Page 39 of What We Become

I swipe.

Another girl. Blonde. Curled on a bed with both wrists pinned above her head by a hand coming in from out of frame.

Another.

Another.

I swipe again and the angle shifts—same room, different girl, same white sneaker in the corner—and my brain does this awful, efficient thing where it starts replacing faces.

Not theirs. Hers.

Sage on a bathroom floor. Sage on a mattress. Sage with mascara she’d never wear smeared under eyes gone huge and gray with fear. Sage looking at the camera because Brock liked to document his pets and Stephen liked to organize the archive. Sage after the jetty if we’d been five minutes later, ten, if Eli had said wait and Holden had listened and Knox hadn’t already been moving and she hadn’t stolen that knife and opened Brock up like a zipper before he could finish what he started.

The images don’t even need to show her. My head does it for them.

I see her wrists held over her head. Her dress bunched at her hips. Brock’s hand in her hair. Stephen somewhere nearby with a laptop, a camera, a trash bag, a plan. I see the folder he would have made for her. The name he would have given it. Something boring. Something that looked like a firmware backup.

My hands shake so hard I nearly drop the phone.

It’s ugly and immediate and full-body—like somebody reached inside me and yanked every wire loose at once. The images blur. My vision goes bright at the edges.

“Milo.”

I don’t realize I’ve stopped breathing until Holden says my name again, sharper this time.

“I know,” I say, except I don’t. There are so many more girls than we thought. I don’t know their names. I don’t know how long Stephen sat there cataloging the aftermath of Brock’s violence like a fucking archivist at a museum of ruined women. I just know I want to peel both of them out of the timeline and feed them to the ocean.

My jaw locks. My teeth grind. I can hear it.

“Milo.” Holden takes the phone out of my hand before I crack the screen. “Look at me.”

I don’t want to. My whole body vibrates, fine and violent, rage finding all the little failure points. I press the heels of my hands to my eyes and see those fucking photos and the white sneaker and Sage’s face where Sage’s face isn’t.

Strong hands close around my jaw.

Not rough. Firm. Precise. Holden drags my face toward him until I have no choice but to look. His eyes are winter-bright and absolutely fucking merciless.

“Breathe.”

I suck in air like it insulted me.

Again.

His thumbs press under my ears, anchoring me in place while my whole body tries to come apart. My shoulders are up around my neck. My teeth hurt. I can feel every pulse beat in my gums.

“We are going to find him,” he says, low and flat and deadly calm. “Do you hear me?”

I do. I just don’t know if hearing is the same as believing when my head is full of bathroom tile and torn straps and all the girls we didn’t save.

“He doesn’t get away with this.”

My mouth opens. Nothing useful comes out.

Holden’s grip shifts, one hand sliding to the back of my neck. “Milo.”

“She isn’t in them,” I say, because apparently my mouth has stopped consulting me. “I know Sage isn’t in those files. But my brain keeps doing this fucked-up slideshow from hell. Every time I close my eyes, it gives one of them her face, and I can’t make it stop.”

“Milo—”