Dredyn comes back into the room. “If Pops calls back and tells me to stand down, I won’t.”
FORTY
JASPER
“Anything?” Dredyn asks, leaning against the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest. We’ve been up all night tearing through Chase Harrington’s digital life. What started as a hunch is turning into a map of his footprints around Evangeline.
Talon’s wearing a groove in the floor, pacing like he’s gonna break through it. I ignore him and drag another file onto the screen.
One by one, I lay out the pieces.
First, a scanned yearbook photo of Evangeline smiling with Chase Harrington’s arm around her shoulders.
Next, an event roster from seven years ago showing them both at the same charity galas and fraternity mixers.
And finally, a campus housing form showing the Harrington family trust paid for Evangeline’s off-campus apartment that summer.
Chase didn’t stumble into her orbit, he built a net and wrapped her in it.
Our mom was PTO royalty. Our dad was OCK. Which left me and Evie stuck in the middle of both houses. The way the Syndicate plays it, your father decides where you land. For girls, that means who you’re allowed to marry.
Evie had my father’s OCK blood with my mother’s PTO polish. That made her worth something to them—a piece to be traded. Chase knew that. Maybe she thought being with him was rebellion . . . her way of telling my parents to go to hell. But it wasn’t a rebellion, it was a trap.
And I can’t figure out why he pushed it so far. Why chase her, lock her down, tear her life apart just to end up killing her.
I eventually land on a recording buried in Evie’s files on her old laptop that I had copied when she passed. I never had the courage to look through it until it mattered. Until another person I love’s life was on the line.
Chase:“What have you done Evie!?”
Evie:“Please . . . just leave me alone.”
Chase:“You’ve ruined everything!?”
Evie:“Chase. Please. I thought you—” Her voice cracks “I thought you loved me.”
Chase:“You’re pathetic.”
The recording ends, and silence eats the room.
“What the fuck was she hiding? What secret was worth meeting him in the goddamn catacombs?” Talon asks.
I shake my head. “She never told me. Just—She only said she found something she shouldn’t have.”
“And we never got it—never found what it was. We pulled her out of the water and had nothing,” Dredyn adds.
Talon rakes a hand through his hair, muttering, “So, Chase drowns her, the Syndicate scrubs the mess, and whatever she saw? Gone.”
I clench my teeth, fighting a wave of nausea and rage. There’s more—there are photos we uncovered too. With a few clicks, I open the folder we decrypted earlier.
Images load on the screen: grainy photos taken at some Psi Theta party. The timestamp on the image reads just past 11 p.m. It’s a photo of Evie going down into Psi Theta’s basement. Minutes later, we see Chase go through the same door
“Bastard,” Talon hisses over my shoulder.
“This is it,” Talon says, voice low. “Proof. He was with her that night.”
“He killed her,” Dredyn snarls suddenly, slamming his fist down on the table so hard my laptop screen rattles. “That son of a bitch murdered your sister. And now he’s about to?—”
“Evangeline is dead, and we finally know who to kill for it.”
