22
Owen and I went back out through the open office window, crossed the roof, and climbed down the trellis. Finn and Bria were waiting by the pool, guns in hand, once again hunkered down behind the patio furniture.
“Now what?” Finn’s green gaze darted back and forth, on the lookout for any servants or guards.
“Now we spread out and expand our search,” I said. “Just because Elissa wasn’t in the mansion, that doesn’t mean Rivera doesn’t have her stashed around here somewhere. Maybe he’s holding her in one of the outbuildings. So let’s split up again and look for her.”
The others nodded, and Finn pulled out his phone and texted Silvio, telling him what we were doing next. Almost immediately, Finn’s phone lit up with a new message.
“Silvio, Jade, and Ryan are still in position on the street outside the front of the mansion,” Finn said. “Everything’s quiet on that side of the estate, and none of the guards have moved away from their posts. We’re still in the clear.”
I nodded. “Let’s get to work, then.”
Finn and Bria went left, and Owen and I went right.
As with many such places in Northtown, Damian Rivera’s estate was like its own little city. Several sheds and outbuildings surrounded the main structure on both sides, positioned in small clusters of trees to blend in with the rest of the immaculate landscaping.
Owen and I went from one shed and outbuilding to the next, careful to stay out of sight of the guards patrolling the front of the mansion. He kept watch while I slipped inside every structure that we came to and searched for Elissa. The sheds held everything from lawn mowers and other gardening equipment, to cleaning supplies for the pool, to red and green plastic tubs filled with all the holiday lights and decorations that had covered the mansion. We moved carefully, quickly, and quietly, looking at all the supplies, peering into the cobwebbed corners, and searching the floors for any trapdoors or sublevels.
But there was nothing. No women’s clothes or accessories spread out across a table, no telltale footprints made by a woman’s stilettos in the dust, no gold tubes of lipstick glimmering on a shelf. There wasn’t a single sign of Elissa anywhere.
More and more frustration surged through me, burning like acid in my veins, and once again, I got the nagging feeling that I was missing something important, something obvious. Ten minutes later, Owen and I had cleared all the buildings on our side of the property, and we snuck back to the pool area.
“Finn, Bria, you guys got anything?” I asked through the transmitter.
Finn’s voice crackled back to me a second later. “Nothing. Nothing at all, and we’ve looked everywhere on this side of the estate. I don’t even see any ropes that might be used to tie someone down. If Elissa is here, then Rivera is doing a bang-up job of hiding her.”
Even more frustration spiked through me, and I reached up and massaged my forehead, which was suddenly aching. “All right. You guys sneak out through the woods on that side of the mansion and go meet up with Silvio, Jade, and Ryan out front. Owen and I will make sure that we didn’t overlook anything and go out through the woods in the back the same way we came in. We’ll see you guys in a few minutes.”
“Roger that.” Finn signed off again.
Owen looked over at me. “We’ll find her, Gin. I know we will.”
I let out a long, tense breath. “I wish I had your confidence. It seems like all I’ve done the past few days is run around in circles, going nowhere fast.”
He lifted his hand and cupped my cheek, his warm, strong fingers stroking my face. “You’ll get somewhere. I know you will.”
I grabbed his hand and pressed a kiss to his palm. “I love you for saying that, and I love you even more for actually believing it. So let’s go over everything again. Elissa has to be here somewhere. She just has to be.”
We left the patio behind and took the same route as before, avoiding the guards and working our way from one outbuilding to the next, checking to make sure that we’d looked absolutely everywhere. But we had, and there was nothing for us to do but head back across the lawn.
Ten minutes later, we were at the very back of the estate, getting ready to step into the woods, when a series of low mutters caught my ear. I stopped and turned around, scanning the grounds, wondering where the sounds were coming from, since we were several hundred feet away from the mansion now. And I realized that there was one place that we hadn’t searched yet.
The caretaker’s cottage.
My eyes narrowed, and I reached out with my Stone magic, listening. Sure enough, the stones of the cottage were the ones that were muttering, the harsh notes repeating over and over again, almost as if they were the words to a song ringing in my ears.
Blood, violence, pain, death . . . blood, violence, pain, death . . .
According to the info that Finn and Silvio had dug up, Bruce Porter had lived in the caretaker’s cottage for years. As Rivera’s head of security, Porter oversaw all the other guards and the servants. He would know every little thing that went on here, including his boss’s proclivities. Porter probably wouldn’t have any problem letting Rivera use his cottage, as long as the dwarf got to keep his cushy job. The building was also isolated enough to keep the other guards and servants from realizing what was really going on inside. That was why no one had talked, like Bria had thought they might.
Owen noticed that I wasn’t following him, and he stopped and turned around. “What is it?” He raised his gun. “What’s wrong?”
“The cottage,” I murmured.
“But Finn looked in through the windows when we first got here,” he said. “Elissa wasn’t inside.”
I reached out with my magic again, listening to the continued shrieks of the stone.
Blood, violence, pain, death . . . blood, violence, pain, death . . .
And I realized that the sounds were harsher, louder, fresher than they had been two nights ago. Emotional vibrations faded with time. They didn’t grow stronger. Not unless someone was around to make the sounds increase with her sharp terror and stomach-churning fear.
“Gin?” Owen asked again.
Blood, violence, pain, death . . . blood, violence, pain, death . . .
“Elissa wasn’t anywhere that Finn could see through the windows,” I murmured again. “And he couldn’t hear the stones. Not like I can. But she’s in there. I know she is. C’mon.”
I headed in that direction, with Owen following me. Through my earpiece, I heard Finn say that he and Bria were back safely at their car and would hold their positions until we met them, but I tuned him out, far more interested in what the stones had to say at the moment.
Owen and I crept back over to the cottage. Even though it was still afternoon, Porter had left a couple of lights on inside. I walked all around the structure, peering into every single window, but it seemed as empty as when Finn had checked it. Owen came with me, still watching my back. Eventually, we wound up back at the front of the cottage.
I tried the door, but it was locked. And not just a simple lock like those that had been on all the mansion doors. This one had three dead bolts all in a row. That was total overkill—unless you had something to hide.
Like the girl you’d kidnapped and were planning to murder.
“Gin?” Finn’s voice sounded through my earpiece. “We have a problem. Rivera’s car is pulling in through the front gate. He’s already back from the bank. Looks like Mosley wasn’t able to stall him as long as we’d hoped.”
I checked my watch. We’d been searching for Elissa for more than an hour. It would take me several more minutes to make Ice picks and to actually finesse all three locks open, and Damian Rivera could come here at any moment to check on his hostage. So I decided to be direct about things. I gestured for Owen to stand back, and then I put my hand on the door, right over the locks, and blasted them all with my Ice magic.
Three inches of elemental Ice coated the dead bolts in a matter of seconds. The wood and metal shrieked and groaned in protest, almost as loudly as the stones were still muttering, but I ignored the sounds, sent out another wave of magic, and blasted right through the locks and all of the surrounding wood. Broken bits of metal flew through the air, along with long splinters and sharp, needle-like pieces of my elemental Ice.
The second the locks busted open, a loud alarm blared, and lights started flashing inside the cottage, which only made me even more convinced that Elissa was inside.
“What is that?” Finn yelled in my ear. “What did you do, Gin?”
“Just a little breaking and entering!” I shouted back at him over the continued din of the alarm.
“Well, I can hear it all the way out here on the street!” he yelled again. “Which means that the guards can hear it too!”
“Stay here,” I told Owen. “I’ll go inside and search for Elissa.”
He nodded and raised his gun, his gaze locked on the mansion in the distance, where the interior and exterior lights were also flashing in time to the cottage’s alarm system. He would watch my back and hold off the guards as long as he could, but I needed to do my part fast. So I put my shoulder down, rammed the door open, and hurried inside.
The front part of the cottage was one enormous open space that was a den, kitchen, and dining area all in one. I’d already seen all of this through the windows, so I moved over to a door that led into a bedroom and shoved it open. Elissa wasn’t in this room either, so I wrenched open the closet door. That too was empty, so I headed into the attached bathroom. Still no sign of her, so I went back out into the main part of the cottage, looking around again.
Now that I was actually inside the structure, the stones’ shrieks were harsher and louder than ever before, ringing in my ears right along with the alarm. This was definitely the place where Rivera held his victims for days on end before he beat and strangled them to death. But where was Elissa? If she was yelling at me to help her, I couldn’t hear her over the alarm’s constant blaring.
So I moved through the cottage again, searching everywhere, and counting off the seconds in my head. Owen and I probably had about five minutes before the guards would arrive in full force, and I needed to find Elissa and get her out of here before then.
I had started to go back into the bedroom to search in there again, even though I’d already cleared that area, when I noticed a crack in the stone floor, one that was peeping out from underneath the corner of a rug that I’d pushed aside with my boots when I first stormed in here. I glanced at the surrounding stones, but the crack didn’t match the rest of the floor pattern.
So I slid my knife back up my sleeve, dropped to the floor, and ripped the rug aside. A secret trapdoor was set into the floor, complete with a large metal ring to open it. I grabbed the ring with both hands and pulled on it with all my might, but the thick door was far too heavy for me to open.
Since I didn’t have the strength to pull up the trapdoor, I decided to go right down through it. I dropped back to my knees, slapped my palms on the floor, and blasted it with my Ice and Stone magic, just like I had done to the front door.
The floor was much harder and thicker than the wooden door had been, but I was motivated, and I forced my Ice magic down into the trapdoor, used my Stone power to crack it away, hooked my fingers into the jagged chunks of rocks, and tossed them aside as fast as I could. The sharp, splintered rocks cut into my hands, but I ignored the painful stings and focused all my magic on the floor.
Ice, Stone, blast, blast, grab, lift, throw away . . .
I repeated the motions over and over again until I’d blasted the entire trapdoor out of the way. I waved away a cloud of gray dust, leaned over, and peered down through the jagged hole that I’d made in the floor.
A glimmer of gold glinted in the dark space below.
For a moment, the odd, horrible thought filled my mind that I’d only discovered Rivera’s stash of lipstick. But the dust cleared, and I realized that the golden glimmer was actually a strand of long blond hair.
I’d finally found Elissa.