Chapter 34
RYKER
The fog is so thick it feels alive.
It presses against my skin, damp and cold, swallowing the streetlights whole.
I know this town without recognizing it—empty storefronts, cracked sidewalks, the distant outline of buildings that look abandoned but feel watched.
Every step echoes too loudly, my boots scraping against pavement that sounds hollow beneath me.
There’s a noise somewhere to my left.
Metal, maybe. Or breathing.
I turn, squinting into the white haze. “Hello?”
My voice dies the second it leaves my mouth. The fog eats it. The silence that follows is worse—expectant, coiled.
Then I hear her.
“Ryker.”
Ellie’s voice. Soft. Too close and too far at the same time.
My chest tightens. “Ellie?” I start walking, faster now, heart pounding. “Ellie, where are you?”
The fog thins just enough for a shape to emerge.
She’s standing in the middle of the street.
Relief hits first—hot and dizzying—until I get close enough to see she isn’t breathing. Isn’t blinking. Her skin is wrong, plastic-smooth, joints too stiff.
A mannequin.
It looks exactly like Ellie, down to the curve of her mouth, the fall of her hair, the jacket I’ve seen her wear a hundred times. Her eyes are glassy, fixed on nothing.
“No,” I whisper, backing away.
The world drops out from under me.
Total black. No fog. No ground. No sound.
Then—click.
A single spotlight snaps on.
The mannequin stands alone in the circle of light, everything else swallowed by darkness. She’s wearing a mask now—white, featureless, stretched tight over her face.
My pulse roars in my ears.
I step forward despite myself. My hands shake as I reach up, fingers hovering at the edge of the mask. I don’t want to see what’s underneath. I can’t decide which version of her would be worse—empty plastic or something that knows me.
“Ryker.”
The voice comes from everywhere.
I peel the mask away—
“Ryker!”
I jerk upright, air tearing into my lungs. Frodo stares at me from where he sits at the foot of my bed, releasing a tiny whimper.
Raymond stands over me, one hand on my shoulder, the other already pulling back like he doesn’t trust what I might do half-awake. The room is dim, real, blessedly solid.
No fog.
No spotlight.
“Landon’s back,” he says quietly, his hand lowering to absently pet Frodo’s head, who has curled back into a ball. “And we need to talk. Now.”
I lay the photos out across the table one by one, careful, deliberate, like if I’m too rough with them, the truth might fracture further.
Cheap printer paper, glossy in places where the ink pooled.
Landon and I didn’t fucking know what will prove to be important, so we took pictures of everything.
Every document. Every photo. Raymond printed them up for us, and now, seeing them like this, the truth of Aria's obsession plain to see…
Piper whistles low. “Jesus.”
Victoria doesn’t say anything. Her eyes move, calculating, cataloging, like she’s already rearranging the puzzle in her head and deciding which pieces don’t belong.
Jane sits opposite me, hands clasped so tightly her knuckles have gone white. She hasn’t touched the photos. Not once. She hasn’t even spoken. She’s spent most of her time here locked in one of the spare guest rooms and has only just made an appearance.
Landon leans against the counter behind us, arms folded, relaxed in a way that makes my teeth grind. He smells faintly like Ellie’s shampoo—citrus and something soft—and I want to punch him for it. Smug bastard slipped away, saw her, and came back like nothing happened.
I want to say he’s a goddamn idiot, but then again…I did it too.
It doesn’t change the fact I’m so fucking jealous I want to kill everyone here.
Raymond breaks the silence. “Were you aware of any of this?” He directs this at Jane, sliding a photo toward her.
Jane finally looks. Her breath stutters. One of her hands flutters up until it touches the bottom of her throat. “That’s…that’s a shrine.”
“Yeah,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than I intended. “That’s what I thought too.”
Raymond flips to another image. A close-up this time. Newspaper clippings. Academic journals. Obituaries carefully trimmed, dates circled in red pen. Someone’s handwriting annotates the margins—questions, notes, arrows connecting ideas.
Victoria exhales slowly and parrots what Landon and I already concluded. “This isn’t admiration. It’s fixation.”
Jane’s hand flies to her mouth. “I didn’t know,” she says immediately, the words tumbling over each other. “I swear to you, I didn’t know any of this. If I had, I would have told you. All of you. I swear. I would never—”
“I know,” I say, attempting to soften my voice, though it’s pretty damn hard.
I’m not really in the mood to comfort her.
But dammit, Ellie is making me soft. Jane’s eyes are glassy, panic swimming just beneath the surface, and I need to say something before she completely loses it. “I know you would have.”
She shakes her head anyway, guilt etched into every line of her face. “I trusted her. I loved her. God, I didn’t even know she was connected to Ellie and her parents. I swear. She never mentioned them to me. Not once. I thought—”
“You thought what she wanted you to think,” Piper cuts in gently. She reaches across the table and takes Jane’s wrist, grounding her. “That doesn’t make this your fault.”
Victoria nods, though when she speaks, her accent is sharper than before, more pronounced. “Aria kept her two lives separate. That’s classic. You don’t expose the ugly parts to people you might need later.”
Jane swallows hard. “I should’ve seen something. Some sign.”
“You’re not psychic,” Piper says. “If you were, we’d have won the lottery that one time we got tickets. Remember? When we used those shitty fake IDs?”
That almost elicits a smile. Almost.
Raymond clears his throat. “Jane. Hypothetically. If Aria was hiding something—something she considered truly valuable—where would it be?”
I know he’s thinking of the little black book.
The holy grail, and the one thing capable of ending this once and for all.
Jane’s shoulders slump. “I don’t know.” She laughs weakly, the sound breaking halfway through.
“That’s the problem. We may have been sisters, but we weren’t friends.
She didn’t invite me into her inner world.
And it’s not like my parents will be of any help.
They haven’t spoken to her in years either.
She has her own life. We have ours. Hell, they probably are in on this too. I just didn’t think…” She swallows.
Piper tilts her head, trying to lighten the mood again. “Well. Look at it this way—you’re technically Ellie’s aunt.”
Jane goes pale. Not figuratively. Her skin literally drains of color so fast, I half expect her to faint. “Don’t—don’t joke about that.”
“Okay,” Piper says quickly. She holds her hands up placatingly. “Too soon. Wayyyy too soon.”
I drag my attention back to the photos before the room collapses under the weight of what-ifs.
“Aria collected everything,” Landon says, his mind churning. “Articles going back decades. Interviews Ellie’s parents gave before Ellie was even born. She didn’t just research them—she curated them.”
“Which raises the question,” Victoria says, “of motive.”
Piper frowns. “If she cared about them that much, she wouldn’t have killed them.”
The words hang there, stark and brutal.
“Unless,” Landon says, pushing away from the counter, “she didn’t see it as killing. More like… preserving something. Ending a narrative before it changed. You know she would do anything to protect the Paragons of Prosperity.”
I mull that over, turning the words around and around, looking at them from every angle, studying them extensively.
Landon could be right, but…
Something isn’t adding up.
I shove my chair back and stand. “I want to go back to Aria’s apartment.”
Raymond looks up sharply. “Now?”
“Yes. Tonight. There’s more there. A secret room, a false wall, something. People like her don’t stop at one shrine.”
“I’ll come,” Landon says immediately.
I give my brother a curt nod. I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s no one else here I would trust to watch my back.
Before anyone can argue, the air shifts.
It’s subtle at first—a pressure change, like the room inhales and forgets how to exhale. Then the front door of the hotel slams open.
Shouts. Boots. Masks.
“Down!” someone yells—Teak, I think, who has been standing against the wall, a silent sentry—but it’s already too late.
Canisters bounce across the floor, metal clattering like dropped cutlery. A sharp hiss cuts through the chaos, and white smoke erupts, burning my eyes on contact. Tear gas. My lungs seize like they’ve forgotten their job.
“Move!” Piper coughs.
I reach for something, anything, I can use as a weapon and collide with someone instead. Hands grab my arm. I swing blindly but connect with nothing but fabric. My vision tunnels, eyes streaming, throat on fire.
Landon rasps out my name.
Someone fires a gun, and I see Teak fall over dead, blood pooling from a wound on his forehead.
I stagger, trip over a chair, and hit the floor hard. The shrine photo slides off the table and curls at the edges as the gas eats at my vision.
The last thing I register is Landon shouting, Victoria and Piper huddling together, and Raymond swearing with terrifying calm. I don’t see Jane.
Then the smoke swallows everything.
And I’m gone.