Chapter 16 Cassian’s Past #2
I nod. The shadow pacing the sidewalk is unmistakable—body coiled tight, head on a swivel. Like a panther in a cage. Watching. Waiting.
He scrubs forward. Twenty minutes blur past in muted tones and indifferent pedestrians.
“Here,” he says.
The image resets. Same street. Same angle.
Then he appears.
A man steps into frame.
Long coat. Hat pulled low. Stationary. Too still.
He plants himself beside the bus stop bench, but doesn’t sit. Doesn’t check his phone. Doesn’t glance at the road or shift his weight. He just stands there.
Watching.
Or worse, posing.
“That’s him,” I say. My voice is rough, like gravel dragged across concrete.
Grayson exhales, slow and hard. “Yeah. Thought so.”
He doesn’t say I was right. He doesn’t have to.
“Next angle,” he mutters. “Come on.”
We move to the passenger side, where a portable monitor’s clipped to a console wired into his car’s battery. A mess of cables coils in the footwell. This setup isn’t standard. It’s the kind you use when you don’t want command to know what you’re watching.
“Used ATM security across the street for this one,” he says. “Crappier resolution, better line of sight.”
He clicks through.
There he is again. Long coat. Still not moving.
But this time, we get a clearer look, just enough to see that his head is tilted slightly toward the office building.
Toward Sabine.
My jaw locks.
“Trace pattern from there,” Grayson says. “He moves two blocks east. Picks up pace here—”
A third camera. Bakery footage.
We watch him cross an intersection.
Then, just before the light changes, he ducks into an alley. It's narrow, shadowed, barely wide enough for a body.
Grayson clicks again.
“Lost him here. Six minutes of dead space. Then—”
New footage loads.
Another camera. A different street. Twenty minutes later.
The man reappears, same coat. Same profile. Same controlled walk.
But something’s off.
It’s subtle.
But I see it.
“That’s not him,” I say.
Grayson looks over. “What?”
I point. “His left foot drags. The guy outside Sabine’s work had a solid stance. Confident. This guy’s gait is tight. Off. He’s imitating.”
Grayson frowns. Rewinds. Plays it again.
“Could be new gear,” he says. “Shoes. Weighted pockets. Limp from running.”
“Or he’s a plant,” I say. “A decoy. He knew we’d check the footage. He wants us chasing the wrong guy.”
Grayson swears under his breath.
“So what, you think he handed off the coat and slipped out the back?”
“I think he planned this,” I say. “Every camera. Every step. It’s a breadcrumb trail. One he wants us to follow.”
Grayson is silent. Then he straightens and shuts the laptop with a sharp click.
“Alright,” he says. “Let’s check the alley.”
Fifteen minutes later, we’re on foot.
The moped’s locked two blocks back behind a shuttered thrift store.
Grayson’s sedan is parked by a loading dock under a flickering light.
We didn’t want to draw attention by arriving together.
Every move matters now, especially with a bastard who knows how to vanish from street cameras without a trace.
This way, the alley swallows us fast.
We move without speaking for a while. Just boots scuffing pavement. Eyes flicking to every dark window, every drainage pipe, every possible escape route.
“He knew this place,” I mutter, voice low and tight. “No cameras. No sensors. No traffic. No eyes. Just a clean slip into shadow.”
Grayson exhales through his nose, gaze climbing toward the rooftops. The late sun catches his cheek in a hard line.
I send a quick text to Sabie letting her know I’m okay, then crouch by a rusted maintenance door, fingers brushing worn brick.
There’s no chance we’ll find prints here.
The dust is undisturbed, not a single smudge.
And even if it were, I doubt the marks would be his.
He wouldn’t touch anything unless he meant to.
He seems the type.
Still, we check the dumpsters. The ladders. A collapsed fire escape.
I turn slowly, eyes scanning every shadow, every ledge and crevice, every pause that feels too still. But the more I look, the louder the silence becomes. It fills my ears like static. Like I’ve already been played and know it, but I’m still waiting for the punch.
Grayson straightens beside me, jaw hard. “He used this alley as a pivot point,” he mutters. “Dropped off the radar and pushed the decoy east. Meanwhile, the real him…”
“…Went somewhere else,” I finish. My voice is hollow now.
Twenty minutes later, we’re at Grayson’s precinct.
We’ve holed up in what used to be a file archive.
The walls are lined with unlabeled boxes, the cabinets have broken locks, and the blinds are pulled tight against the evening light.
There’s a desk barely big enough for his laptop and a cracked coffee machine in the corner that hasn’t worked since last summer.
I don’t care.
All I want is to find that guy. Whatever it takes.
Grayson’s guy joins us through a secure line. He feeds us footage. Batch by batch. Street cam. Building entrances. Parking garages.
And finally, finally we have a lead.
Grayson freezes mid-scrub, eyes narrowed.
“There.”
He rewinds and plays it again. A new angle. Different neighborhood. Narrower street.
The figure reappears.
Long coat. Hat pulled low. Similar posture. But the limp’s gone, and his boots… His boots are different.
“Where is this?” I ask.
Grayson nods once, his mouth tight. “Two neighborhoods over. Twenty-three minutes after we lost him in the alley.”
“But this is at least a thirty-minute walk,” I say. “Longer in a coat like that. Unless he sprinted—and he didn’t.”
“Exactly,” Grayson mutters.
“It’s another decoy, man,” I say. My jaw clenches. “It was staged. Just like the rest.”
He drags a hand through his hair, slow and rough. “We’ve been tracking a damn shadow.”
“Jesus,” I say, voice low, heart pounding. “That’s already a second guy pretending to be him.”
Grayson looks at me. There’s something unreadable in his expression, maybe fear.
“Chances are he just paid some thugs to take a walk.”
“Or he’s not working alone,” I reply.
A beat of silence passes between us.
If that bastard has people he can use like puppets, this just got even worse.
Grayson runs a hand over his face.
“Alright. Let’s go back to the beginning,” he says slowly. “He’s clearly doing all this knowing we’re trying to track him. But he had to go somewhere. If you were him, if this was your strategy, what would you do? How would you land the punch?”
Fuck.
I don’t know.
The possibilities are endless.
I rub my forehead, trying to think. Then my phone buzzes. I pull it from my pocket.
A message from Sabine:
Can you come home already? Something’s wrong. Mom didn’t come back yet.
My heart stutters.
Could it be...?
Grayson must see the shift in my expression. “What?”
“Sabine hasn’t heard from Mom.”
He straightens. “You think he—”
“I know he’s been in the house before,” I snap. “He’s been watching all of us. If he knew I was focused on Sabine, and then saw us chasing this bait...” I gesture to the screen.
“Shit.” He slams the laptop shut and grabs his keys. “Let’s go.”
An hour slips by in a blur of panic and motion.
We search every place that comes to mind, her usual routes, the grocery store down the road, the garden shop where she always lingers too long. We knock on neighbors’ doors. I pace the porch where she sometimes sits to chat. Nothing.
No one’s seen her.
Grayson calls in a favor to ping her phone. We wait, barely breathing.
He hangs up.
“No signal. It’s off, or it’s been destroyed.”
The words hit like a slow punch. I try to stay rational, but it’s slipping. Control, hope, logic. All of it unraveling. I lean against the hood of the car, hands braced, eyes on nothing.
She’s gone.
And not in the way where you tell yourself maybe she lost track of time or stopped for tea. Not the kind of gone you can fix with a phone call or a search party.
This is the other kind.
The kind you feel in your gut before it even finishes happening.
And he’s done that.
Grayson paces. I don’t stop him. We’ve run out of places, out of leads. My mother, just gone.
Silence settles. Heavy. Cold.
Then my phone buzzes.
I yank it from my pocket like it might bite me.
A new message. Not from Sabine.
A number with no name.
I like the way you work, Little Soldier, so I’ll give you a clue. Try west, not east.
My stomach turns.
He’s watching us.
Still.
And now he’s helping?
No. Not helping. Leading. Keeping the game alive.
I show Grayson the message. He reads it, jaw clenched, then tosses the phone back.
“West,” he mutters. “Not east. That’s the direction he vanished the first time.”
“Industrial fringe,” I say.
He nods.
“Then that’s where we go.”
We don’t speak after that. There’s no time.
And by the time we’re in the car, the adrenaline is already catching fire again. Grayson throws it into gear and the tires screech as we tear out of the lot.
We kill the headlights a block out and approach on foot, cutting through the edge of the industrial fringe.
Everything out here feels gutted and half-forgotten. Rows of crumbling warehouses, chain-link fences sagging under rust, whole buildings hollowed out by time and weather. Streetlights flicker dimly or not at all.
We move through it like ghosts.
Eventually, we find it.
A squat house wedged between a collapsed loading dock and the burned-out husk of a shipping office. Its roof sags in the middle. The porch is tilting, swallowed by weeds. It looks like it shouldn’t be standing, like it slipped between the cracks when the rest of this place died.
A faded Do Not Enter sign flaps weakly in the wind, nailed crooked to the doorframe.
Grayson glances at me, then draws his weapon.
I follow without a word.
The door creaks as we push it open. Stale rot floods the air—wood, dust, and something sour beneath it.
The floor groans under our weight as we clear each room.
Then we hear it.
A faint sound. Muffled. Coming from below.
The basement.
We find the door behind a shattered shelf, the padlock already broken. Like someone wanted us to find it.
Grayson flicks on his flashlight and goes first.
The steps creak. My heartbeat is louder than my boots. Every muscle is tight, braced for what’s coming.
And then—
In the corner of the basement, under a hanging bulb wired to the ceiling, we see her.
My mother.
She’s tied to a chair. Duct tape around her wrists. A cut on her cheek, already dried. But she’s breathing.
She lifts her head.
Her eyes go wide.
“Cassian. Behind you.”
I spin.
But before I can see anything, something slams into my head, and everything goes black.