Nothing moves.
“You’re losing your mind, Carter,” I whisper to myself. “Paranoia isn't a good look on you.”
“CARTER!”Gary’s voice screeches from the kitchen, followed by the unmistakable sound of a tray of silverware hitting the floor. “I think I broke the industrial sink! Or my toe! I can't tell which!”
I roll my eyes, the normalcy of the disaster pulling me back.
“If it’s your toe, keep the blood off the floor!” I yell back, heading inside. “The back hallway was just mopped!”
I leave the trees to their behind and ignore the vibration of the unknown number in my hand. I just push through the door, letting the frantic energy of the kitchen and the clatter of work swallow me whole.
Chapter twenty-four
Dominic
The party is loud in a way that vibrates through the marrow of my bones.
It isn’t fun loud. It’s that suffocating, layered noise where hundreds of meaningless conversations happen at once, none of them sticking to the air. Cups clink. Laughter spikes and shatters like dropped porcelain. Someone shouts my name like it’s a punchline; someone else shouts it like they’re waiting for a hand-out.
The house is a hive. Every room spills into the next, choked with bodies that don’t belong to anything except the momentary high they can scavenge.
I sit on a lounge chair by the pool, facing the water, one ankle resting over the other. My posture is loose—that calculated, intentional ease I’ve spent years perfecting. The underwaterlights bleed gold and blue into the night. Faces blur. Too small clothes catch the glow like they were engineered to be admired only from a distance.
I don’t look at any of them.
My phone buzzes. A sharp, rhythmic intrusion against my palm as Marco’s name flashes across the screen.
I answer before the second vibration can finish. “Yeah.”
“We landed,” he says, his voice a clean, steady frequency that belongs to a world I’m currently losing touch with. “Everyone’s good. No issues.”
“Good.”
“See you tomorrow when you get in. I’ll text the lineup and the schedule.”
“Fine.”
There’s a pause. It’s a heavy, loaded silence that tastes like the air before a storm. “You good?” Marco asks.
He doesn't rush the question. His voice is careful—not soft, because he knows I’d recoil from pity, and not accusatory. Just aware. It’s the tone of someone who recognizes the exact moment my autopilot starts to fail.
I watch a girl in a short dress laugh too hard at something a guy says. She leans back, expecting to be caught. He does. The crowd swallows them both.
“Dominic,” Marco says, his voice dropping an octave, losing the professional edge. He doesn't ask again. He just says my name like it’s a tether he’s trying to throw me before I drift too far out.
Marco begins to say more—something about the transport or the morning brief—but the words start to smear into the background.
Because over the music, over the roar of the party, and through the thousands of miles compressed into a digital signal, I hear it.
Carter’s voice.
It’s a hiccup of a sound in the background of Marco’s end. She isn't talking to me. She isn't even talkingnearthe phone. It’s a stray sentence, a quick, sharp bit of technical jargon she’s throwing at someone as she moves around the room on the other side of the world.
It isn't loud. It isn't significant. But it hits me like a physical blow to the sternum.
The party around me—the girls, the lights, the heavy smell of expensive liquor—it all flatlines. The noise doesn't just dull; it disappears. My brain ignores the bass vibrating through the wall and chooses, with a terrifying, singular focus, to find the grain of her voice in the static.
The weight of it is suffocating. It’s a gravitational pull I can’t fight, making the phone in my hand feel like a lifeline and a weapon all at once. I want to reach through the phone and drag that sound closer, just to prove I haven't completely lost my mind.
