Chapter 15 Nyx #2
A man brushed past us, too close for no reason. My skin crawled. Tatum’s hand found my palm, and she squeezed once. Not comfort. A signal. She had learned that from me. I had learned it from being the one who had to get us home.
“You okay?” I asked, quiet.
She tried to joke, because she always tried to joke first. “Girl, I’m fine,” she said, but her voice cracked on the lie. Then she swallowed and made herself steadier. “I’m with you.”
The train rolled in with a scream of metal. People surged. Somebody shoved. Somebody cursed. I kept my hand locked around Tatum’s.
When we finally got on, the door pressed into a corner us. Too many bodies. Too much breath. Too much heat. Tatum shifted so she was in front of me, chin lifted and that was how I knew she was scared. She only got brave when she needed to feel it.
“You hungry?” I asked, because I needed her focused on something normal.
She blinked at me, then her mouth softened. “Always,” she said, and held up her bag. “I got you, though. I told the lady at the counter to load the plates up. I was like, my sister been working hard, don’t play with her.”
I made a sound that could’ve been a laugh if my throat wasn’t tight. “You did not.”
“I did,” she insisted, and her eyes got bright with it. “And she did it, too. Extra chicken, extra mac. She saw your face in my spirit.”
That was Tatum. She could be broke, tired, and hunted, and still make the world feel like ours for five minutes.
I looked down at our hands, knuckles pressed together, and I squeezed back. “Thank you,” I said, and the words came out too thick.
Her smile turned soft, the kind she only gave me. “You always say that like you don’t do everything,” she whispered. Then she leaned closer and dropped her voice until it was just for me. “We gonna be alright. We always are.”
My chest ached with how much I wanted to believe her.
The memory snapped shut, and the bark under my palm came back sharp and real. My throat still felt his forearm like it was there, and my body didn’t care that the danger had a distinct face now. It only cared that a man had pinned me and decided I didn’t get a choice.
Elijah didn’t move. “I know,” he said.
The bond pulsed at his voice anyway, insistent and intimate. I hated it lived inside me now, humming beneath my skin and responding to him whether I invited it.
“What Jabari did is going to live with me,” I said. “My body remembers before my mind does. I can sit still and my throat remembers.”
I lifted my hand and touched the side of my neck lightly. My pulse jumped under my fingers, too fast and too reactive. I hated my own nerves for betraying me. I hated the part of me that kept calculating exits even under an open sky.
“My shoulders remember too,” I continued. “My body braces like I’m supposed to be grateful for being hurt instead of killed.”
Elijah’s gaze stayed on my face. He didn’t pretend not to notice and he didn’t demand I hurry. He just watched and somehow that made it worse, because if I spoke, it was because I chose to.
“And you,” I said, because leaving his name out would turn him into a shadow I could pretend didn’t exist. “You didn’t put your arm around my throat, but you still changed me.”
The bond responded immediately, a pulse beneath my skin. I could feel him.
“You forced that bond,” I said. “You decided for me when my body was exhausted and my mind was raw. Now I wake up with you in my blood, and my instincts keep trying to turn your proximity into relief even when my memory says it isn’t safe.”
My voice wavered only slightly. I steadied it again because I refused to let emotion become a weapon in someone else’s hands.
“That’s the part that scares me,” I admitted. “Not that you exist. It scares me that my body adapted.”
Elijah’s jaw tightened. He inhaled slowly, visibly, and I heard the faint cadence under his breath.
Thirty-three. Thirty-five. Thirty-seven.
He lifted his gaze to mine. “Jabari violated you,” he said. The word echoed against stone and landed heavy between us. He didn’t soften it and he didn’t excuse it. Then he added, quieter, “And I violated you too.”
The honesty hit harder than denial would have. My stomach rolled, but it didn’t turn away, and I hated I respected him for not trying to polish what he did.
“Yes,” I said. Not denying the facts.
Silence stretched, dense and necessary. Wind moved through the leaves and the bond pulsed between us.
I didn’t bring him up here to confess pain and stall. Pain without action was another form of captivity, and captivity had taken my sister.
“My sister’s name is Tatum,” I said. “My baby sister. She’s been missing for three years.”
Elijah’s attention sharpened in a way that made the air feel tighter. He didn’t interrupt, and he didn’t comfort me into quiet. Comfort was how people ended conversations they didn’t want to have.
“I didn’t come after Meridian because I wanted to play hero,” I continued. “I came because the last time I saw Tatum, she was young enough to believe a clinic intake form meant safety.”
I had been doing this kind of work long before Tatum vanished. Forensic finance is just pattern recognition with consequences, watching what money does when people think no one is watching, tracking the slow drift that tells you what a place really is under the paperwork.
I learned to read what stayed wrong, not just what spiked loud enough to get attention.
So when my sister disappeared behind a clipboard and a signature, I did what I had always done.
I followed the trail that was supposed to be boring.
Intake points, billing codes, shell clinics that changed names but kept the same habits, the same quiet gaps where a person should have been.
If Tatum had gone into a system, then the system would leave fingerprints, and I refused to let hers be the one set that never showed up again.
My voice stayed flat on purpose. If I let it turn soft, it would crack, and I needed my words clean. I had learned a long time ago that people listened to flat voices more than they listened to crying.
“Then she disappeared,” I said. “And Chicago kept moving like it always does, boots crunching through snow, shoulders down against the wind, nobody stopping because the city punishes hesitation.”
I held Elijah’s gaze so he couldn’t look away from what I was giving him. If I was going to stand in front of these men, I needed them to know I was not here to be tragic. I was here to get answers.
“Meridian Health isn’t one building,” I said. “It’s a network. Multiple clinics. Multiple intake points. Chicago is just the mouth of it.”
Elijah sat still, hands visible, posture contained.
“What do you need?” he asked.
“Paper,” I said. “Records. Staff rotation lists. Intake codes. Stabilization schedules. Suppressant inventory. Transport logs. Anything that moves bodies without leaving fingerprints.”
Elijah nodded once. “We leave in fifteen,” he said, voice turning crisp. “You will touch nothing without gloves.”
“And we don’t go alone,” he added, and it wasn’t a question.
“Who?” I asked.
“Kairo drives,” Elijah said. “He blends.”
He didn’t say the rest, but I understood it anyway. Kairo looked like somebody’s little brother. Somebody who could stand in a lobby and make people assume he belonged without demanding it.
“And Malachi knows,” he continued. “Not because you need permission. Because if someone moves against you outside Meridian, you need the full pack response.”
My stomach tightened at Malachi’s name. My body wanted to interpret that steadiness as safety. I didn’t let it, but I felt the temptation anyway, and I hated myself for how fast it came.
“Call him,” I said.
Elijah didn’t step closer. He made the call from where he stood. That mattered more than his words.
“We are moving,” he said into the phone, voice controlled and professional. “Meridian Health. South Shore. Quiet entry.”
A pause. His eyes stayed on mine the whole time, no private conversations that left me out of the math.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Understood.”
He ended the call and slid the phone away.
“Kairo meets us at the garage,” he said. “You stay on my right side. If you tell me to stop, I will stop.”
The reminder hit the bond. My body wanted to interpret that steadiness as safety. I didn’t let it, but my chest still loosened by a fraction.
We moved through Meridian without taking the main corridors. Elijah chose service routes that avoided cameras and high traffic. He did it without being told. He did not announce his decisions. He just did them, and that quiet competence was its own kind of danger.
Because it made me want to relax.
The garage smelled. The concrete carried tire marks. Kairo waited beside a black SUV.
He leaned against it like he belonged anywhere, shoulders loose, a clean hoodie under a jacket. His eyes stayed sharp though, and he had a second phone in his hand for half a second before it disappeared into his pocket.
“Morning,” he said.
His gaze flicked over me, quick and subtle. No pity. No surprise. Just assessment, the way young men from rough places learned to read danger before they learned to name it.
“You ready?” he asked, and there was a slight grin in it.
“I was ready three years ago,” I said. The words came out calm, not bitter. “I’m just catching up.”
Kairo’s grin twitched into something more real. “Say less,” he murmured, and he opened the back door for me, then stepped back.
Space offered. Choice respected. It was the courtesy that could still be a cage if you weren’t careful, because Kairo’s niceness came with eyes that watched for your weaknesses and hands that could move fast when the smile dropped.
Elijah popped the rear hatch and checked what was inside. A medical kit, a small tool roll, gloves, zip ties still sealed, and a plain folder that could hold paper evidence without bending it.
“You came prepared,” I said.
“We always do,” Elijah replied. “And you touch nothing in that building without gloves.”