And that feels like healing. Tomorrow we can focus on us. Tomorrow we can focus on figuring out what really happened with Leyla and Cameron. We can try to make sense of what the next steps between us really are, to look at things more clearly now that we’re not running from ourselves anymore.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
GHOST
LINCOLN
I’ve been working long enough to know the difference between bad luck and bad information. This was the fucking latter.
The monitors glow dimly in the room, throwing pale light across my hands as they move from screen to screen, cross-checking data I’ve already verified twice—a third time just to punish myself. The trail we followed—Cameron, Leyla, their digital footprint hopping cities and hiding behind noise—was clean enough to believe. That was the problem. It made sense. Too much sense.
And while we were chasing them, someone else slipped through.
Zack hasn’t said it out loud, and he absolutely won’t say shit to me about it. He’s never been the kind of man who points blame when something goes wrong, especially not at me. But I know him better than anyone, and I can hear it in the way his voice went flat when he told me Hazel had been taken, the wayhe didn’t ask how my intel failed—because he already knew the answer.
“Daddy?”
The voice comes from behind me—small, sleepy, and impossibly gentle—and it hits harder than any realization on my screens ever could. I turn in my chair to find Nora standing in the doorway, her curls wild from sleep, one sock missing, clutching a stuffed rabbit by one ear like it personally wronged her.
“Hey, princess,” I say immediately, softening my voice as I hold my arms out. “You’re supposed to be dreaming right now.”
She toddles over anyway and climbs straight into my lap like it’s the most natural thing in the world, pressing her forehead against my chest. “I had a bad dream,” she murmurs. “It was sca-wy.”
“I know,” I say quietly, wrapping one arm around her and pulling her close. “But you’re okay. I’ve got you.”
She peers at the screens with serious interest, her tiny finger lifting to point. “Is that a map?”
“It is,” I say, smiling despite the knot in my chest. “A very boring one.”
She considers that. “I don’t like boring maps.”
“That makes two of us.”
She giggles then yawns, settling more comfortably against me, her thumb finding its way into the hem of my shirt like it always does when she’s half-asleep. I rest my chin on the top of her head for a moment, breathing her in, grounding myself in the warmth and weight of something real, innocent, and entirely my responsibility.
Zack hasn’t blamed me. He never would. He trusts me the way you only trust someone who’s been beside you through years of shared damage, someone who’s earned that faith the hard way. Hazel is alive because Zack refused to stop looking,because he moved when the rest of us believed the threat had already passed.
The Whispering Killer doesn’t erase people digitally. He preserves them in silence. I see it now with painful clarity. No activity doesn’t mean no one is there—it means someone wants them quiet.
While we mourned two ghosts, he repositioned.
Hazel’s kidnapping wasn’t random. It was clean. Timed. Executed while our attention was elsewhere. Our confidence settled on the idea that the danger had already come and gone. We thought the worst had already happened.
It hadn’t.
I shift Nora slightly so she’s more comfortable, keeping one hand steady at her back while the other nudges the trackpad. Cameron’s file opens again, then Leyla’s. When I overlay the gaps instead of the data, the pattern finally snaps into place—controlled environments, limited power usage, physical isolation designed to leave no digital echo.
“They’re not gone,” I whisper to myself.
Alive means suffering. Alive means leverage. Alive means The Whispering Killer still has pieces we haven’t accounted for. I don’t know what the end game was, but all of this is hitting closer to home than I’d like to admit, and it hurts me to realize that. I now clearly see Hazel was never the endgame, and I’m beginning to realize Cameron and Leyla were just pawns in a game they didn’t understand to the complexity and depth this all went to.
Nora stirs, lifting her head just enough to look at me. “Daddy?”
“Yeah, baby?”
“Are you fixing it?”
The question is simple. It’s so small and simple, but she knows even at her little age that I’m the one who fixes things. And she’s always been the one who I’ve done all this for. Ina way, I owe The Whispering Killer. They killed the man who killed my Olivia.
