Page 195 of The Silent Note

The flash drive bits disappeared.

Grey is gone.

Chapter Fifty-One

GREY

The days are one big blur.

After leaving the hotel, I spend every waking hour going through files, crouched on a tattered, moldy carpet like a zombie, hands rifling through document after document.

My mission? To find an alternative to the evidence on the flash drive.

But there’s nothing.

Not a scrap of evidence exists in the boxes we pilfered from Redwood Prep.

Today’s day twelve of the search, and I wake up to an excruciating headache and belly pain.

“Ugh.” I groan. Hand to my mouth, I stumble to the bathroom. The toilet is disgusting. There’s mold around the rims and stains inside the bowl, but the pain makes it hard to be scornful.

I grip the edges and retch into it.

My stomach contracts, letting out bile and spit.

It’s agony, but my body has nothing to expel. I can’t remember the last time I ate properly.

“You don’t look so good,”Sloane says, tiptoeing into the bathroom. She’s wearing her usual Redwood Prep skirt and blouse, but something’s strange. Her boobs look far bigger than usual.

Ignoring her, I stumble into the main room.

The sun pushes through the ugly curtain shading the heavily barred window. The sound of fluttering paper gets louder with my stride. I look down and see documents stuck to my body, my sweat acting as an adhesive.

“When was the last time you ate?”Sloane demands.

I push through the files on the ground until I find a half-eaten chocolate bar.

There’s an army of chocolate wrappers to my left. I’d limped to a vending machine two days ago, sensing that if I didn’t putsomethingin my body, I’d pass out. Which I did anyway. My phone died, and I’m pretty sure I was unconscious for a solid twelve hours.

“Grey, you need to stop before you kill yourself.”

Stop? I can’t stop.

Time is of the essence. There is nothing I can do to expose Sloane’s killer. Nothing I can say that will bring down the yakuza.

A pebble like me can’t take down a mountain.

But I’ve come too far to back down now.

“How many times do I have to tell you that you tried your best. You need to let it go now.”

My gaze drops to her hands, which are free of blood. The violent image cleared up when I decided to take a sabbatical from Redwood, move into a motel in the middle of nowhere, and go through the files.

Hiding out here felt like I had a purpose again.

I felt likemeagain.

Before Zane, before The Kings, before the grand, sparkling world that they dragged me into, it was just like this.