Page 125 of The Silent Note

“Not quite.”

I look up hopefully.

Zane dangles a key from his finger.

I snap it up and inspect it from back to front. “What is this?”

“The cleaning lady at the prison said Slavno left it for us. The logo is from a storage company. Finn and I thought the evidence would be locked in the storage container, but we checked and the key doesn’t belong to any of the lockers there.”

“So we search outside of the city,”Sloane says.

“So we search outside of the city,” I blurt. “We search the entire country if we have to.”

“I thought the same.”

“Great, then let’s?—”

Zane shakes his head. “But seeing you now, I realize why we can’t do that.”

“Zane.”

“Searching everywhere is what you’ve been doing, and it’s not an effective use of our time. Besides it might be useless. I have no idea who that cleaning lady was or if she really heard from Slavno. It could be The Grateful Project leaders trying to put us off the scent. It’s possible this key has nothing to do with Slavno at all.”

“We’re missing something. That bastard wasn’t stupid. He would have kept evidence just in case they got rid of him.”Sloane paces in the other direction.

“Slavno would have kept evidence,” I say.

“We don’t know that he did. The only thing we know is that you’re in danger and the deeper we dig into this, the more dangerous it gets.”

His voice is a dangerously low timbre, caught somewhere between Jarod Cross’s husk and Dutch’s grit. It’s a little terrifying.

A few minutes ago, this frightening enigma was about to confess that he loves me. But love is a word with many different meanings and it takes many different forms.

Romeo and Juliet dying in each other’s arms.

Othello driven to madness by jealousy.

Orpheus descending into the underworld for his wife Eurydice.

Like them, Zane’s love feels like obsession.

Like death.

Dark. Insatiable. Inevitable.

Sloane implores me with her big blue eyes.“We’re so close. I can feel it.”

“We came too far to stop now,” I murmur.

“Don’t think of it as stopping. Consider it a ‘pause’.”

“Pause?” I frown. “That’s another word for stop.”

“More like taking a step back.” Zane has his hands out like he’s approaching a rabid dog. “You’ve been running non-stop, beating your head against this case foryears. Maybe you’re too close to this. Maybe you need a break to come at it from a different angle.”

“And if I don’t stop? If I keep going? What are you going to do?” I tip my chin up in challenge.

He looks down with a scowl. “You want to fight,wife?”