the video, when you would be home. But I think seeing you, seeing that you are not injured and stuff, helped her."
Still hugging myself, my hands fist into the fabric of my shirt. "What did you tell her?"
Rhys stares off into the distance for several moments before he speaks. "I avoided answering her for the most part. I said, ‘Lilly wouldn’t send us this message unless it was the truth. No one would be able to manipulate her to lie to the people she loves. We have to believe that she is okay and will be able to give us answers when she is back.’"
My mouth hangs open, and I'm not sure what to reply. Pride and dread equally build inside of me. Rhys found a way to give Heather what I intended with the video, but at the same time, he also had to bend the truth again.
"Thank you," I whisper.
Rhys’s eyes are gentle. "You did the right thing. Though, I never would've expected you to send us a video," he chuckles. "You should've seen Wes’s face when his phone reset. I thought he was gonna cry like the time he ran over Riddell."
I bark out a laugh. Riddell was the football Wes got for his seventh birthday. It became the fourth member of the Sheats's family, and we used to make fun of Wes whenever he brought it along—which was all. The. Time. He treated Riddell like a little brother—until the day Wes got his license. The second he got home with his license in hand, Wes wanted to take his brand-new 4Runner for a ride. He backed out of the driveway, running over poor Riddell in the process. The whole scene was like a bad horror movie. You'd have thought someone had chopped off Wes’s arms for how he was wailing.
"You need to tell me how you did that. It was sick." Rhys shakes me out of the memory, and the proud undertone in his voice makes my cheeks heat.
"I will, but first, I want to know what Tristen said to you. Was he pissed?"
He leans his head against the headrest and stares at the roof of the car. "Confused would be a better description." Rhys looks back at the phone in his hand.
"Confused?" My brows draw together.
"The first thing he asked was what phone that is. When I told him it's mine, he wanted to see it. He inspected it as if you were gonna climb out of the screen like the creepy girl from The Ring. I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd busted out a screwdriver to take it apart."
Something clicks, and I smack my hand against my forehead. "He checked because the bug didn't alert him or record anything."
"WHAT?" Rhys’s voice goes an octave higher.
"You know your phone was bugged." Rhys nods. "It was a pretty sophisticated program, according to Nate. He wrote a subroutine that executed when you opened the text and deactivated the tracker," I explain proudly. Mainly because Nate made me write the execution part, and it actually worked.
Surprise, surprise.
"That's fucking insane. This sounds like a bad sci-fi movie." Rhys rubs his free hand across his face.
"What else did Tristen say?" That cannot have been all.
"He asked if this is the first time you contacted me. I told him yes. He kept staring at me forever and then walked out with my phone. I yelled after him, asking what he intended to do with it, but he didn't answer. You know how he gets." Rhys huffs a non-comical laugh. "He brought it back an hour later, saying I'm staying home from now on. I told him, 'Fuck that. I'm going back to Wes’s.' That's when it got interesting..."
I inhale sharply. Rhys’s expression speaks volumes. "What happened?"
"He went big bad Marine on my poor door. Slammed his palm against it, yelling I will remain at home, and that it is not up for discussion. All he has ever done was to keep us safe. Not you; he said us. He was dead serious. It was the first time he’s showed some type of reaction since you…uh, left."
Tristen is a professional. He doesn’t let emotions get the best of him. Ever. We’re missing something here.
"He is hiding something."
Rhys nods in agreement. "There is more than just him getting surprised by the video."
We sit in silence for several minutes before Rhys asks, "Now tell me, how did you pull that off?"
I open and close my mouth. My pulse accelerates. The last time I told him Nate had been teaching me, Rhys flipped his lid. "Do you really want to know?" My voice is low.
He picks up on my hesitation. "I’m not gonna go apeshit on you again, Cal. I promise."
I press my lips together, still not convinced.
"You surprised me last time," Rhys adds.
I take a deep breath. Here goes nothing. "It wasn't that difficult. Nate is a genius; he can type out the most complex code in a matter of minutes. And he's a good teacher. He says I'm a natural." I pause, assessing Rhys’s face. He seems relaxed and listening, so I continue. "Den’s and Wes’s videos had a subroutine with a counter and a timer. As soon as they opened their texts, the timer activated. The video is less than three minutes, so I implemented it for the wipe to execute five minutes after the message was opened. If they had played it, the counter would've started the wipe as soon as it switched to ‘played once’."
"You?" Rhys interrupts.
"Um, yes. Nate helped with the main part, though." My cheeks heat.
"What about my video?" Rhys’s tone is now emotionless, and I don’t want to continue.
"Calla?" he pushes.
"Are you mad?" I can’t help but ask.
"Uh, not mad. I don't know. I guess it's a bit weird that you are so into it." He sucks in his lower lip and looks off to the side. When I think he won't say anything else, he adds with a wink, "But I also think it's pretty hot that you can do this."