A cold ripple moves down my spine. That woman already unsettled me, from the moment I met her as a kid. There was always something that was just too polished, too controlled, too focused on certain details while ignoring others. “And?”
“And it’s strange,” he says, choosing his words like they’ve been burning holes in his mouth all morning. “Her past doesn’t line up. There are pieces missing that should exist. Records that aren’t there. A history that seems almost…too perfect.”
I frown, trying to process that. “Too perfect, how?” My brow furrows as I try to understand what is happening. I didn’t want to jump to some sort of conclusion, but the way things were sounding…does he think that Alex was the reason for their death? Disappearance?
“There’s no trace of her before she transferred here,” he explains. “No verifiable employment history. No certification hours. No ID photos on file from any previous precinct. The logs say she worked in Chicago, but Chicago’s records don’t list her. At all.”
Confusion twists into something darker in my gut. “So…someone erased her past?”
“Either someone erased it,” he says, his eyes still fixed on the road, “or the past she’s claiming never belonged to her in the first place.”
I stare at him, the weight of that sinking heavily into my chest. Alexandra’s clipped, precise voice flashes in my memory. The way she studied me like she already knew what I was going to say before I said it. The way she kept circling back to certainquestions, like she was looking for confirmation rather than truth. “That doesn’t make sense,” I say, even though a part of me feels the pieces clicking together in a way I don’t like. “People don’t just…lack an entire background.”
“That’s why Lincoln is concerned,” Zack says. “He doesn’t get stumped. But this shit—this is just too fucking clean. Too perfect. If you try hard enough, you can usually find at least a trace of someone’s life. A school record. An old ID. A random forum account from when they were a teenager. But Alexandra? Nothing. It’s like she appeared out of nowhere.”
“Zack,” I whisper, feeling the truth settle uneasily into my bones. “Why would a detective hide her whole past? I mean, she’s been around my entire life. From as young as I can remember.” I think back to the days of LeBauer group, and a shiver rolls through me as memories of unsettling moments sink into me. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to begin to separate the past I remember and the past that might have actually happened.
His silver eyes swim with what I can only begin to describe as concern. I watch as hands tighten on the wheel again, his knuckles so white I can hear the leather creaking. “I don’t know. But it means we can’t trust her. And it means whatever she’s involved in…it’s bigger than we thought.”
“Do you think she’s The Whispering Killer?” I blurt out, fully knowing that sounds absurd, but it would make sense.
“No. There’s no way it’s her; she’s not organized enough. But she definitely knows something.”
The car goes quiet again, but it’s different now. Not the heavy tension from before, but the kind that comes after someone pulls a curtain back and reveals something you weren’t prepared to see. My brightness dims a little, the cracks in it showing through no matter how much I try to smooth them over. We’re heading to a safe house, to discuss what actually happened, and the moreand more I think about the absurdity of it all, it shatters this fun little façade I’ve been keeping up for so long now. The silence must go on for just a moment too long, or maybe Mr. Tall, Dark, and Broody, has a little bit of foresight in him after all.
“Hazel,” he says after a moment, softer than before. “You don’t have to pretend everything’s fine.”
“I’m not pretending.” The lie comes easily, almost habitually, but my voice doesn’t carry the conviction I want it to.
He glances at me then, eyes softer than the rest of him. “I feel guilty,” he says quietly, “because I care.”
The words hit too hard, too fast—like a sudden gust of warm air in a frozen room. They make my throat tighten, and my heartbeat kicks uncomfortably against my ribs. But before I can say anything, because God knows I would mess it up, the GPS chimes, announcing our next turn.
The moment dissolves, swallowed by the road ahead.
And even though I sit up straighter and force my voice into something passably cheerful when I ask how much farther we have, the truth is humming underneath everything:
Zack cares.
And we might be driving straight toward something that takes advantage of that. Going back to his home made me smile more than I’d like to let on. It’s time to figure out what’s going to happen with all of this, and I’m so ready.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
YOU COULD START A CULT
THE WHISPERING KILLER
The room hums.
It always hums, even when no machines are running and no one is speaking. As if the concrete itself is full of trapped whispers that wander the walls when the world is quiet. Sometimes I think the building is breathing with me. Sometimes I think it is breathing instead of me. The difference has begun to slip like worn fabric, and I am not sure which version is real anymore. The memories of the past flutter in and out of a time that I forbade myself to remember.
The two on the floor have stopped pleading. They sit bound to the pillar, heads drooping, their breaths shallow and uneven. The louder one ran out of voice hours ago, his throat too raw to shape the questions he kept repeating. The quieter one is still watching me, their gaze steady in a way that grates under my skin. I do not like when people look at me as if they knowsomething. People think silence makes them mysterious, but I have always been able to hear the truth inside it.
I pace the length of the room, fingertips dragging across pockets of cold air that drift through the cracks. Each flicker of the fluorescent light above scrapes across my senses, sharp enough to make my vision stagger for a heartbeat. Some moments feel clear, crystalline, precise. I hear every drip of water in the pipes, every faint movement from the two behind me. Other moments smear at the edges—reality slipping like wet paint—and I have to blink several times to keep the world from splitting open.
Something is approaching. I feel it like a pressure in my spine, an echo that tightens every time I inhale.Hazel and Zack. Those two…they’re moving closer, stitching their way toward me with a persistence that borders on irritating. They don’t fucking know how to leave things buried. Let the past stay dead. They keep dragging the past into the light, unaware that some truths burn hotter than they expect. They believe they can save what has already been claimed. People like them always believe they can make things right.
They never understand that some endings have already chosen them.
