“Where is it, Mr. Bolton?” Emma said.

I saw Bolton spin around, and he frowned. He turned to look around the room, first at the bed, then his nightstand, and then back at the dresser.

“What the hell?” he said, walking over to the dresser and putting his hand on it. “I left it right here.”

They both spun in slow circles, then Bolton walked out of the room.

“Maybe I left it in the living room,” I heard him yell.

Emma stood there silently in the middle of the room. For the first time, I saw something in her eyes that I hadn’t seen before—a clear, quiet determination, and the mask of something that was almost…

Sinister.

She was still looking around the room, but I saw her stop, and she looked at the closet door. My heart almost stopped as she seemed to look right at me.

“Mr. Bolton,” I heard her call out as she continued to stare at the closet door.

“Yeah,” he called out from the living room.

“You said your computer was here when you left this morning?”

“Yes, of course,” he said.

“And how long have you been gone?”

“I don’t know, twenty minutes or so?”

“Can you come here, please? I need you to do me a favor.”

I heard footsteps, and a disheveled-looking Bolton was back at the bedroom door, his eyebrows raised.

“What is it?” he asked. “I can’t find my computer. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“I think someone stole it,” Emma said assertively. She reached into her pocket, took something out, and handed it to him. “I need you to call this number,” she said, then she leaned over and said something else quietly to him that I couldn’t hear.

Bolton said something back, then turned and walked away.

Emma turned to look at the closet door again, and in that instant, without any real proof at all…

I knew the truth.

I stared at her face, her nostrils flared, her gaze razor-sharp, and I knew instantly that I’d gotten it all wrong. I flashed back to the night of the dinner party as I lay on the ground watching Hooks pressed up against Emma in her kitchen, and I felt, more clearly than I had felt anything else in the last couple of days, that it just wasn’t right.

The curves and lines of the woman’s face in the kitchen, and the one staring at the closet door…

They weren’t the same.

It wasn’t her.

I’d gotten it wrong, so terribly wrong, but I didn’t have time to think about what that meant.

Because a moment later, she charged.

Chapter 31

Claire

Four days after