Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
Simon
The silence in the black SUV wasn't peaceful; it was a holding cell.
I slumped against the cold leather of the back seat, my hood pulled up over my head like a shroud, staring out the tinted window at the grey slush of the pharmacy parking lot.
The engine ticked as it cooled, a metallic metronome counting down the seconds until Anders returned with the gauze and Daniel returned with the eggs.
We were resupplying. We were being logical. We were handling the logistics.
But my hands were vibrating.
I looked down at them resting on my denim-clad knees. My fingers were permanently stained with ink and charcoal, marking me as the artist, the observer. But now, beneath the black smudges of my trade, there was something else. A phantom sensation. A tactile ghost.
I rubbed my thumb over my index finger, remembering the slick, velvet heat of Tessa’s body. I remembered the way she had looked in the mirror, flushed, ruined, and absolutely magnificent, and the way she had commanded us to fill the void.
Years, I thought, a bitter taste rising in my throat. I spent years drawing her from a distance because I was too scared to get close. And now that I’ve touched her, I feel like I’ve contaminated the art.
The air in the car was stale, recycling the heavy, complex scent of our pack. It smelled of Anders’ sharp, ozone-laced bourbon, Daniel’s warm, yeasty spiced chai, and my own underlying note of dark chocolate, currently scorched by the anxiety that smelled like burnt sugar.
But underneath it all was her. Sea salt and blackberries.
It clung to the upholstery and my hoodie. It was stamped into my skin. We had left her alone in that glass box on the cliff, wrapped in our scent, believing she was safe because we had locked the door.
Two hours, Anders had promised.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket. The screen was cracked in the corner, a casualty of me dropping it when we first breached the house yesterday. I hadn't looked at it in twenty-four hours. We had been in a dead zone, a pocket universe where the internet didn't exist.
But here, in the parking lot of a local pharmacy, the signal bars flickered. One bar. Two bars of LTE.
The device buzzed in my hand, a frantic, angry vibration as a day’s worth of notifications tried to push through all at once.
Messages from the studio. Emails from my agent. Direct messages from fans asking why I hadn't streamed.
I swiped them away, my thumb moving on autopilot.
I didn't care about the stream. I didn't care about the character renders.
I just wanted to check the weather radar, to see if the storm front had truly passed, to reassure myself that the sky wasn't going to fall on her again while we were buying ibuprofen.
My thumb hovered over the weather app.
Then, habit took over. The muscle memory of a man who lived his life online, who curated an audience of millions.
I opened my most recent social media app. The little loading circle spun for a second, a digital ouroboros eating its own tail, as the feed refreshed.
Then, the world ended.
It didn't happen with a bang. It happened with a hashtag.
#1 TRENDING: #GraduationGirlFound
#2 TRENDING: #TKRoseExposed
#3 TRENDING: #TheLeak
My breath stalled in my lungs. The phone felt suddenly heavy, like a brick of lead. The scent of burnt sugar spiked violently in the enclosed cabin of the SUV, acrid and choking.
"No," I whispered. The word sounded wet and pathetic in the silence. "No, no, no."
I tapped the hashtag. My finger left a smudge on the screen.
The feed populated instantly. It wasn't a slow trickle of rumors. It was a deluge. It was a tsunami of information, moving so fast the timestamps were measured in seconds.
@Nexus_Zero [Verified]: You wanted the truth about the Invisible Queen? You wanted to know who writes the fantasies while hiding in a castle? We found the receipt. #TKRose is #GraduationGirl.
The tweet had an attachment. A video file.
I pressed play.
The footage was grainy, shot from a high angle. It was drone footage. The camera swooped down out of the grey sky, buzzing over the tree line, fighting the wind. It focused on a structure perched on the cliff edge.
The fortress.
The drone hovered, peeping-tom style, outside the floor-to-ceiling glass walls of the living room.
I saw the firelight flickering inside. I saw the shadows. And then, for a split second, I saw her.
Tessa.
She was walking past the window, wrapped in a blanket, looking small and fragile. It must have been taken this morning, just moments before we left. The resolution was high enough to see the messy bun of her black hair. High enough to identify her.
"They're watching," I choked out, bile rising in my throat. "They're outside the house."
But it got worse.
Beneath the video was a document. A screenshot of a hacked database. It was a medical log from the Omega Health Foundation.
ALERT ID: 4992-ALPHA
PATIENT: KANE, TESSA
STATUS: CRITICAL ENDOCRINE DISTRESS
LOCATION PING: [Coordinates Redacted]
Except they weren't redacted. The hacker, this Nexus_Zero, had highlighted the GPS coordinates in neon green.
They traced the ping.
The distress signal. The biometric alarm that had saved her life... It was the breadcrumb trail. We had used the system to find her, to save her, and in doing so, we had lit a flare in the dark for every predator with a WiFi connection.
I scrolled down. My vision blurred.
The comments were a cesspool. It was the internet at its absolute worst, a mob mentality fueled by anonymity and cruelty.
Side-by-side images were propagating like a virus.
On the left was the sleek, dark, erotic cover of The Alpha’s Oath, symbolizing power and control.
On the right was a grainy screenshot from graduation. Tessa on the stage. The wet stain on her blue graduation gown. Her face twisted in a sob.
The comments were exactly what I had come to expect from the internet.
"Writes about Alphas because she can't handle reality. Look at the puddle. #Cringe"
"Imagine being a billionaire author and still being the girl who peed herself on stage."
"Heading to the coordinates. Who wants a signed copy?"
"Fuck," I gasped, dropping the phone into my lap as if it had burned me.
The nausea hit me hard. I doubled over, clutching my stomach, my forehead pressing against the back of the driver's seat.
It wasn't a leak. It was a dissection.
They were flaying her alive. They were taking the one thing she had protected for a decade, her anonymity, her shield, and shattering it. And they were using her trauma to do it.
And she was alone.
The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow.
We had left her. We had walked out the door, kissed her goodbye, and promised we'd be back in two hours. We left her defenseless in a glass box while the entire world converged on her location.
She'll see it, I thought, panic scrambling my synapses. She has the internet now. Anders reconnected the lines. She has the sat-phone. She’s going to look.
And when she looked... what would she see?
She would see that ten minutes after we drove away, the leak dropped.
She would see that the men who claimed to protect her left the premises just before the coordinates went live.
"She's going to think it was us," I whispered, the horror of it expanding in my chest until I couldn't breathe. "She's going to think we sold her out."
I scrabbled for the door handle. My hands were shaking so bad I couldn't find the latch. I clawed at the plastic, desperate to get out, desperate to get air.
I shoved the door open and tumbled out onto the wet asphalt.
The cold air hit me, but it didn't help. The scent of Burnt Sugar was pouring off me in waves, thick enough to taste. I grabbed the roof rack of the SUV to keep from falling.
"Anders!" I screamed.
People in the parking lot turned to look. A woman loading groceries into a sedan stared at me with wide, frightened eyes. I didn't care. I looked like a madman, hoodie stained with charcoal, eyes wild, screaming at the sky.
"Daniel! Anders!"
I fumbled with my phone again. My fingers were clumsy, slipping on the screen.
I texted Anders and Daniel.
GET BACK TO THE CAR. NOW.
I hit send.
Every second that ticked by was a second the drones were getting closer. Every second was a comment added to the thread. Every second was Tessa, alone in that house, watching her life burn down.
I drew her, I thought, a jagged sob tearing out of my throat. I drew her as a survivor. I drew her as a queen. And I left her to the wolves.
The glass doors of the pharmacy flew open.
Anders sprinted out.
He looked wrong. He was missing his jacket.
His shirt was untucked. He was holding a plastic bag in one hand like a weapon.
His golden hair was a mess, blown back by the wind.
Even from fifty yards away, I could see the terror etched into the sharp lines of his face.
He scanned the lot, his blue eyes locking onto me instantly.
He saw my posture. He saw the way I was clutching the car for support. He saw the phone in my hand.
He didn't walk. He ran.
To my right, Daniel burst out of the grocery store.
He abandoned a full cart in the middle of the crosswalk, cans of soup rattling as it hit the curb.
The gentle giant was gone; he moved with the momentum of a line-backer, his heavy boots pounding the pavement, his face a mask of dark, thunderous fury.
"Simon!" Anders roared as he closed the distance. "What is it?"
"The leak," I choked out, thrusting the phone toward him as he reached the car. "It's the leak, Anders. Someone found the ping."
Anders snatched the phone from my hand. He looked at the screen. I watched the color drain from his face, leaving him grey and deathly pale. I watched the muscle in his jaw jump as he read the hashtags.
"The coordinates," he breathed. "They posted the coordinates."
"Ten minutes ago," I sobbed. "They're already there. The drones. The swarm."
Daniel reached us, breathless, smelling of high-grade panic and spiced chai. He looked over Anders’ shoulder at the screen. He growled, the sound low and dangerous.
"They linked it," I said, tears finally spilling over. "They linked the medical crash to the video. They put them side by side."
Anders looked up. His eyes were no longer human. They were cold, dead things, focused entirely on the threat.
"Get in," he snarled.
He threw the bag of medical supplies through the open window into the passenger seat.
"In the car!" Anders yelled, shoving me toward the back seat. "Move!"
I scrambled inside, Daniel diving in beside me. The scent in the car was suffocating now, a concentrated bomb of Alpha distress.
Anders was in the driver's seat before I had even closed my door. He slammed the car into gear, the engine revving to a scream. The tires shrieked against the wet pavement as he swung the massive SUV out of the parking spot, clipping the edge of the abandoned shopping cart and sending it spinning.
"Check the feeds," Anders ordered, his voice tight, clipping the words. He blew a stop sign, swerving around a confused truck. "How many? Is it confirmable?"
I grabbed my phone back from Daniel, my thumb scrolling frantically.
"Local news is picking it up," I read, my stomach bottoming out. "Streamers are live-streaming their drive to the location. Anders, there are people on the road."
"Then we drive through them," Anders said.
He accelerated. The speedometer climbed past sixty, then seventy. The trees whipped past the windows, a blur of grey and green.
"Call her," Daniel demanded, leaning forward, his hand gripping Anders’ seat back so hard the leather groaned. "Try the sat-phone again."
I hit the redial.
Ring... Ring...
The sound echoed through the car speakers.
Ring... Ring...
"Pick up," Simon whispered, pressing his forehead against the cold glass of the window, watching the storm clouds gathering on the horizon. "Please, Tessa. Don't look at the screen. Just pick up the phone."
Silence.
Then, the automated operator voice. The subscriber you are trying to reach is not available.
"She's gone dark," Daniel said, his voice hollowing out.
"Or she's running,” I said as I looked at Anders. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. He was driving like a man possessed, taking the curves of the coastal road at speeds that should have been impossible.
We were racing back to the fortress. But this time, we weren't the saviors. We were just three men who had failed to lock the gate.