I press a kiss to the top of her head and let my eyes close.
Sleep finally comes, deep and dreamless, with her heartbeat steady against my skin.
When I wake, the sun has moved across the sky and hours have passed.
And my phone is buzzing with a text from my father.
We need to talk. Now.
CHAPTER 3- JADE
Three days pass without a word from the police.
I tell myself that's a good thing. No news is good news, isn't that what people say? If they had evidence, if they'd found something in Marcus's car or discovered the grave in the mountains, they would have come back. They would have knocked on the door with handcuffs.
But the silence feels like its own kind of torture. Every time my phone buzzes, my heart stops. Every time a car slows down on the street outside, I freeze at the window, watching, waiting for the flash of red and blue lights that will end everything. I can't eat without feeling sick. I can't sleep without dreaming of blood and frozen earth.
Phoenix handles it better than I do, or at least he's better at pretending. He goes back to work, takes calls, answers emails, moves through his days like nothing has changed. But I see the tension in his shoulders when he thinks I'm not looking. I notice the way his eyes dart to the door whenever there's an unexpected sound. He's as scared as I am. He's just had more practice hiding it.
I need a distraction. Something to occupy my mind besides the endless loop of fear and guilt and what-ifs that plays on repeat every waking moment.
So I start writing.
It's not the literary fiction I studied in my MFA program, the atmospheric pieces about nothing that my professors praised and no one wanted to publish. This is different. This is a fantasy world with magic and dragons and a ruthless rebellion fighting against a tyrannical king. It's a romance wrapped in adventure, the kind of story I used to devour as a teenager. The words come faster than anything I've ever written. I sit at the kitchen table with my laptop, and hours disappear while I build this world that exists only in my head. The heroine is a palace scribe, a half-elf passing as full elf, quietly surviving under a regime she doesn't love but doesn't dare fight. She knows an ancient language that makes her valuable, that puts her in the path of dangerous people. She's cautious in ways I wish I had been, but brave when it matters most.
The rebel leader who kidnaps her is nothing like the monster she's been taught to fear. He's hardened and guarded, driven by loss and consumed by his cause. Dangerous to everyone except her. He sees something in her that she doesn't see in herself, and their alliance slowly becomes something neither of them expected.
Their love is the kind that burns. The kind that makes people choose between comfort and revolution, between the life they know and the truth they can no longer ignore.
It's not subtle. I know who I'm really writing about.
I find myself posting the chapters online as I finish them, one at a time, on a site where amateur writers share their work for free. It feels reckless in a way I can't explain, putting pieces of myself out there for strangers to read. But it also feelsnecessary. Like if I can make sense of what's happening in fiction, maybe I can make sense of it in real life.
Phoenix notices, of course.
"What are you working on?" he asks one afternoon, looking up from his own laptop where he's been reviewing contracts.
”A novel." I angle my screen away from him instinctively. "Just something I'm playing with."
"Can I read it?"
"No." The word comes out sharper than I intended. I soften it with a smile. "Not yet. It's not ready."
He raises an eyebrow but doesn't push. "Is it like your other writing? The short stories?"
"Not exactly." I hesitate, trying to find the right words. "It's more genre. Fantasy romance. Probably not your thing."
"Everything you write is my thing." He says it simply, like it's obvious, like there's no world in which he wouldn't want to read every word I put on paper. The sincerity in his voice makes my chest tight. "But I can wait. Just promise you'll let me read it when it's done."
"I promise."
He goes back to his work, and I go back to mine, and for a few hours the silence between us feels almost normal and peaceful. Like we're just two people sharing a quiet afternoon, not two people bound together by blood and secrets and the body buried somewhere in the Angeles National Forest.
The sound of Phoenix's phone shatters the illusion.
I watch his face as he answers, trying to read his expression for any sign of danger. Police? Lawyers? But his features stay neutral, controlled, giving nothing away.
"Dad," he says, and something in my stomach unclenches. Not the police. Just his father.
