“I keep thinking…” My voice cracks before I can stop it. “If I’d just gone with her instead of letting Dakota?—”
“Don’t.” Noah’s voice is quiet, but enough to cut through my guilt.
I press my palm against the glass, watching the faint reflection of my own eyes staring back—hollow, haunted.
“Jace won’t stop,” Noah mutters after a beat. “He’s been working with Lucian’s contacts. If there’s a lead, he’ll find it.”
“Yeah, but how much longer before he breaks?” I glance over at Noah. “He’s barely sleeping. He’s running on rage and caffeine.”
“We all are.”
I huff out a laugh.
The world didn’t stopwhen she disappeared.
Classes kept running. The Guild kept sending assignments. The sky still had the nerve to turn blue in the mornings.
It’s almost funny—how quickly people move on. Except we can’t, we’re still stuck inside the night she disappeared.
Jace is the first one up every morning. I hear him before I see him—the scrape of the chair against the floor, the coffee maker, the sound of him pacing while the rest of the dorm still sleeps.
When I finally drag myself out of bed, he’s already by the window, one hand braced against the frame. He doesn’t look at me when he speaks.
“Guild briefing in ten.”
“Yeah,” I mumble, rubbing my eyes. “Can’t wait.”
He exhales through his nose, sharp and tired. “You didn’t sleep.”
“Neither did you.”
It’s not a fight, but it could be. Everything between us lately teeters on the edge of one. Two months of us both being too damn stubborn to admit what’s really clawing at us.
By the time we make it to the training hall, Noah’s already buried in data on his tablet. He looks up briefly, the dark circles under his eyes are worse than yesterday. “Another false lead from the docks. The camera’s timestamp was off by a week.”
Jace doesn’t even react. He just walks past him, shoulders stiff, and starts strapping on his gear like he’s going to war with the air itself.
I sit beside Noah and grab a protein bar from his desk. “You should eat something that doesn’t come in aluminum, man.”
He doesn’t look up.
We train. We study. We report to Lucian. We do what we’re supposed to do. But every night, when the lights go out, I see her face—defiant, terrified, bloodied—and I wonder if that was the last time I ever will.
When Jace finishes, he throws his gloves onto the table and mutters, “I’m heading out.”
“For what?” I ask.
He pauses in the doorway. “Leads.”
I stare at him for a long second. “Sure.” I cross my arms and mumble loud enough for him to hear. “Tex wouldn’t have let this happen.”
He doesn’t answer. Just walks out, the door slamming shut behind him.
Noah sighs and pushes his tablet away. “You should talk to him.”
“Yeah,” I say, leaning back against the wall. “I might as well talk to a wall for all the good that would do.”
Outside, the rain starts again. It’s been raining a lot lately. The kind of gray drizzle that never stops, like the sky forgot it was supposed to be blue.
