"Clear!" came from the basement.
Then the words we'd been praying for: "I've got her! She's alive!"
Little Hannah Sullivan was in a hidden panel behind the water heater, bound and gagged but alive, eyes wide with terror but physically unharmed. The sick bastard who'd taken her—her uncle, as it turned out—hadn't had time to move her to the trafficking ring's next location.
"You did good, Walker," Captain Baker said as they loaded the uncle into a squad car, his accomplices already in custody. "Record time on this one. That little girl's going home because of you."
FBI agents were swarming the scene now, having uncovered a child smuggling operation that reached into three states. Kidstaken, sold, disappeared. We'd stopped it. We'd saved not just Hannah but potentially dozens of other children.
I should have felt satisfaction. Relief. Something.
But my phone was buzzing insistently in my pocket, and that cold dread from this morning was back, crawling up my spine like ice.
"Excuse me, Cap," I said, stepping away from the chaos.
Uncle Owen’s number.
The family didn't call like this during a case unless?—
I answered, skipping pleasantries. "What's wrong?"
“Son…”
The world narrowed to just his voice, just the words that I knew were about to shatter everything.
"What happened?" But I already knew. That feeling this morning, that weight in my gut when I drove away—I already knew.
"Stephy's gone. Someone took her from your house. There was a struggle—blood, furniture overturned. Ivy found the scene twenty minutes ago."
The moment Owen spoke the words, my world didn’t explode.
It imploded. Quiet. Cold. Vacuumed hollow from the inside out.
The phone creaked in my fist, plastic giving way under pressure I didn’t realize I was applying. I stared down at it—at the spiderweb crack bursting across the screen—almost detached, like I was watching myself from outside my body.
My greatest nightmare. The one I’d been outrunning my entire goddamn life. Real. Standing in front of me like a reanimated ghost.
Someone I loved was in danger. And I wasn’t there.
Just like before. Just like the night I was fifteen, helpless, listening to the world end in the next room.
“Liam, did you hear me?” someone asked—FBI, local PD, I didn’t know. Didn’t care.
My voice, when it came, was barely human. “How long?”
A beat.
“Maybe an hour,” Owen said. “Blood’s still wet. Drag marks leading to tire tracks behind the barn.”
An hour.
Sixty minutes.
Three thousand six hundred seconds of her being terrified. Of him touching her. Hurting her. Taking her away from safety—from me—because I wasn’t there to stop it.
My ribs felt like they were collapsing inward, crushing my lungs, crushing my heart, crushing every part of me that had learned how to breathe after childhood.
Everything inside me screamed, Not again.
