Chapter 518
“Anyone else want coffee?” Elliott asked, pushing up from his seat. He smiled at me, knowing I wouldn’t want any but also feeling sorry for me for an entirely different reason than the one I was currently focused on. I managed a small smile.
“I’ll take a cup, if you don’t mind,” Hannah said. No one else wanted any, so Elliott headed toward the door. Mrs. Carminati has a Keurig out by her desk.
“What kind?” Elliott paused with his hand on the knob.
“Barista prima, please. No creamer.” Hannah smiled at him in thanks, and I let out a deep breath.
“You okay?” Jamie asked me as Elliott left the room and Aaron got up to grab something off of the printer. I could’ve gotten it for him....
“Yeah, fine.” He nodded but I could tell by his expression he wasn’t buying it. I was so ready for this to be over.
Aurora flew in the door and rushed to her seat. “Sorry I’m late. I got hung up. New recruit with a lot of questions caught me.” She was flustered and out of sorts. I knew the feeling.
“No problem,” Cadence assured her from across the table from me. “We haven’t started yet.”
Elliott came back in and set Hannah’s coffee in front of her. “Here you go.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The oxygen in the room shifted. Aurora was sitting two seats down from me, and I could feel her emotions rolling off of her as she made a “hmmm” sound and jabbed the lid on her ink pen. I am not an emotional empath, but I could read that.
Elliott was back in his seat. He looked around at all of us to see if we were aware of the situation. Of course we were. Aaron looked busy, but I could sense he felt the shift even more severely than I did since he is an emotional empath. “Somethin’ on your mind, Roar?” Elliott asked, his tone light but cautious.
“Aurora to you, thank you, and no. Nothing.”
I felt Jamie tense up next to me. Nothing didn’t mean nothing. Everyone knew that.
Elliott said, “Okay,” as if it were actually okay.
It wasn’t. “It’s just... other people like coffee, too. That’s all.”
I felt my eyes bulging out of my head. Gosh, if that’s what it’s like to break up with someone you work with, I never want to be in that situation. Except that I was. I hoped Brandon and I never talked to each other like that.
Maybe Elliott would let it go, ignore it, remind himself she was baiting him. She was being unreasonable. “I asked if anyone else wanted any, and no one did.”
I felt sorry for Hannah. Her mouth was slightly open like she was about to jump in. Aurora didn’t let her. “You didn’t ask me.”
“You weren’t here.”
Someone needed to do something! I wondered if Aaron or Cadence were sending any messages on their IAC to calm this situation. My nails were digging into my leg as I fought against the horrible uncomfortableness of it.
Thankfully, Jamie hopped out of his seat. “Smells good,” he said, heading toward the door. “I think I’ll have a cup.” Jamie had a bottle of water on the table in front of him, so I was certain he didn’t actually want any, but I was thankful he’d decided to stop the madness. “Aurora, how do you take yours?”
“Oh, no thanks, Jamie. I’m not thirsty.”
“O....kay,” the Healer said, shaking his head as he went out the door anyway. Aurora took the lid off of her pen and pushed it on again. Passive aggressive much?
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Elliott muttered, and I saw my sister’s arm move, imagining she’d reached under the table for Elliott’s hand or to squeeze his leg so he’d stop. Someone had to stop.
“We done?”
Every eye in the room shifted to the head of the table where Aaron was standing. I wasn’t even the one in trouble this time and I felt like a kid in the principal’s office. There was no need to answer that question because we were all done.
Jamie took his seat, but his expression told me he was a little lost at everyone’s stoic expressions. He raised an eyebrow at me. “Principal McReynolds lowered the boom,” I said to him through my IAC and saw him stifle a chuckle.
Still not playing, Aaron jumped right in. “Cass has just informed us that we have hundreds of missing people in and around the two target areas where we know Daunator and Holland were most recently spotted. This is a list of those missing persons.” He dropped a chunk of papers on the table thick enough it made a loud thunking noise. I wasn’t surprised, though everyone else was. The urge to say I told you so was so tempting.
“If we enlarge the radius to take up all of Eastern Europe, we add this many people.” He dropped another stack, this one not as thick but large enough. “This is the rest of Europe.” Another chunk. “And this is the rest of the world.” He dropped the rest of the stack, a hefty little pile, though not nearly as large as the first one. That did surprise me. I hadn’t been paying attention to anything outside of Europe. I wondered how he’d gotten all of that so fast but didn’t go there at the moment.
“How many are there?” Hannah asked. I wanted to yell at her, “Too many!” Why didn’t she know the answer to that question? Wasn’t she the one left in charge?
“In total, in the last twenty-three days since we destroyed Holland and Hines, in Europe alone, eight hundred people have gone missing. An additional two hundred people are missing elsewhere.”
“Holy moly,” Elliott mumbled for all of us. I knew about the first 650, but the rest of the numbers were still breathtaking.
