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Nothing again. The same nothing, like the dark has learned exactly one answer and intends to give it to me every single time I ask, no matter how I phrase the question. And no matter how many different ways I break myself open trying to earn something different back.

I understand, somewhere underneath the pain, that this is the only conversation left available to me. Ask. Get silence. Ask again. Get the same silence, dressed up a little differently each time so I keep mistaking it for hope.

There’s no warmth I can’t explain. No voice pretending to be more than my own mind trying to keep me alive. Only the dark and the ringing in my skull, and somewhere behind my closed eyes, a shape that might be her. It drifts at the edge of my vision the way she does now, never quite materializing into anything I can hold onto.

A streak of blonde hair. The familiar tilt of a head I’d know anywhere. Gone before I can be sure I saw it, the way everything about her is gone before I can be sure of it now. Over and over, an answer that never changes no matter how many times I ask the question.

I don’t know why tonight’s different. I don’t know why the one thing that’s kept me tethered through every other blackout has gone quiet when I need it most.

And I don’t know if I have enough strength left to care.

If Knox doesn’t find me, I’m going to die here. Not the slow kind, one bottle at a time, that I’ve been doing for months. This is the real thing—the kind with no mornings after it.

Some broken, ugly part of me welcomes the thought.

I’ve been half dead since the creek took her. Half here, and half nothing at all. One foot in this world, one foot in that cold, quiet dark where she’s waiting so patiently, like only the dead know how.

Maybe it’s the only way left to reach her.

I think of every door I’ve knocked on since she died and found locked. Every empty room where I called her name and got nothing back but the echo of my own voice. Every hallucination that dissolved the second I reached for it. Every scent that vanished before I could be sure I hadn’t imagined it. Every hope that arrived only long enough to be taken away again in exactly the same fashion.

If dying is a door too, maybe it’s the one door in this whole grieving, endless house that finally opens instead of throwing my own voice back at me.

I don’t let myself finish that thought. Not because it isn’t true, but because some smaller piece of me isn’t ready to give up whatever this is.

So, I hold on, alone in the dark, with no voice left to answer me, and wait to find out if it matters.

Somewhere about me, close enough that I feel it more than hear it, wingbeats stir the dark.

Once.

Twice.

Then they do still like something’s landed nearby to watch and has no plans to leave.

Knox

Mouse traces the number in just over twenty-four hours. He stayed hunched over his laptop at the clubhouse table, refusing to let anyone else touch the keyboard until he pinpointed an address. Old Mine Road. A warehouse that’s supposedly been abandoned since before I was patched in.

I stayed by his side the entire time. I told myself it was strategy. I was staying sharp and ready to move the second we had a location. The truth is simpler and more painful than that. Every time I close my eyes, I see Rae’s face instead of Sam’s. Some cowardly part of me has been afraid that if I sleep, I’ll wake up to news that I lost them both.

“You’re sure,” I say, already reaching for my cut.

“As sure as I can be without eyes on it.”

“That’s good enough.”

It has to be. Forty-eight hours doesn’t leave room for better than good enough.

Mouse, Diesel, and Bishop come with me. We go in dark, no headlights past the tree line, engines cut a quarter mile out so we cover the rest on foot. The cold doesn’t touch me. Nothing does right now except the count running in my head of how many hours are left. How much of that Sam’s already lost, and whether we’re already too late and just don’t know it yet.

I buried my sister two months ago. I am not driving home tonight to tell my father we have to bury her husband too.

Diesel works quiet and quick, taking the side door first, a crowbar doing what a key should’ve. Bishop’s already moving to cover the flank before the hinge finishes groaning, pistol low and steady. His stealth-like ability surprises me every time I watch him work, given how loud he is at the clubhouse over a game of pool.

I go in first, Mouse right behind me.

The main room opens up, dim and cavernous. Exposed beams. A rusted forklift dead in the corner. Two of Cullen’s men reacting half a second too slow to the fact that we’re already inside. Diesel drops one before he clears his own weapon. I take the other down.