The silence stretches again, the weight of it pressing against my ribs. Somewhere in the house a clock ticks.
I pull my knees to my chest, as much as the sheet and cuff will allow. The room feels smaller by the second.
Miles stays crouched, hands open like he wants to help but doesn’t dare touch me. Jamie sits in silence, staring at the floor, the ice pack forgotten beside him.
I can taste fear at the back of my throat. Metallic and bitter.
Something deep in me—the part that’s survived worse—whispers that whatever comes next, I need to be ready. Because whatever this is, it isn’t over.
It’s just beginning.
27
Miles
It’squietexceptforthe sound of her breathing. Uneven. Small. Every few seconds, it hitches, like she’s still trapped somewhere between sleep and the kind of panic that doesn’t have words.
I sit across from her, her journal open in my hands. I shouldn’t be reading it, but I can’t stop. The words are small, neat, almost obsessive in the way she arranges her thoughts. The kind of handwriting that comes from someone who’s been taught to be careful.
She writes small and neat. The pen is a little shaky when she writes the worst sections, the ink blots where a hand must have paused. I read it like a confession and like a map, every line tells me where she hurts and why.
August 14—court day she calls it, but she dates it as if it were a holy thing. She remembers the room, the gavel, how everyone’sfaces turned into something else when they saw her name. She remembers Nate’s hands, the way the town pivoted. She writes,I learned how quickly people will erase you.
Another page, ink dark and cramped.I found the trust paperwork. I thought I could fix it. I thought I could make it right. I was nineteen and stupid. I thought responsibility was math, but it’s rope, and its mouths and it becomes a debt you breathe.
And then there’s a day she sketches out in blunt strokes—the day I helped my uncle and Rico drag her into our world, remembered from the other side by someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and then never knew what would happen.
She writes,I was running my car because I had to get away. The black car followed, and when it hit my bumper I thought it was an accident. I thought that at first. Then there were two men. Hands. The road smelled like tires and gasoline, and I remember a suitcase rolling under my foot. The world compressed down into a narrow tube. When they hit me with something, I thought at first it was pain. Sharp, sudden, and then nothing at all. I woke up in a place that smelled of old vinegar and dust. I felt small. I felt stupid. I remember thinking only, Why me? I remember begging. I remember trying to bargain with the dark. I remember a face with no name that pressed too close and the grip that made me soft with fear. I remember losing myself and promising to be someone who could not be taken again.
She isn’t blaming anyone here, she blames herself. The paper catches and holds the shame she wore like a second skin. I read her open, angry and raw about the way people who should have protected her folded like paper. She writes,I deserved that for failing, a line that lands in my chest like a stone.
I want to stand up and smash the lamp. I want to tear every page out and burn them and turn the whole world upside down for ever thinking she deserved any of it. Instead I fold the corner of the last page she read and close the journal with deliberate slowness. The thing becomes weight in my hands. It is not evidence. It is not an easy ledger of profit and loss. It is somebody’s life.
She writes about how she thought she was going to die in that warehouse.
I didn’t think she’d remembered that much. Didn’t know she’d written it down.
Her words are raw—fear bleeding through the pages.He had gray eyes.That line hits me so hard I have to set the notebook down. She doesn’t know it was me, but she remembers my eyes.
I look at her. She’s still tied to the bed, sheets knotted around her ankle, one wrist cuffed to the headboard. I used the softest ones I could find. Like that makes it any better.
Jamie’s gone. I told him to go to the bar, act normal. He’s good at pretending. He’ll laugh, make jokes, order a round, and keephis head down. That’s the part I can’t do. I can’t pretend none of this is happening.
The phone buzzes on the nightstand. Rico.
I step outside to take it, closing the door behind me. The cold hits me, sharp and grounding.
“Where the hell are you?” Rico’s voice crackles through the line.
“Dealing with something.”
“Well, deal faster. Victor wants us to head to the girl’s apartment. He’s getting impatient and wants her.”
My stomach drops. I swallow the bile rising in my throat. “I’ll meet you in an hour.”
“Sooner,” he says, and hangs up.
I text Jamie—head back now.
