Chapter 18 – Silas – Collateral
My heart is a ticking bomb in my chest as I sit in the car, hoping she will change her mind and walk out after all.
Restless, after about forty minutes of her not showing up, I drive around and find myself turning the last corner to her apartment building. A thick pressure sitting under my skin like it knows something I don’t.
I stop across from her building.
The street’s too clean. No cigarette butts near the curb. No kid on a scooter buzzing by like he usually does at this hour. Just two parked cars and a slow breeze pushing a dead flyer across the sidewalk like it’s crawling home.
I wait a beat, staring up at her window.
Closed. No movement. No light. No Lydia.
I don't let myself jump ahead. Not yet.
I pull out my phone and open the monitoring app—the one connected to the network tap I installed in her apartment last week.
The screen loads.
The feed is live. Active.
But there's no movement. No sign of her.
I scroll through the last four hours of activity captured by Drazen's cameras—the same footage the tap has been passively recording.
Kitchen: empty.
Living room: empty.
Bedroom: dark, untouched.
The timestamps are clear. She hasn't been home.
Four hours. No entry. No movement. Nothing.
The network tap is working perfectly—sending data, monitoring traffic, recording everything Drazen's cameras see.
But she's not there.
I call her burner. Straight to voicemail.
My knuckles tighten against the leather strap of my watch.
Something isn’t right.
I’d left her there, standing stiffly in that dress like her bones were waiting for a different skin. I asked her to leave with me. She didn’t.
She should’ve been home by now.
I pull out my phone and open the encrypted app.
Text Tyler: Need eyes on traffic cameras near the Solstice Club. 5-6 PM today. Can you pull footage?
After about five minutes, three dots appear. Then: You know I'm not supposed to do this without a case file.
I know. But I need it now. Not tomorrow.
Longer pause.
Fine. Give me 20 minutes.
Thanks.
I sit in the car, staring at Lydia's dark window, waiting.
Twenty-three minutes later, my phone buzzes.
Tyler: Got it. Sending now.
A video file loads. Timestamp: 5:12 PM. Traffic camera, angle facing the club entrance.
There. 5:15 PM. Black SUV. Dom’s. Not surprising.
He opens the door. Lydia waits a while, looks like she was questioning him, but she gets in eventually. Her face is tight. Her eyes flick once toward the street.
Maybe she was looking for me.
I advance the footage. The SUV pulls out and takes a hard right.
I advance the footage. The SUV pulls out and takes a hard right.
I text Tyler: Need next camera. Follow that SUV eastbound.
Tyler: On it.
Another minute passes. Then: Here.
The next file loads. A few blocks down, from a different angle.
Nothing.
The vehicle just... disappears.
Literally.
Like the plates were scrubbed in real-time or someone spliced the feed.
I text Tyler: You seeing this?
Tyler: Yeah. That's not a technical glitch. Someone wiped it. Deliberately.
Only a few people in this city have that kind of access.
And two of them work for Drazen.
I quickly save the feed in my flash drive and lean back in the driver’s seat.
She’s not missing.
She’s been taken.
I tell myself to stay calm.
I fail.
I open the glove box, retrieve the other phone, the one Naomi gave me to use when everything goes sideways.
I stare at the screen.
Then throw it back into the compartment and slam it shut.
Naomi’s not giving me backup.
Not for this.
I need another route.
Another ally.
Another move.
I pull into traffic with my jaw locked and my foot pressing hard enough on the gas to make the tires protest.
If Lydia’s gone, it’s not a punishment.
It’s a warning.
I stare at the blank screen where the SUV disappeared.
Drazen made her wait. Sent Dom to pick her up.
Then scrubbed the footage so no one could track where they went.
Why?
I run through the possibilities.
Option one: Maybe they're taking her somewhere safe. This is probably a protection detail. Maybe someone threatened her, and Drazen's moving her off the grid.
Option two: They think she's compromised. Maybe this is about the leak, the one Drazen mentioned, showed me the files someone has been leaking to the feds, but I know that’s me.
My chest tightens.
He didn't say who at the time, but he was watching everyone closer. Paranoid. Testing loyalties.
What if he suspects her?
What if someone planted evidence to make it look like she's the leak?
Or what if—
I stop that thought before it finishes.
No. She didn't betray him. I know her. She's careful. Too careful.
But Drazen doesn't trust anyone. Not fully. And if someone whispered the right lie in his ear, if they made her look guilty...
He wouldn't kill her. Not right away.
He'd test her first. Lock her down, and watch her, break her if he had to.
Figure out if she's loyal or if she needs to be eliminated.
Option three: This is about me.
Maybe Drazen is finally reacting to our relationship.
Maybe Drazen's moving her to see what I do. To see if I follow. To see if I'm compromised too.
I exhale slowly.
I don't know which option is true.
But I know one thing: she's not home, and wherever they took her, they didn't want anyone to know where.
I wait in the car until the street forgets how to move. Until even the stray cats stop threading their way between the dumpsters behind her building. Her window stays dark. The buffer doesn’t blip back online.
Something’s wrong.
I don’t go charging off into the night. That would be reckless. That would be emotional. I can’t afford that.
So I drive.
Nowhere special. Just long enough for the streetlights to smear into streaks and the pavement to lose meaning. I loop the city’s gut twice. Pass Dom’s club once, slow. No sign of her car. No sign of his.
At a gas station two blocks off the pier, I get out and buy black coffee I won’t drink. It burns my hand through the paper cup, a necessary distraction.
Back at the apartment, I sit on the edge of the bed for thirty-three minutes.
I count them, because I can’t stop hearing the echo of her voice from the last time we touched.
The last time she looked at me, like she still didn’t know what I was hiding, but already sensed it was something that would cost her.
I don’t sleep.
Instead, I pull out the same blueprint I’ve memorized a hundred times, the one with every potential safehouse in the area marked and annotated by hand. Drazen doesn’t move women around like trophies. He moves them like leverage. And Lydia is a threat to every edge he hasn’t refined properly.
I circle five locations. Cross out three. Add two more based on the last shipment he had rerouted through the waterfront.
When that doesn’t calm the chaos in my chest, I take the burner phone apart and rebuild it. Twice. No messages. No signs. No trace of her, not even a breadcrumb left behind in the dust of the city.
Around four-thirty, I open the feed from her loft again. Still nothing.
I lean back in my chair, throat dry and eyes burning.
If I stay still another minute, I’ll snap.
So I don’t.
By the time the sky begins to shift from its dead pre-dawn grey to something with teeth, I’ve been awake for twenty-two hours. Maybe more. It’s hard to tell time in between panic and denial.
The apartment is cold again.
Not physically. The heating’s on a timer. But there's a kind of emptiness that no thermostat can fix. It’s the kind of stillness that only exists when someone who should’ve come back… didn’t.
I’m seated on the edge of the couch, eyes fixed on the surveillance loop from her loft. I’ve watched the feed at least forty times. Nothing useful. She never returned.
I replay the final few frames with her from the day before. Lydia looking at me with those damn eyes, shoulders stiff. Face unreadable. Determined. I thought she just needed space. Time.
"I can't," she'd said.
And I'd walked away. Waited in my car, for her to make her choice.
Told myself she needed space, that pushing her would only make things worse.
I thought giving her time meant she'd be safe. That maybe she'd change her mind.
I was wrong.
I drag both hands through my hair and stand. My legs are stiff. I haven't moved in hours. I pace once—twice—and then stop at the window.
Miramont is still sleeping.
Damp sidewalks. Fog crawling like it’s lost its way. Someone walks a dog across the alley below, slow and shuffling, like the world isn’t burning beneath us.
I grab my phone and call Naomi.
She answers on the third ring. "It's 6 AM, Silas."
"Is there any Bureau activity around Lydia Carr?"
Silence. Then: "Why?"
"She's missing. Drazen's men took her yesterday evening. Black SUV, east toward the waterfront. Footage was scrubbed."
"Missing? Or relocated?"
"I don't know. That's why I'm calling you."
“Hold on.” A few seconds pass. Then I hear her typing.
"Nothing in the system," she says. "No alerts, no surveillance flags, and no inter-agency reports."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing."
I go still. "So either no one noticed, or—"
"Or someone didn't want it noticed." Her voice is flat. "Where are you?"
"My apartment."
"Stay there. I'll make some calls."
"Naomi—"
"I said I'll handle it. Don't do anything stupid."
She hangs up.
I stare at the phone.
The Bureau has no alerts. No follow-ups. No missing-person pings.
Not even a hint that they noticed anything.
Either they don't know, or they're choosing not to look.
The next hour is a loop of movement. Shower. Cold. Clothes. Clean shirt. Get all the backup ammo reloaded. I don’t even know where I’m going yet, but I can’t stay still.
Every instinct I’ve buried in five years of operations screams the same thing:
They took her to find something.
The question is: what do they think she knows?
Unless...
Unless they think she has me. Or rather, the person leaking their operations, which they haven’t identified as me yet.
Maybe they think she knows who it is?