Every part of me goes cold. “Where?”
“We lost her after the second-floor transfer.”
I curse and turn around so fast my coat swings wide.
The men behind me don’t ask questions. They just pivot with me.
By the time I hit the elevator again, I’m already putting the pieces together too fast and not fast enough. Alena walking in now, after the evidence, after the pressure building against her, after everything. Either she’s suicidal, or she’s desperate, or someone sent her.
The third possibility is the one I hate most.
The doors open. I stride out into the corridor at speed, and one of my men stationed near Zatanna’s room is already there, face pale.
“She went in,” he says.
My heart stops once and then starts again harder.
With him at my side, I hit the door.
We don’t knock. We barge in.
The door slams open hard enough to crack against the wall.
For one second, the whole room is chaos without motion.
Alena is on the floor. Blood at her hairline.
Zatanna is half upright in the bed, eyes wide and wild, hand still smashed against the call button.
And standing beside her, breathing too evenly for someone who should be panicking, is my mother.
Everything in me goes still. Not confusion. Recognition.
The kind that arrives so fast it feels like memory, not thought. Every missing piece. Every too-clean answer. Every time the trail pointed somewhere obvious. Every time I chose to hate the convenient woman instead of asking who benefited most while I was busy burning in the wrong direction.
My mother turns to me. And smiles. “My son,” she says softly, as if we’ve walked into tea, not a scene with one woman bleeding on the floor and another white with terror in a hospital bed.
The silence is worse than shouting could have been.
I look at Alena first.
Alive. Dazed. Trying to push herself up.
Then at Zatanna.
Her face tells me everything before she says a word.
She knows. Or enough.
My man steps in behind me. “Boss?—”
“Out.”
He hesitates.
I don’t look at him when I say it again. “Out.”
He leaves. Closes the door behind him. Good. No witnesses. Not for this.
