Page 160 of Captive Audience

How dare he walk away.

63

ASHA

Iswiped at my wet cheeks and drew in a deep breath.

Pull yourself together, Asha.

Now wasn’t the time for tears. It was time for action. It wasn’t too late to change Rook’s mind and salvage what we had.

I grabbed my phone and dialed his number. The call didn’t even ring.

The number you have dialed is not connected.

I tried again, but the same flat recording played back at me.

Damn him. Damn him to hell.

I wasn’t giving up that easily. I scrolled to Orla’s contact and hit Call.

She answered on the second ring. “Asha.” Her Irish lilt was thick with fatigue.

She already knows.

“I need to see him,” I snapped, pacing my living room like a caged animal. “Tell him to stop acting like a coward.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

There was a long pause before she answered. “Because he’s gone.”

My stomach pitched, and I froze. “Where?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice softened. “He told us he needed timeaway. Said he was heading back to Ireland, but he refused to give us a town, not even a county. Just…gone.”

“What about Aidan? Torin? He must’ve told them where?—”

“He didn’t.” Orla’s voice quavered, which scared me more than anything, because it meant she was telling the truth and was also hurt by Rook’s abandonment. “If he wanted us to know where he was, he’d have told us. Don’t tear yourself apart looking. He won’t be found unless he wants to be.”

Orla was wrong.

Tracking people was what I did. I’d find Rook, too.

64

ROOK

The wind howled off the North Atlantic and rattled the loose panes in the cottage windows. Rain lashed the stone walls, seeping through cracks no matter how much patching I’d done.

The place had been falling apart when I’d found it. Slate roof leaking, chimney half collapsed, floorboards swollen and warped with damp. I’d thrown myself into fixing it by replacing tiles and reinforcing the sagging beams with timber hauled from piles at the edge of the property. I’d mended broken hinges, drafty doors, and a stove that smoked more than it heated.

The repairs gave me purpose, or at least kept my hands busy. But they never silenced my head.

I kept myself off-grid for a reason. No car, no bus stop, no train station for miles. The only way off this tiny island was a weekly ferry, and bad weather stopped it from crossing the North Channel often enough. But if there’d been an easy way out, I would have taken it. I’d end up halfway back to Philadelphia before I could stop.

So I let the storms cut me off. I lived on tinned food and water I boiled over a smoky fire. No wall power. No hot water. No phone.