Owen noticed that I wasn’t following him, and he stopped and turned around. “What is it?” He raised his gun. “What’s wrong?”

   “The cottage,” I murmured.

   “But Finn looked in through the windows when we first got here,” he said. “Elissa wasn’t inside.”

   I reached out with my magic again, listening to the continued shrieks of the stone.

   Blood, violence, pain, death . . . blood, violence, pain, death . . .

   And I realized that the sounds were harsher, louder, fresher than they had been two nights ago. Emotional vibrations faded with time. They didn’t grow stronger. Not unless someone was around to make the sounds increase with her sharp terror and stomach-churning fear.

   “Gin?” Owen asked again.

   Blood, violence, pain, death . . . blood, violence, pain, death . . .

   “Elissa wasn’t anywhere that Finn could see through the windows,” I murmured again. “And he couldn’t hear the stones. Not like I can. But she’s in there. I know she is. C’mon.”

   I headed in that direction, with Owen following me. Through my earpiece, I heard Finn say that he and Bria were back safely at their car and would hold their positions until we met them, but I tuned him out, far more interested in what the stones had to say at the moment.

   Owen and I crept back over to the cottage. Even though it was still afternoon, Porter had left a couple of lights on inside. I walked all around the structure, peering into every single window, but it seemed as empty as when Finn had checked it. Owen came with me, still watching my back. Eventually, we wound up back at the front of the cottage.

   I tried the door, but it was locked. And not just a simple lock like those that had been on all the mansion doors. This one had three dead bolts all in a row. That was total overkill—unless you had something to hide.

   Like the girl you’d kidnapped and were planning to murder.

   “Gin?” Finn’s voice sounded through my earpiece. “We have a problem. Rivera’s car is pulling in through the front gate. He’s already back from the bank. Looks like Mosley wasn’t able to stall him as long as we’d hoped.”

   I checked my watch. We’d been searching for Elissa for more than an hour. It would take me several more minutes to make Ice picks and to actually finesse all three locks open, and Damian Rivera could come here at any moment to check on his hostage. So I decided to be direct about things. I gestured for Owen to stand back, and then I put my hand on the door, right over the locks, and blasted them all with my Ice magic.

   Three inches of elemental Ice coated the dead bolts in a matter of seconds. The wood and metal shrieked and groaned in protest, almost as loudly as the stones were still muttering, but I ignored the sounds, sent out another wave of magic, and blasted right through the locks and all of the surrounding wood. Broken bits of metal flew through the air, along with long splinters and sharp, needle-like pieces of my elemental Ice.

   The second the locks busted open, a loud alarm blared, and lights started flashing inside the cottage, which only made me even more convinced that Elissa was inside.

   “What is that?” Finn yelled in my ear. “What did you do, Gin?”

   “Just a little breaking and entering!” I shouted back at him over the continued din of the alarm.

   “Well, I can hear it all the way out here on the street!” he yelled again. “Which means that the guards can hear it too!”

   “Stay here,” I told Owen. “I’ll go inside and search for Elissa.”

   He nodded and raised his gun, his gaze locked on the mansion in the distance, where the interior and exterior lights were also flashing in time to the cottage’s alarm system. He would watch my back and hold off the guards as long as he could, but I needed to do my part fast. So I put my shoulder down, rammed the door open, and hurried inside.

   The front part of the cottage was one enormous open space that was a den, kitchen, and dining area all in one. I’d already seen all of this through the windows, so I moved over to a door that led into a bedroom and shoved it open. Elissa wasn’t in this room either, so I wrenched open the closet door. That too was empty, so I headed into the attached bathroom. Still no sign of her, so I went back out into the main part of the cottage, looking around again.

   Now that I was actually inside the structure, the stones’ shrieks were harsher and louder than ever before, ringing in my ears right along with the alarm. This was definitely the place where Rivera held his victims for days on end before he beat and strangled them to death. But where was Elissa? If she was yelling at me to help her, I couldn’t hear her over the alarm’s constant blaring.

   So I moved through the cottage again, searching everywhere, and counting off the seconds in my head. Owen and I probably had about five minutes before the guards would arrive in full force, and I needed to find Elissa and get her out of here before then.

   I had started to go back into the bedroom to search in there again, even though I’d already cleared that area, when I noticed a crack in the stone floor, one that was peeping out from underneath the corner of a rug that I’d pushed aside with my boots when I first stormed in here. I glanced at the surrounding stones, but the crack didn’t match the rest of the floor pattern.

   So I slid my knife back up my sleeve, dropped to the floor, and ripped the rug aside. A secret trapdoor was set into the floor, complete with a large metal ring to open it. I grabbed the ring with both hands and pulled on it with all my might, but the thick door was far too heavy for me to open.

   Since I didn’t have the strength to pull up the trapdoor, I decided to go right down through it. I dropped back to my knees, slapped my palms on the floor, and blasted it with my Ice and Stone magic, just like I had done to the front door.

   The floor was much harder and thicker than the wooden door had been, but I was motivated, and I forced my Ice magic down into the trapdoor, used my Stone power to crack it away, hooked my fingers into the jagged chunks of rocks, and tossed them aside as fast as I could. The sharp, splintered rocks cut into my hands, but I ignored the painful stings and focused all my magic on the floor.