Gone
THREE
CONNOR
If I’m still coherent enough to be able to count right, I haven’t slept in three days.
No. Wait. That’s not entirely right. I’m pretty sure that, at some point yesterday morning, I passed the hell out at the kitchen table while I was scrolling through some more camera footage, managing to go under without any pharmaceutical help for sixty-three minutes.
It was a little over an hour from when I remember glancing at the clock in the corner of my laptop to jolting awake in my seat.
Sixty-three minutes. Sixty-three fucking minutes when I wasn’t doing everything I can to find Haven.
Sometimes, I don’t know if I want to put my fist through a wall or throw up the bile in my belly.
For the last six weeks, I haven’t been able to sleep.
Eating? Fuck, no. I’ve dropped more weight than I can afford to, but the thought of choking down food while Haven could be lost, could be hurt, could be hungry, could be gone…
I force myself to swallow what it takes to survive because, if I don’t search for Haven, no one will.
And that realization makes the last cracks in my fragile sanity widen to the point of no return.
This was never supposed to happen. For fuck’s sake, she’s an Offering.
She’s prized in Harmony Heights, and no one in town should’ve been stupid enough to let anything happen to her.
One good thing about being an Owed whose parents don’t expect much of you, I don’t have to waste my time at some boring job.
Since I was a kid who looked at a sassy brunette and saw forever, my life has been Haven Smith.
Watching her, learning everything I could about her…
she was my education, my career, and my obsession all in one.
There isn’t anything I don’t know about her—except for what happened that Friday afternoon.
When I’m not delirious, I admit that it’s impossible for me to be everywhere.
As devoted as I am to Haven, there are some lines I’ve gotta draw.
Stupidly neglecting to put cameras near her apartment so that I could watch her whenever I was otherwise occupied was one of them; silly Connor, I thought she’d be impressed that I gave her some privacy, but fuck if I’m not paying for that now.
Abandoning one of my bros when he asked for my help was another.
Dallas needed Bas and me for a hit and a dump, one ordered by his old man.
I hated leaving Harmony Heights—leaving her—but, for Dal, I did it.
Flat on my back, staring at the ceiling, I wish I could blame him. If I hadn’t gone with Dallas and Bas to Freehold, I might’ve been able to stop…
What?
I don’t know. Six weeks after Haven went out to volunteer at Harmony Heights Animal Shelter like usual only to disappear before making it there, leaving her phone, her purse, and her car behind, I’m no closer to discovering what happened than when I went to take a ride past her apartment after I finished up with Dallas and Bas only to find it crawling with cops.
It’s as though she’s vanished, and even with the weight of the Order behind the initial search, no one has been able to find her.
As the weeks past, the hushed whispers throughout town said that Haven saw the writing on the wall, realized that—after nine consecutive Claiming ceremonies, with the tenth coming this August—she was quickly aging out of the society, and she—like so many others…
like even Dallas’s mom did a couple of years back—ended her life rather than face the fucking horror of being thirty and unwed.
She’s only twenty-seven. She has plenty of time, and even if she didn’t, the Haven Smith I know couldn’t care less about being married.
Maybe, when she was eighteen and still under her parents’ thumbs, she did.
Five years ago, Roger and Hannah Smith died in a boating accident during a trip to the Caribbean.
Even if the King of the Order considers her as high-ranking an Offering as ever, Haven’s done everything she could to withdraw from society life since then.
Day to day, it doesn’t rule her like it does Dallas or Adrian or even me.
She’s too proud to commit suicide, and too stubborn to let the Order push her over the edge anyway.
No. She’s not dead. She can’t be.
I won’t fucking allow it.
I tighten my fingers in the sheets beneath me.
I spent too long staring at my computer screen, searching for tips, hoping there’s something that the Owed’s few investigators missed.
My eyes went crossed, my head fuzzy, and I knew that, if I didn’t at least get a couple of hours down, I’d be dead myself long before I brought Haven back to Harmony Heights.
Back to me.
I went up to my bedroom. After tossing and turning for a half an hour, I dragged myself out of the King-sized bed, then slumped down to the basement.
Four summers ago, I spent over a month with a construction crew inside my house, finishing the space to my exact specifications.
It looks like another apartment down there, with an attached bedroom for privacy.
That’s where I am now. It’s not fancy. It’s not big.
Roughly the size of my master bath on the second floor, the private room has a door, a single light source, and a bed.
Before Haven disappeared, no one’s ever been down here.
When the worst of the panic and the fear and the absolute need to have her where I can breathe in her sweet scent has me too dangerous to be around anyone else, I lock myself in here with my phone, my knife, and a fresh sedative.
Though all of my buddies are worried about me, it was Adrian who insisted on the sedatives.
If I can’t sleep, I need to take something so that I will.
I get his point. After I tried to gut Desmond because he said that maybe Haven got wind of my obsession and bolted the same way that Loni did when we were kids, I could see why I needed to hang on to some control.
Everyone knows Des has a smart mouth. Just like how he’s still bitter that the Offering he wanted chose Adrian over him, and that Adrian was supposed to have one of his own…
Only he couldn’t, could he? Because Haven? She’s always been mine, and even if Harmony Heights didn’t know that, the four men that I consider my brothers did.
That’s how it had to be. To escape Jack Collins’s ruthless reign as King unscathed, to survive until Dallas succeeded him and he could warp the society to suit us—the new guard—rather than the men who currently lead now, we had to be careful.
The way I saw it, so long as the Order considered Haven Adrian’s, she was safe. So long as Adrian knew that Haven was mine, she was untouchable.
He did. From the first time I confronted him when we were twelve and I demanded that he refuse to Claim Haven, I knew that he had no interest in taking the girl I wanted as my own.
He’s stuck by that for the last nine Claiming ceremonies, and I know damn well that Adrian Heller will do the same for the three that come next.
Adrian… Adrian has a plan. He’s going to wait out the clock.
Once Loni is thirty—and considered basically even more worthless by Jack and the old guard than when she was seventeen, unmarried, and sexually active—he can marry her and it won’t go against the Order’s bullshit charter.
They won’t twist it so that she’s designated as one of the Used, Adrian gets the woman he’s been obsessed with since kindergarten, and if Jack decides to interfere with his marriage, Adrian has an ace or two up his sleeve.
He’s only worried about Loni’s position in the grand scheme of things.
He was willing to wait a decade to Claim her if that’s what it took, and he’s spent that time making himself indispensable.
Add to that how he will call on the blood oath he made Jack notarize when he was freshly eighteen, and he’s convinced his plan will work.
He’ll end up with Loni Dougherty as his wife, and whether she agrees or not, he’s prepared to spend the rest of their lives together making up what happened after Bas’s party.
There is no alternative. Adrian will have Loni, and once he can’t Claim Haven, I will.
I wanted to do it that sultry August night.
Seeing Haven in that white dress for the first time, staring at her across the bonfire as my newly-branded palm burned in fucking agony, I almost did it.
Only knowing that Dallas’s old man would find a way to refuse my Claim, putting my future with Haven at risk, made me say ‘no’ after I promised her that I would Claim her.
But how could I tell Haven that the only reason I couldn’t keep my word was because Loni took off? If Adrian could’ve Claimed Loni, I would’ve had Haven… but with Loni missing, that was impossible.
Only Loni? She’s not missing, missing, missing. She’s moved on, but not far enough from Adrian, even if she thinks she did. She’s not in Harmony Heights, but we know where she is; hell, I went to her college graduation to snap pics for Adrian since Jack won’t let him out of his sight.
Why would he? Adrian knows where all the bodies are buried. He knows how the game is played in Harmony Heights, and has a whole damn ledger of who really is Owed what. He’s the fucking Kingmaker, he is, and even he couldn’t protect Haven.
I needed to be able to protect Haven.
A giggle swells in my throat. Fuck. What would Haven say if she saw what she reduced me to just by disappearing?
Maybe she did plan this. Maybe she did leave.
Maybe she figured out that I spent most of my evenings parked in a lot opposite her ground-floor apartment, watching her live her life while imagining what ours will be like together one day. Maybe—
I slam my fist into the mattress. No. No. Haven is mine. She has to be. And just because I haven’t gotten another lead today, doesn’t mean that there won’t be one tomorrow. Until they lay her corpse at my feet, I’ll never believe that Haven Smith willingly walked away from Harmony Heights.