Let him be irritated.
Let him work harder.
He straightens slowly. “We’ll see.”
He turns toward the door.
The light under it looks thinner now.
Before he lifts it, he glances back once.
“Pray all you want, sweetheart,” he says. “It won’t change what he is.”
The door rattles upward. Light cuts in. Then he’s gone again, and the metal slams shut behind him with a sound that seems to shake the whole room.
Darkness rushes back in.
Silence follows.
For one terrible second, I let myself shake.
Then I inhale.
Exhale.
And whisper into the dark. “Evie, stay with me.”
CHAPTER FORTY
Zane
The first thingI do is quiet everything that doesn’t help.
Fear has a sound to it. So does panic. It fills a space, pushes at the edges, and makes everything feel urgent and directionless at the same time. Finn’s pacing feeds it. Ryder going still feeds it more.
Aurora doesn’t need any of that.
So I step back into the alley and let the noise fall away.
The air still carries it. Disturbed gravel. Rubber. That faint chemical tang from a vehicle that sat here too long with the engine running. It lingers in a way most people wouldn’t notice, but once you’ve learned what to look for, you don’t miss it.
I crouch near the edge of the blind spot.
Start with the ground.
There’s a shift in the gravel where her footing went wrong. A drag, brief but sharp, she fought for balance before she lost it. No long struggle. No scattered debris. He didn’t give her time for that.
My jaw tightens slightly.
I follow the disturbance outward, tracking the line until it thins into the rest of the alley traffic. It almost disappears there,almost, but the weight tells a different story. Tires pressed deeper than the usual pass-through. A vehicle that paused.
The marks angle toward the street, subtle but consistent, and I follow them out on the video on my phone, letting my focus narrow until the rest of the world fades into background noise.
There’s a storefront across the way. Dark now, but the glass still holds reflections from earlier. I step closer, adjusting my angle until the faintest ghost of movement sharpens into something usable.
Headlights. A turn. A partial plate caught in the curve of the reflection.
It isn’t clean, but it doesn’t need to be.
