“Fuck.”
Click.This isn’t what we wanted, but I know where it’s heading. And now we have a direct place to take this, and a direct answer as to who’s really behind this now.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
ALL THE THINGS SHE SAID
HAZEL
Zack is on high alert, and I can’t help but feel like this is somehow my fault. I can feel him hiding things from me, and I don’t like it.
“What is it, Zack?” I look to him, truly trying to just get anything out of him, but I can tell he’s trying to protect me again and I can’t deal with this crap. I’m not breakable, and I’m not some fragile flower that he’s making me out to be. I can tell the false sense of security settles over the room as soon as he looks at me like whatever he’s going to say is going to break me. Then it hits me, and I can tell something’s different the moment he sits down next to me, phone still in his hand, shoulders tight in a way I recognize now as focus instead of fear. The kind that means a piece finally clicked into place, even if it isn’t a comfortable one. I’m sitting at the small table with a mug of tea gone cold between my palms, watching the safe house window like I expect answers to appear there on their own.
“Philly,” he says finally.
I look up. “Philadelphia?”
He nods. “That’s where Cameron and Leyla were headed before they went dark. Lincoln just confirmed it. Every thread we missed bends east.”
Something in my chest tightens—not panic, not this time, but recognition. “They weren’t running,” I say slowly. “They were closing in.”
Zack’s jaw flexes. “Yeah.”
The word hangs between us, heavy with implication. Cameron and Leyla weren’t victims of random violence or collateral damage in someone else’s game. They were getting close. Close enough that someone decided silence was safer than risk.
“And while we thought they were dead,” I add quietly, “someone else made their move.”
Zack meets my eyes, and I see it there—the same realization settling in him at the same moment it settles in me. The timing. The precision. The way my kidnapping happened not during chaos, but during certainty.
“We were distracted,” he says. “Fed bad conclusions and was encouraged to stop looking. This was planned out.”
“We didn’t just miss something,” I reply. “We were steered.”
The word tastes bitter, but it feels right. I push back from the table and stand, pacing slowly as the pieces rearrange themselves in my head. Philly isn’t random. Philly is proximity—to systems, to people, to information that doesn’t want to stay buried. Cameron and Leyla didn’t disappear because they failed. They disappeared because they succeeded, so what exactly was it that they found? It’s up to me now—well up tousnow—to find Cameron and Leyla, to find The Whispering Killer, and trap them in their own game before it’s too late for them, for real this time.
“So when do we head out?” My words are more confident than they’ve been in a really long time, and for the first time in a long while, I’m confident that we’re on the right path this time. I hate that we wasted weeks on the wrong one.
“Tomorrow morning. They won’t know we’re coming this time, there’s no way, and we’re going to stay ahead of them now.”
“Tomorrow morning. Okay, okay yeah, I can absolutely work with this. They were close enough to scare someone,” I say. “And instead of stopping them directly, that someone widened the board, and we just walked into their trap.”
Zack nods once. “Took you to get my attention off the real threat.”
I stop pacing and look at him. “And it worked.”
For a moment, there’s silence—not the dangerous kind, but the kind where both of us are recalibrating. I expect the old fear to creep in, the sense that I should step back, let him handle it, but it doesn’t come. What I feel instead is sharp, focused resolve.
“They think we’re still behind,” I say. “They think the worst of it already happened. They clearly don’t understand who we are, what we’re capable of.”
Zack’s mouth curves into something grim. “They thought they could use you against me to distract me. They know we’re together, and they think that you’re close enough to be a distraction.”
“They’re wrong,” I say immediately. “I wasn’t the end of the message. I was a delay— the distraction. I just don’t understand, I really don’t understand why me.”
That gets his attention. He watches me carefully now, not protective, not dismissive—evaluating. “What are you thinking in that beautiful head of yours?”
“That Philly matters now,” I reply, trying to not let that little slip of a compliment distract me from the truth here.“If Cameron and Leyla were close there, then whatever scared The Whispering Killer enough to take them is still there. Or connected to whatever is there?”
“And whoever took you wanted us nowhere near it,” he finishes.
