Hazel tilts her head, frowning slightly, this adorable crease forms in between her brows. “Older how?”
I scroll to the file Lincoln marked in red. It’s an old police report with a bunch of old scanned pages—newspaper clippings from nearly thirty years ago—and…and a missing child bulletin. Hazel’s brow furrows as she reads the header. She gingerly tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, looking closer at the clipping like she could figure it out through osmosis.
“A kidnapping?” she whispers.
“A baby,” I say. “Taken twenty-eight years ago. Never found.”
She looks up slowly, confusion tightening her features. “What does this have to do with The Whispering Killer?”
I swallow, because the truth unsettled me, too. “Lincoln ran comparisons between the killer’s earliest activity and old police databases. It looks like he found something that wasn’t adding up. There are redacted sections in the original kidnapping report. Pages missing. Most of the digital archive is corrupted or erased entirely. And someone tried very hard to bury the case. Like a simple search wouldn’t bring this up.”
Hazel leans in, studying the faded photograph attached to the file: a grainy hospital picture of a newborn wrapped in a blanket. There’s no identifying name on it, just a smudged year written on the bottom of it, dated twenty-eight years ago.
Her voice softens. “Why would Lincoln think it is connected?”
“Because someone accessed this file two days ago,” I say. “Illegally. From the same masked network The Whispering Killer uses.”
Hazel stills completely, the weight of the implication settling over her.
“You think The Whispering Killer is looking into their own past,” she says, quietly.
The waitress comes back with our drinks, and we order ourselves breakfast, the tense moment broken. Hazel’s question lingers in the air around us. It’s loud and present, and I’m ready for these answers to finally make sense.
I nod, a moment passing before I speak again as I gather the courage to bring this all up. “Lincoln thinks whoever this is may have been that baby. Or connected to them. And now they are spiraling, trying to dig up something buried this deep.”
Hazel turns the laptop slightly so she can study the blurry image again. The baby is small—someone helpless and so fucking innocent. It makes something cold ripple through me, nearly making me sick. All this new information making its way to the forefront is honestly fucking disgusting, and there isn’t a single thing I like about it.
“This happened twenty-eight years ago,” she murmurs. “That means the baby would be around my age.”
“Exactly,” I say. “And if the killer is trying to understand who they were, or what happened, or why someone took them, it could explain the instability in their recent behavior.”
Hazel shivers slightly, her eyes still on the screen. “This is not just a killer losing control. This is someone trying to understand themselves.”
“And doing it violently,” I add. “Which means they are not going to stop until they either find what they are looking for or destroy everything in the way.”
For a moment, neither of us speak. Hazel slowly closes the laptop, her fingers lingering on the lid.
“So, what do we do?” she asks.
Before I answer, my phone buzzes with a message from Lincoln.A location ping. A place connected not to recent kidnappings, but to the old case. A storage unit rented under a false name, the same one that accessed the archived file. My stomach tightens. Something about all of this doesn’t fucking feel right. It feels too easy, but when it comes to me, nothing is ever easy.
“That’ll be where we go next,” I tell her, a lump forming in my throat. Her smile is wide, as if this isn’t going to end terribly for her, but her optimism is fucking infectious, even if it is forced.
“Okay, well…I guess we’re going back to Michigan?” A big beaming smile sits on her face now. The childlike glee that emanates from her is refreshing. It’s something different and something I haven’t felt or truly seen in far too damn long.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DADDY ISSUES
HAZEL
If someone had told me a month ago that I’d be standing in the doorway of a Detroit hotel room with my heart trying to break out of my chest because there is only one bed, I would have laughed. Or cried.Probably both.But here I am, frozen in place, staring at the neatly made king-sized mattress like it is an active bomb waiting for someone to cut the wrong wire.
The room itself is nice enough. It’s got warm lighting, a big window overlooking the parking lot, and a clean bathroom—nothing creepy, or stained, or suspicious. It should feel safe. Comfortable, even. Instead, it feels like the universe is sitting in the corner waiting to see which one of us combusts first. I’m kind of enjoying the fact that Zack is three…two…one…yep, there it is.
Zack stops behind me, and I feel his whole body tense the moment he notices the bed. It is not dramatic or obvious like you read about in books, but it’s subtle—just like everything else he does. His inhale sharpens, and I watch as his shoulders lockfor a second. He doesn’t step around me, but I can feel him processing, recalculating, and preparing to retreat in that quiet way he does when something touches too close to a boundary he never explains. I just wish I knew what to do or say to this man to make him feel more comfortable around me—and this is apparently his biggest nightmare.
I step deeper into the room before he can say anything. If I keep moving, maybe my brain will not have time to implode.
