The hallway to my office is empty. Quiet. The sounds of chaos fade behind us as we run.
I slam through the door. The room is exactly as I left it an hour ago. Laptop closed on my desk. Papers scattered. Everything normal.
Everything wrong.
I grab the laptop, flip it open. The screen glows to life.
Lorenzo appears in the doorway, breathing hard. "Let me?—"
I shove the laptop toward him. He takes it, fingers already flying across the keyboard.
"She uses a secure server." His voice is clipped. Professional. Like he's not talking about his sister who was just dragged away at gunpoint. "Encrypted. I need to access her system."
"How long?"
"I don't know." He types faster. "She's the tech genius, not me. I just know the basics. Enough to check if?—"
He stops. Stares at the screen.
"What?" I move around the desk to see. "What is it?"
"I'm in." Lorenzo's voice cracks. "I'm in her system."
The screen shows a map. Chicago. Streets and buildings rendered in clean lines. A grid of the city.
Empty.
No dots. No signals. Nothing.
"She didn't activate it." The words taste like ash. "She didn't?—"
"Wait." Lorenzo leans closer. "It takes a minute to load. The system has to ping the devices, triangulate positions. Just—wait."
I can't breathe. Can't think. Can't do anything except stare at that empty map and pray to a God I stopped believing in when my mother died.
Please.
Please let her have activated it.
Please let us find her.
A dot appears on the screen. Green. Pulsing.
"That's me." Lorenzo points. "Nexus. See?"
We wait. But there's not another dot.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Vittoria
Pain.
That's the first thing I feel. Sharp, throbbing pain radiating from the back of my skull down through my neck.
I try to open my eyes but my eyelids feel like lead. Heavy. Wrong.
Where—
