Page 96 of Royal

However, it wasn’t Royal I saw when I turned the corner.

“Brysen?” I fell down beside him and slid a hand behind his back, gently lifting him to a sitting position. “What happened?”

He whimpered and swayed in my arms. Blood trickled from a cut on his forehead, and his neck was pink and bruised.

“There was…he took…” Brysen’s eyes fluttered before he slumped against me. “Help him.”

“He needs to go to the hospital,” Phoenix said. “I’ll call for an ambulance.”

I nodded to him before looking down at Brysen. He was still conscious, but only just.

“What happened to Royal?” I asked, my voice breaking just like my heart.

“H-he took him.”

Brysen could’ve had a concussion, and he looked like he was about to pass out. Every second mattered, though. If Ameinias had Royal…we had hours to find him. The killer never held anyone longer than that.

“Did you see what he looked like?” I pressed for more information, desperate. We had a description from Janice, but he could’ve changed his hair or anything over the past five days.

“B-brown hair. Black eyes. M-maybe-five-foot-nine.” Brysen’s hazel eyes held my gaze. He was hardly staying alert, but I could see his struggle. His fight to keep talking. “Scars on his hands.”

The ambulance arrived, and the EMTs talked to Brysen, asked him questions while looking at his pupils. The cut on his head had stopped bleeding, and they reassured me that head wounds tended to bleed more than others and looked a lot worse than they actually were. They decided to take him to the hospital just in case, though.

I didn’t have Kyler’s number, so I grabbed Brysen’s phone and found his contact. The Spring Fever Festival had ended days before, but he and Declan had stayed a while longer since Declan had finished filming a movie and had a break in his schedule.

“Hey, B,” Kyler answered on the third ring. “We still meeting for lunch today?”

“Um. Hi,” I said. “This is Grayson Riley.”

I told him about Brysen’s assault and that he was being taken to the hospital.

“We’re on our way,” Kyler responded, worry filling his slightly raspy voice. “Where’s Royal? Is he still on lockdown at the hotel?”

I didn’t want to tell Kyler over the phone. Fuck, it was hard just to say it out loud. But he deserved to know. Royal had said he, Kyler, and Brysen were like three peas in a pod. The three musketeers.

“We believe Royal was…” My throat tightened and my eyes stung. “He was taken.”

Once I got off the phone with Kyler and knew Brysen was okay, I turned to Phoenix. His expression was sympathetic at first, because I knew he saw the pain in my eyes, but then he pinned me with a determined stare.

“We’ll find him,” he said, squeezing my shoulder before letting his hand fall away.

The clock was ticking. And I feared the moment when the ticking stopped.

***

“I don’t understand what we’re missing,” Luke said, as he went over the Lauren Parks case again. “She was the first one he targeted. Something leading up to her death was his snapping point. But what was it?”

“I don’t really give a goddamn what made him snap and kill her,” I said, clenching my fists and refraining from punching the wall. “He has Royal right now. Here in Addersfield. We need to be out searching everywhere for him, not sitting here fucking twiddling our thumbs and trying to figure out what made this psycho a psycho in the first place.”

“I know it’s hard, but you need to calm down,” Phoenix said, studying me. “Losing your temper won’t get us anywhere.”

“This isn’t getting us anywhere, either!”

Fuck it. I punched the damn wall.

It’d been years since I reverted back to my old anger issues and lost control, but I was losing more than my control. I was losing my mind with worry. Every time a phone rang, my heart seized in my chest—fucking stopped beating—because I feared it was news that a body had been found. That Royal had been found dead.

If I got that call…