Chapter 14
Declan
The bed is cold.
I reach for her before I open my eyes—arm sweeping across the mattress, fingers searching for the warm curve of her hip, the dip of her waist. My hand finds nothing but sheets that have already lost her heat.
I sit up. The room is dark. The bathroom door is open, no light on, no sound of water.
"Saoirse?"
Nothing.
I'm on my feet and down the hall before my brain catches up to the alarm already roaring through my body. The guest room door is open. The closet light is on, the door ajar, and I can see from the threshold that the clothes are still hanging in their neat row—every blouse, every jacket, every piece I bought for her.
But her duffel bag is gone.
I stand in the doorway of the guest room and stare at the empty corner where the bag used to sit. She left.
My fist hits the doorframe hard enough to split the wood.
I check the cameras. Front door, back door, side entrance—nothing. No footage of her leaving. Which means she used the fire escape on the east side.
The realization is like a knife blade between my ribs. I assumed she'd stay because she said she was mine. Because she kissed me in the kitchen. Because she rode me on the couch and fell asleep in my arms and fed a stray cat and laughed at my lack of imagination and pressed her palm to my chest like she wanted to feel my heart beat.
I assumed wrong.
She ran the way she's always run. The way every single person in her life trained her to run—because staying was never an option.
I grab my phone and call her. The burner. The one I gave her in the laundromat, the one she never returned, the one I prayed she kept.
It rings. Rings again. No answer.
I call again. Again. Again. Six times, my thumb hitting redial with a force that threatens to crack the screen.
Then I text. Three words. The truest three words I've got.
Please come home.
I don't wait for a response. I'm already pulling on jeans and boots, shoving my gun into the back of my waistband, calling Corcoran as I take the stairs two at a time.
“She’s gone.”
Corcoran's voice is gruff, then sharp. "She hasn't come out the front. I've been on post since?—"
"Fire escape. East side. She's gone." The words taste like battery acid. "Get everyone searching. Sweep east, then south. She'll head out of the neighborhood to someplace she's familiar with."
"Copy. How long ago?"
I check the time. It's past four in the morning. "I don't know. Could be hours."
Hours. She could be anywhere. She could be on a bus. She could be in a doorway somewhere, curled around that duffel bag, making herself small again. The image punches through me—Saoirse in a doorway, knees to her chest, alone.
I take the fire escape down, my boots ringing on the metal, and hit the alley at a dead run.
Think. She won't go north—that's deeper into O'Rourke territory, and she knows it. West is residential, dead ends. She'll go east toward the lake, then south toward the bus terminal or the shelters she used to frequent.
She'll retrace the map of her old life because that's the geography she trusts.
