The last thing Jacob had expected was to be spending his night hunting down a missing hospital patient. While he’d been on his way to speak with King Atlas about the weakened security point in the garage, he had bumped into Harry, who had immediately blanched upon seeing him. Right away, he had realized that something was wrong, since he’d never seen the other guard abandon his post before. However, he’d had a long day and had been too tired to question why Harry would have left Iris alone at the hospital. Instead, he’d reprimanded him for his negligence and ordered him to go back.

That was when Harry had told him that someone had impersonated him over the phone and told him that he would be taking over his shift.

With enough expletives to make a sailor blush, Jacob commanded Harry to return to the hospital while he called the police to inform them of the situation. He’d hoped that the law enforcement officers would be able to respond quickly enough to catch the perpetrators before they got away. Unfortunately, when he got through to dispatch, the woman on the other end of the line informed him that a nurse at the hospital had already called a few minutes ago and that police were already on the scene. The criminals, however, had escaped.

He had hung up the phone in a rage and headed to his car, driving down to the hospital personally to find out if he could do any better identifying the culprits than the officers had. He was going to have to tell the king that their prisoner was gone, and he wanted to have at least some good news to offer when he delivered the worst of it. Having a solid lead to follow to get her back would be a good start.

With that objective in mind, he made his way into the building and beelined for the security personnel’s office, making phone calls along the way for the soldiers to keep an eye out for suspicious people and notices for stolen vehicles. It hadn’t been long since Iris had disappeared, so she and the others couldn’t have gone far. Assuming their plan was to take her out of the capital, the military needed to cut them off before they could get to the border.

In the meantime, he reviewed the security footage at the hospital. Due to patient privacy policies, there weren’t very many cameras on the inside of the building, but there was some suspicious activity that had been captured on two of them in the hallways on the first and third floor as well as one in the parking lot.

“As you can see, we don’t have a lot to go off,” the on-duty security guard explained with a perplexed sigh as they looked over the recordings that had caught Iris and the three people who had helped her escape. “The only things we’ve determined are that they’re all male and seemed to know enough about the way this hospital works to get in and out without raising suspicion. Do you think they’re from the capital?”

“Possibly,” Jacob replied noncommittally, leaning closer to the computer screen and narrowing his eyes as he studied the repeating footage of the group slipping out of room 311 with Iris still in her mobile bed. His bent was to assume more members of the rebellion had gotten inside the city to rescue her, but he wasn’t ruling anything out just yet. “I’d like some time to review this alone,” he added to the hospital guard. “Check in with the police officers, will you? Tell me if they’ve found anything else worth noting.”

“Sure thing,” the guard nodded, stepping out of the office.

Jacob glanced at his back on his way out and then returned to looking through every bit of footage the hospital had caught of the three men once he was alone. Even if it took him all night, he was determined to find [i]something[/i] that would help him narrow down who could have taken Now-Fleuret and where they could have gone.