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Promise out of there.
    When she saw us through the glass window, Holly had gone ape shit again, screaming that Promise was her baby and I was an asshole. I don't fault her on the second count, but hearing her call Promise her baby . . . I almost broke my cardinal rule about never, ever hitting a woman.
    Now we're back at the loft and Promise is being stubborn.
    “Babe, you have to eat.”
    She rests her chin on my shoulder as I hold the fork to her lips, laden with just a bite of my famous scrambled eggs.
    “I’m not hungry,” she says, pushing at my forearm. “In fact, I’m the opposite of hungry. I’m anti-hungry. And if you don’t take that fork away from my lips right now I might throw up all over your world famous gourmet eggs.” The sarcasm in her voice isn't all that playful.
    And I know what she wants, but it can't happen. Not yet. We have to know what's going on before we start taking action.
    I sent a few texts to my SEAL brothers while we were at the cop shop. Northrup said the cops are doing what they can to gather intel on where Louis may be headed, but since he hasn’t broken any law by taking Jordan out of the country, there is not much they can do.
    I'm keeping the possibilities of what we will do to bring Jordan back to myself for the moment. There's no way that Promise can deal with that kind of information.
    With my connections, finding Louis is doable, but just how deep do we want to go to make it happen?
    I fight the urge to rationalize why he may have gone rogue. He’s wrong in about a thousand ways, but something deep down tells me there’s a reason. A reason for all of this. I'm just not seeing it. To my mind there's no sane reason why he would have even wanted to take Jordan to Egypt. Certainly not without telling us beforehand. And the guy I knew as Louis was as sane as anyone I'd ever met.
    There’s also no logical reason that he would have falsified evidence.
    Even if it was against a piece of shit like Rendell.
    Jeremy Rendell, who kept hundreds of pictures of Promise from when he was young until a few months ago on his computer. Jeremy Rendell, who led her down a path for his own pleasure without any regard for what was best for her. Jeremy Rendell, who taught a broken little girl how to set fires.
    Fires that killed people.
    Destroyed other people.
    He may not have set the fire in the loft that killed my father. That's looking increasingly unlikely. But he is still culpable for coercing a little girl into another arson where people died. We have had no contact with him. Unfortunately, in order to figure out everything possible about Louis and this entire shit storm, it was becoming painfully obvious that I was going to have to have a little sit down with that little fuck. Regardless of the instructions from Northrup to stay far away from him.
    Defeated, I push the plate of eggs and toast across the table. We're sitting on the bench alongside one of the long metal tables. It's still covered with the stacks of letters and my notebooks. For a second I forget about Louis and Jeremy and remember I’ve got a conference call tomorrow with Icon Publishing.
    A phone meeting that Louis and I were supposed to take together. I’d set it up before we’d organized our trips. Both of us decided we could be on the phone from anywhere, so we’d keep the appointment. It was only to finalize the cover and some minor details about distribution channels or some shit anyway.
    But what the fuck do I know about business and distribution channels? That was Louis’s end of the deal. I created and he dealt with the bullshit business. Our arrangement was that Louis was acting on my behalf as my representative. For that I insisted he would get the standard 10 percent. I wanted to split it with him fifty-fifty, but it was a battle to get him to accept even 10 percent.
    Ten percent of what though?
    Who the hell knows what sales, if any, we were going to see from my little project. I don’t give a shit about