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“I did, actually. So this is a little weird,” she said as she slid her finger across the screen to answer the call.

“Hey, Janet, what’s—what?” she asked, her tone going from light and friendly to sharp. “What do you mean ‘tossed’?”

Her hand on the wheel was white.

Her face was taking on the same shade.

“No. No, I… we’ll be right over,” she said, sounding even more breathless than while having her anxiety attack a moment before.

“What’s going on?” I asked when she looked over after hanging up.

“Janet and Jill saw my door open. So they went to check. And they said my place was tossed.”

I was out of the car before she went on.

A creepy guy hanging outside her room.

A flat tire.

A purposeful hit-and-run.

And a tossed room?

Sure, random bad shit happened to people all the time. But not all at once.

Something was going on here.

I had to figure out exactly what it was.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Georgie

Janet and Jill were standing guard outside my room door.

Janet had her arms crossed, but I spotted what looked like a taser in her hand. Jill stood with one arm on her hip and the other wrapped around a bat. Neither looked like someone you wanted to mess with.

Beside me, Cain was as taut as a bow, his handsome face tight, his eyes determined.

Despite all that, his hand was gentle as it wrapped around me, supporting me as we went up the stairs in case I got dizzy. And if that didn’t say a lot about Cain, I didn’t know what did. Because he was clearly anxious and angry about the situation, but he could separate those feelings he was experiencing from how he treated me.

“Ladies,” he greeted the sisters. “Thanks for keeping an eye on her place.”

“We’re just sorry we didn’t catch the sonofabitch in the act,” Janet said.

“While I’m sure you two can hold your own, I, for one, am glad you didn’t have to confront anyone,” Cain said. “I don’t like the idea of Georgie’s friends getting hurt just to protect a few replaceable items.”

Jill shot me a look I could only interpret as “I told you so.”

“But now we don’t know who it is,” Janet said, sighing.

“Well, this place has cameras,” Cain said.

“Yeah, this place has cameras like I have a six-pack.”

“They’re not operational?” Cain asked.

“They’re not even real,” Janet explained. “They’re dummy cameras. The owners are too cheap to pay for an actual system.”