My body isn’t listening anymore.
He moves closer, his presence filling the space in a way that feels inescapable now, his voice dropping lower as the world starts to fade.
“Tomorrow,” he says quietly, close enough that I feel the words more than hear them. “We’ll be home.”
Home.
The word drifts.
“I’ve spent the last twelve months getting everything ready,” he continues, his voice soft, certain. “Somewhere no one can find us. No one can take you from me again.”
My thoughts feel slow now.
Heavy.
Like they’re slipping through my fingers as I try to hold onto them.
“We’ll start over,” he murmurs.
Start over.
The room tilts again.
Darkness creeping in at the edges.
My body sinking back into the cold beneath me, heavier than before, harder to move, harder to fight.
I try to hold onto something.
Anything.
Elijah.
Jackson.
Zach.
The names slip through me like something distant, something I can’t quite reach anymore.
And then everything goes dark again.
nine
Zach
By the time the second day settles in, time stops behaving like something linear and starts folding in on itself, each hour pressing into the next without anything shifting except the weight of it. Someone said it’s been close to forty-eight hours since she was taken, but the number doesn’t land properly, because it doesn’t feel like forty-eight hours.
It feels longer than that, like something has stretched the distance between when she was here and now until it no longer fits into anything measurable, like the version of the world where she exists has been pulled just out of reach and everything else is continuing around that absence without acknowledging it.
There are still no leads.
That’s the part that sits under everything, constant and unrelenting, threading through every conversation, every plan, every movement in the apartment that goes nowhere. Christian is still working, still moving pieces into place that no one else cansee, still taking calls that sound important without producing anything solid, while Lucian moves with that same controlled presence beside him, adjusting things, guiding things, keeping it contained in a way that suggests there should be progress even when there isn’t.
They had come back not long ago, and Elijah was covered in more blood. It had dried into his hands, into the fabric of his shirt, into the edge of his jaw like he hadn’t even thought about it, like it hadn’t occurred to him that it should be removed before he walked back into the space where everything else is still trying to function.
He hadn’t spoken when he came in. He had just moved through the apartment like it had already shifted to accommodate whatever he has become in the last day, like the version of him that existed before this no longer fits here.
Jackson hasn’t moved from the table.
