Beckett doesn't give much away. That's the thing most people don't understand about him — they see the size, the quiet, and they think slow, but he is controlled. But this is different.
His eyes meet mine, and I know something’s wrong.
He hands me the phone.
There’s Adela on a bed, tied up with a blindfold. The two-second clip plays on a loop. I don’t know this room. It’s unfamiliar. It’s not the Ravenshaw house, not his bedroom, not her bedroom, not her dorm.
I turn the sound up. Fuck. The sound she makes in those two seconds is completely involuntary and completely real. Cody knew, and he’s sending this to Beckett’s phone tonight like he’s sliding a business card under a door.
Here. I want you to know who she belongs to. Look at what I do with what's mine.
I set the phone down on the coffee table, silencing that sound.
The hockey game plays on behind us, but I stare past it.
"Why the fuck would he send that to me?" Beckett doesn't phrase it like a question. He phrases it like a man trying to make sense of Cody’s nonsense. Anything Cody does has never made sense to me. The man operates out of spite. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for me, but it’s clear he has his priorities straight, which means he must not know about Adela and me yet.
"It's a warning."
Beckett grabs his phone and watches the video again.
"He saw you leaving, so he took her, and now he’s showing you who she belongs to."
"Does he know about you?"
I'm quiet.
This is the question of the hour. What Cody knows versus what Cody suspects versus what Cody can prove. What Nessa might have said — not maliciously, Nessa doesn't do malicious, but Nessa talks, and Cody listens. Cody has always been better at listening than people give him credit for. What Serena has given him. What the library connection looks like from Cody's angle when you don't have the full picture, when you only have fragments, and you're working backward from them.
"I doubt it," I say. "But he's close."
Beckett pulls up her contact and calls it.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Do you think maybe he left her tied up somewhere?”
We both listened to it go straight to voicemail.
I don't reach for my own phone. I look at the hockey game and let the anger sit where it wants to sit, which is low and heavy and very, very still. Not the kind that needs to move. Not the explosive kind that burns up its own fuel before it can be useful. The kind that waits.
"He probably has her phone," Beckett says.
We look at each other.
“I shouldn’t have called.” He stares at the phone now like he’s waiting for her to call back.
"He's made his first move," I say.
"Because she told him she wanted to break up." Beckett exhales.
I look at him. “She told you that, but it doesn’t mean she did it right then and there.”
“I think she did,” he says.
I look at the phone on the table.
So the sequence is this: Adela decides this afternoon that she's done. Adela tells Beckett — which means some part of her is already building the bridge toward what comes after Cody, already testing the weight of it. And then tonight, within hours, Cody takes her somewhere and ties her up and films her. He sends two seconds of it to the person Cody saw with his own eyes leaving Elm Hall.
