We keep walking anyway.
Seventeen
The weekend passed quietlyafter Saturday night. Mostly with me constantly checking the missing persons database every hour on the hour.
Nothing.
No Jane Does matching her description. No reports of blonde women gone missing from Center City. No bodies discovered in alleys or rivers or empty lots.
It’s like she never existed.
I refresh the Philadelphia Inquirer again. Scroll through the crime blotter. Local news. Nothing. Not a single mention of a missing woman. Not a whisper about a body.
Dom’s cleanup crew is that good.
The journal entry from last night stares up at me from my phone as I walk toward my desk—every detail I can remember about the VIP lounge. The bartender. The fluttering curtains. The warning about the hot stove. The cryptic direction toward club ownership.
I need more proof. Something concrete.
But first, I have to survive Monday morning at work and that means putting the phone away.
“Did you hear?” Alex materializes at my desk like she’s been summoned. Leans in close, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Just got here.” I look around, finally noticing what I somehow missed when I walked in. There’s a strange feeling in the air. Everyone has their heads down, some secretly texting. Others are blatantly gossiping in hushed clusters by the coffee station. “Okay, what’s happening?”
“First—the club.” Alex pushes her glasses up her nose. That nervous tell. “The Dahlia is registered as a fictitious name. The actual entity is Dahlia LLC.”
“Okay...” I wait for more.
“I haven’t traced the LLC yet. Need to pull corporate filings, see who the registered agent is, who the actual members are. Could take a few hours, maybe until tonight?—”
“Do it. As soon as you can.”
She nods, but her expression shifts. Goes from investigative excitement to something else. Something darker.
“But that’s not why everyone’s acting weird.”
The base of my spine tingles—that specific warning that starts soft then spreads. Not the ice-heat from the stairwell. Not the same system that kept me alive that night.
This is different. Worse.
It twists. Coils. Like something is wrapping around each vertebra one by one, squeezing until I swear I can feel them crack. That serpent-spine thing. The one that only happens when my body knows something my brain hasn’t caught up to yet.
Danger. Real danger. Here. Now.
“Right, so—” Alex grabs my arm and yanks me toward my desk. Physically moves me. Her eyes dart around the office before she leans in even closer. “Marcus Ashford is here.”
The name doesn’t register immediately. I’m already shrugging off my coat, tossing it on my chair. “Who?”
Alex leans closer, drops her voice even lower. “He walked in wearing a fur coat.”
Everything stops as my brain finally connects the dots.
Marcus Ashford. Philadelphia’s newly elected City Controller. Playboy politician. America’s eligible bachelor.
The man in the fur coat.
The man whose voice I memorized while he confessed to murder.
