Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,106

turned the phone to show Eric. “She’s going through an area with no service. She’s in the foothills there, spotty service all over the place.”

Shit. I felt like my head was going to explode.

“Why does Lagan want Joan?” Eric asked. “What’s the angle?”

“He’s a crazy asshole with a God complex and a vendetta against her because she tried to blow him up and scrapped his deal. Because he’s sitting on millions of dollars worth of drugs with no distribu—”

Shit. Oh. Shit. Distribution. This was about the drugs.

This was about me.

I turned away from Eric and took a deep breath before texting Lagan. Playing it cool just in case I was wrong.

The good times begin when?

There was nothing. For heartbeat after heartbeat.

They start when you get here. Start driving toward Atlanta. Alone. Alert police or anyone else and Olivia and her sister will get a bullet in their heads. More instructions to come.

“What’s going on?” Eric asked me, and I turned around, every wild and seething emotion on lockdown. Stone cold. That was me. And Eric saw it, his eyes flaring for just a minute.

“I’m going after her.”

“Alone?” Eric asked.

I didn’t even bother answering that question and Eric didn’t ask it again. I liked that about him. He would do the same thing in my position. “Stay in touch with your FBI guys. Call me with updates.” I gave him my cellphone number and he plugged it into his contacts.

“You know, maybe we’re wrong,” Eric said. “Maybe Jennifer did get out in the commotion.”

“Maybe,” I lied, because I knew Lagan wasn’t kidding around with that bullet in the brain. Just like he hadn’t been kidding around with the pills.

“Is there anything else you need?”

“Yeah. A car.”

Chapter 27

Joan

I turned off the highway onto a smaller road, heading toward Pickens, a town that according to all the signs was really excited about their azaleas. The road was a twisty thing and I kept my eyes peeled for South Glassy Mountain Road. I was exhausted and buzzing again from the energy drinks and coffee, and my heart was pounding against my ribs like it wanted to get out.

I had the address she’d given me on a piece of paper I kept checking like it might have changed in the seconds since I last checked it.

Jennifer. Jennifer was only a few minutes away.

I took another left and the mountains got more serious. Pickens was a blink and you’ll miss it kind of place, and I left it in my rearview mirror.

My face felt hot and I realized I was crying. Floods of tears streamed down my face. I wasn’t sobbing or trying to catch my breath. I was just…leaking.

Fucking Max. I brushed the tears off my face with the back of my hands. I wasn’t going to miss him. There was nothing there to miss.

Except how good he made me feel. Except how, when looking at him, when talking to him…there’d been a sense of something more. A crack in the walls I lived behind. A glimpse of blue sky and green grass and sunlight.

That’s why I was crying. Turning my back on that wasn’t easy. Because that little glimpse of more—it had looked good. Like a life I might want someday.

But today was about Jennifer.

The longer I drove, the more certain I was that this was a trap. And part of me wanted to believe that was just my skepticism. Because really, what were the odds that she got out?

But the other part of me had built a life raft of faith and hope and dreams and wishes and I was clinging to it. Hard.

On the outside of town, I took the cutoff to the Glassy Lake Chapel, which looked like it was way out over a cliff. Gravel crunched under the tires as I rolled through a thicket of pine trees until finally I came to a stop at the end of the gravel parking area.

When I turned off the motor, the silence was thick. This was way out in the middle of nowhere. A stone church with a steeple was to my left and to my right there was nothing but woods.

I hurtled out of my car.

“Jennifer!” I yelled.

My voice echoed back to me. The air smelled like sunshine and cedar.

“Jennifer!” I yelled again. “Jennifer! I’m here! Where are you?”

I started running toward the church. The doors were locked, so I stepped into the grass along the side so I could peer into the windows. The old building had been modernized on