He doesn't wait for an answer.
The lock clicks once, then twice.
I make it to the bathroom before my legs fold, catching myself on the sink. I glance up at the mirror, not recognizing the woman staring back.
The shower is a glass box lined with dark rock. The water is freezing when I turn it on, then scalding. I step under it, letting it hit my skin until everything is numb and burning.
The sound of the water is loud enough to hide the small, broken noises that come out of me.
I sink down, pulling my knees to my chest as water beats down on my head.
Don't forget how much you owe me.
We'll start trying soon.
I scrape my nails over the scar on my thigh, the one Tristan stitched up himself in a motel outside Prague.
The memory catches like a hook and pulls.
I shouldn't let myself go there. It's stupid. A slow kind of torture I can't afford. But my brain does what it always does when the walls close in. It slips sideways before going back.
To nights where the world wasn't kind, but I wasn't alone in it.
To hands that touched me like I was something worth keeping, not something to own.
Back to a version of myself I'll never get to be again.
The worst part isn't that I lost him. It's that I remember exactly what it felt like to be loved like that. To be seen. To matter beyond what I could do or give or survive.
And now those memories are all I have left.
They sit in my chest like shrapnel I can't dig out—painful and permanent and only mine.
So I let the water beat down and close my eyes.
Just long enough to pretend I'm somewhere else, with someone else, before I come back to this version of hell.
TEN
TRISTAN
The hotel room in London is a characterless, stale box.
Beige walls. Corporate art. A window that doesn't open, triple-glazed to keep out the noise below. It's not somewhere I would ever stay, which is exactly why I chose it.
No one would think to look for me here.
Streetlights bleed orange through the glass, turning everything the color of old bruises. The days are just blending together at this point, and my patience is wearing thin.
I sit at the desk with my laptop open, arm still wrapped in gauze from where I cut the tracker out. Thousands of codes are running in the background, trying to find anything remotely tied to the Ferryman.
Minutes blur into hours. The screen washes the room in cold light as encrypted codes scatter across the dark web. Jobs, private docs, real estate, hidden shipments, shell companies, security cameras, contractors.
All of it turns up nothing. Again.
Every second feels like another piece of her slipping further out of reach.
Nick and Zara are probably losing their minds, but the tracker had to go.
