Run Away by Laura Salters Read Free Book Online

quarry behind them disappeared, Mek vanished. Tiny Eyes evaporated in a puff of magician’s smoke. It was just the two of them, for a fraction of a second. It was all the convincing Sam would need; the first of many times that Kayla’s mosaic eyes, flecked with green, blue, and hazel, would give him a surge of adrenaline that made him feel like he could do anything.
    He took a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. What do I do?”

 
    Chapter 7
    June 28, England
    P ERCHED ON A bar stool at the marble breakfast bar in her family kitchen, Kayla pushed her soggy cereal around in the bowl. Her earlier bravado in thinking she could handle a regular portion of food had vanished around the same time she’d flicked on the morning news to see a picture of Sam. His big, brown, doelike eyes and tufty dark hair had caught her off guard. The delay had irrevocably compromised the structural integrity of her Cheerios.
    Today was the day she was to go and meet the police officer who was handling the case in the UK. DCI Mason Shepherd. The Thais had originally wanted her to talk to him as soon as she landed in Newcastle, but he seemed conscientious enough to allow her to sleep off her jet lag and gather her thoughts before their debrief.
    There had been no progress in the search for Sam, or what was left of him. None whatsoever. The manhunt team had quickly lost interest when they followed the trail of blood, which stopped abruptly halfway down the road outside the villa, and searched the obvious places to no avail. They’d received no tips, other than some obviously fake ones—­including a man who’d insisted that Alex Garland’s The Beach was real and that’s where Sam was—­and no new leads.
    Nothing had come of talking undercover to the drug dealers Sam had supposedly been in contact with, or following them with Phuket’s patchy and fuzzy CCTV footage. Maybe if Greyfinch had been in charge of Thailand’s surveillance, finding a broad, six-­foot-­five twenty-­year-­old might have been a little easier.
    Kayla pushed the bowl aside and slumped onto the counter, her head nestled in the crook of her elbow. It had been a long week. Now that they’d offloaded her onto Dr. Myers, her parents were largely attempting to continue their lives as if nothing had happened. As if there had never been a Gabe, or a Sam. Her dad was working fourteen-­hour days, and her mum, ever the good Samaritan, was dividing her time between charity ball committees, volunteering at an animal shelter, and teaching kids French at a series of free community night classes. Keeping busy, for them, meant avoiding what awaited them at home: a grieving daughter and an empty bedroom where their son used to sleep.
    Kayla heaved herself off the stool, which was just a bit too far from the ground for her five-­foot-­four frame to maneuver with a single ounce of grace, and made her way across to the white French doors. The sun was peering lazily through the steely gray clouds, and the blustery chill of the wind bit her skin with unusual aggression for this time of year. She lit a cigarette with the oversized candle lighter her mother was forever misplacing and wrapped her spare arm around her waist, shivering involuntarily.
    Still, she rather liked the sensation of feeling cold after months of sweaty, sleepless nights and muggy air so thick you could practically chew it. The climate had been one of the few things she’d missed about her family home in north Northumberland. Some, she’d forgotten about, but loved nonetheless, like the powerful, fragrant scent of the vivid yellow oilseed rape fields that scattered the countryside like a patchwork quilt. Oh, and the unrivaled taste of a good old mug of English breakfast tea—­none of that aromatic bathwater the Thais paraded as a substitute.
    From inside she could still hear the chirpy northern economics journalist on the morning news questioning whether the Bank of England’s interest rates would remain low this month.