It’s not her. It’s Silvia. And in the same, world-shattering instant, I process her panicked words.
“...Please, hurry! My friend is gone!”
A startling scream follows as Silvia sees me and David in her living room. She freezes when she sees us, her eyes wide with shock and fear.
“Dorian?! What… ?” Silvia’s face is pale and her voice is trembling “Della’s missing and…”
“Ma’am, are you ok?” I can hear the operator asking at the phone.
“Someone entered my living room,” Silvia replies “Please, hurry!” and hangs up. “Now they’ll come for sure.”
I cross the room in three strides, my voice sharp, cutting through her panic. “Silvia. Tell me everything. Where did you last see her?”
“The beach bar,” she sobs. “She left an hour ago to walk home. I wanted to leave with her but she asked to be alone, to walk on the beach. I just got back and couldn’t find her. I went looking outside and I… found her purse and sweater on the deck.” She starts shaking and I hold her hands.
“Show me.”
We step on the back porch and I see her sweater crumpled on the floor. My heart tightens. David kneels, using a pen to take a look at the contents of her overturned purse.
“The phone isn’t here, Dorian.” He says.
Instantly, I pull out my phone and open the tracking app I installed in our last day at Lake Geneva.“This way, I will never lose you again.”We laughed and joked at that point and never would have thought I will use it like this.
A single red dot pulses on the screen. Not moving.
“I’ve got her.” I say and turn to Silvia and give her instructions “Go inside, wait for the cops and tell them everything. Give them this address. We’re going now.”
Silvia’s in shock “I don’t understand. Who would…?”
“I will find her,” I cut her off and grab her hands “Now go inside.”
We run back to the car and David drives like crazy.
That red, flickering dot on my screen isn't just a location.
It is everything.
* * *
Della
Red. The first thing I see is a single, pulsing red dot.
It fades, then flares up again in the dark like a heartbeat. Or maybe a warning.
My thoughts are lost in a thick fog, and my body feels disconnected, like I’ve slipped out of myself.
Where am I?
There’s that red light again. My vision sharpens, just a little. It’s a cigarette. Someone’s out there, sitting in the dark and watching me.
This realization crushes me like a winter wave, and I can barely breathe as everything rushes in at once. My head throbs, a dull, heavy pain blooming behind my eyes, like wet cement packed into my skull. My throat burns, tastes sharp and bitter, like battery acid. My arms and legs are dead weight. And the ropes—they cut into the raw skin at my wrists, binding me tight to a chair.
No. No. This isn’t happening.
This feeling, this sickening, damn helplessness—it isn’t happening again.
The memory of Andy slams into me, not as a thought, but as a physical sensation—of being pinned down, of my screams being useless, of my body not being my own.
