Chapter 40 Lucian
Lucian
Iglance at my watch again. She’s been gone too long.
At first, I tell myself she just needed a second to breathe, maybe to touch up her makeup.
The minutes keep folding over each other, and the bathroom door stays out of sight, tucked down the hallway by the stage.
A low hum starts under my ribs, the coil that lives there tightening whenever she slips beyond reach.
It used to be easy to laugh off; tonight it feels like a live wire.
I catch Shiloh’s eye across the table. She is mid-laugh at something Linkin said, but when she sees my face, the laugh dies, and her smile drops. “What?”
“Celeste went to the restroom almost ten minutes ago. Can you get eyes on her? Just make sure she didn’t fall asleep on the toilet or get stuck in a line.”
Her brows pull together. “She went to the women’s restroom. There’s always a line. Are you really that worried?”
“With everything going on, yeah, I’m just being cautious. Would you please go check?”
She nods and slips from the booth, moving toward the hallway. My palms itch and my pulse thuds against my ribs like a war drum. The air in the booth feels thin and fragile.
Time stretches. I keep my eyes pinned to the hallway until Shiloh finally reappears. She is walking fast, her mouth is set in a hard line, and the way she moves makes my stomach drop before she even reaches us.
Her eyes are wide as she confirms my biggest fear.
“She’s not in there. I checked every stall, and I called her name.
Nothing.” Shiloh swallows and looks toward the hallway.
“There’s a service exit past the bathrooms that dumps into the alley.
It’s closed, but there is a brick on the floor next to the door. ”
I move before my brain finishes catching up. The second Shiloh says alley, I’m already pushing out of the booth. Linkin is right behind me. We cut through the crowd until I spot the waitress who brought the drink.
“Excuse me,” I say, stepping in her path. “I need to know exactly who bought the drink for the woman who was with us earlier.”
Her eyes widen, tray dipping. “Oh, uh—I, uh… I got it from the bar. The bartender, Bryce, passed it to me.”
“Take me to him,” I demand.
She nods and leads us to the long counter. The bartender, broad-shouldered with a beard, looks up mid-pour.
“What’s up?” he asks.
“A redhead ordered a drink and had it sent to the blonde who played the piano earlier,” I say, my words clipped. “Who was the redhead?”
He thinks for a second, then frowns. “I don’t remember her name. She wasn’t a fan of small talk, and she paid in cash.”
My jaw locks. “Did she touch the drink?”
He hesitates, then nods. “Yeah. It was a miscommunication on my end. I gave it to her, thinking it was for her. She grabbed the glass from me, and I turned to help someone else. Not even a second later, she’s waving me back over, saying it’s for the singer and not her.
She gave it back, asked me to send it out so she didn’t seem weird. ”
The sentence lands like a fist in my stomach
“You should have remade it.” I fight not to shout the words at him.
He swallows hard. “Yeah. Look—I didn’t think—she looked harmless.”
The waitress beside him has gone pale. Linkin moves closer, his easy grin gone; his voice is low and dangerous. “So she ordered it, touched it, then handed it back and sent it to Celeste? You didn’t think for one second she might’ve slipped something in the drink when you turned away?”
“Yeah,” the bartender says, jaw tightening. “Sorry, man. If I’d known—”
I turn away before he can finish. Excuses are noise I don’t have time for. Every second he talks is another second she’s missing.
Her friends follow as I push through the crowd and out to the SUV. We pile in. I fumble my phone, hit Orion on speaker, and the line clicks after one ring.
“Hey, Fucker.” Orion’s voice is smug through the phone. “Did she love it?”
I close my eyes for a beat. “She did, but—listen,” I clear my throat. “She’s gone.”
The cheer drains out of him in an instant. “What the fuck do you mean, gone?”
“She went to the bathroom, and after ten minutes, I sent Shiloh after her. She’s not there.
There is a service exit by the restrooms with a brick next to it, someone might’ve used to prop it open.
A woman bought Celeste a drink earlier, and paid cash, and the bartender gave it to the woman who ordered it and walked away.
He didn’t remake it after she called him back and told him the drink wasn’t for her.
He said it was because the woman looked ‘harmless,’” I say, and my hands tighten on the wheel until it aches.
“I think the woman drugged Celeste. She had to’ve taken her. ”
“She’s got the pendant—” Orion starts.
“She hasn’t triggered it; if she’s drugged, she might be unconscious.” I cut in.
A pause on the line. “Can you override it?” he asks finally.
“I don’t know how; we can’t even track her phone. She left it with me since her skirt doesn’t have pockets.” The word tastes like metal.
From the back seat, Linkin leans forward. “Uh… what kind of pendant are we talking about?”
“It looks like a circular disc,” I say, knuckles whitening on the wheel. “It’s got a built-in panic device, if you press it twice, and it alerts Rowan, Orion, and me. That’s how we know she’s in trouble.”
Linkin whistles under his breath. “Cute. Since we have her phone, I can force its location.”
I glance at him in the mirror. “Force it how?”
“If I can get to a computer with a stable connection, give me ten minutes.” His grin is thin, all calculation. “If the chip’s simple, I can piggyback from her phone and hit the firmware to make it talk whether it wants to or not.”
Orion exhales. “Hold on.”
The line goes dead.
Shiloh’s head snaps toward my phone like she wants to wrench it from my hands. “Did he just hang up? His sister is missing and he just—”
“Shiloh.” My voice comes out low and warning. “Breathe, he’s not bailing. If Orion cuts the line like that, it means he’s had an idea and needs to get moving parts in place. We don’t have time for niceties.”
She blinks, her shoulders trembling with fury and fear. “He could at least tell us—”
“He’s probably calling someone local,” I say, forcing my breath even when every muscle wants to punch something. “It could even be the friend who tipped him off about this bar. He’s ex-SWAT and retired out here. Orion’s network is wide; he has plenty of strings he can pull.”
Linkin’s hand lands on Shiloh’s shoulder. She glares at him, but doesn’t shrug him off.
The phone rings through the SUV speakers, and I hit accept before it finishes ringing. “Speak.”
“Your contact’s name is Sam Torres,” he says instead of greeting. “He’s retired SWAT, but runs private security these days. You’re headed to County Road 13. Dropping a pin to your phone now.”
The address appears on my screen a second later. I hit it, and the GPS lights up, saying it will take us thirty minutes to get to him.
“We’re on our way,” I tell him, shifting the SUV into gear.
“Torres can get you access to local cams, dispatch chatter, everything. You’ll have boots on the ground faster than official channels will allow.”
“Copy,” I say, and hang up.
“So, Linkin,” Shiloh begins. “You think you can find her pendant without her clicking it?”
Linkin’s reflection in the rearview gives a single, sharp nod. “If Torres has the right setup? Yeah. I can brute-force the chip. It’ll scream back eventually.”
I angle him a look. “You… know how to do that?”
He bears a feral grin that promises both genius and property damage.
“Umbra goes on break, every once in a while, and I get bored. Let’s just keep this between us, though.
There are places and communities I am legally not allowed to be around.
Besides, I learned to hack way before the music thing blew up. ”
“But what you do is ethical, right?” Shiloh asks, like she already knows the answer.
“I mean… It is now… Before Umbra, I used to be a little more… flexible. I might be on a watch list or two.”
The corner of my mouth twitches despite the panic twisting my gut.
I let their bickering fade into a low hum and focus on the road and on the single objective that matters: get to Torres, and get Celeste back.
The turnoff appears as a slit in the trees, a rust-pocked mailbox leaning like it’s given up on life. Gravel crackles under the tires as I guide the SUV down a long, winding drive swallowed by dark woods. The only light ahead is a lone porch bulb, haloed in moths.
A man steps into the light as we roll to a stop.
He’s not the hardened ex-SWAT specter I’d built in my head.
Torres looks aggressively normal. He’s in his early fifties, maybe, soft around the middle, wire-rim glasses catching the porch glow, a faded T-shirt tucked into jeans like he’s about to mow the lawn, not help us track a kidnapped woman.
He flicks his cigarette into a coffee can and gives a small, neighborly wave as we get out of my SUV.
“Orion filled me in,” he says, voice calm enough to lower my blood pressure by ten points. “Come on in. Quiet, please, my family is sleeping.”
Our footsteps crunch over the gravel as we follow him inside.
The house smells like fresh coffee and paper. A stack of mail leans precariously on the hall table next to a family photo.
“My office is in the back,” Torres says, leading us down a short hallway.
“Got what you asked for, set up already. You have a desktop, a hardline connection, and a way to get into her phone. It should be enough for whatever you’re doing.
A friend of Orion’s is a friend of mine.
Let me know what you need, and I’ll get it for you. ”
I follow them in, jaw tight but grateful for quiet competence.
Linkin is already folded over Torres’s desk, his shoulders are hunched over, his hair slips forward in a dark curtain, fingers moving so fast the keys barely register the abuse.
We all go quiet around him, the only sounds the soft clatter of plastic and the low, steady hum of a server rack tucked in the corner, like it’s trying not to intrude.
Then he stills and exhales sharply through his nose, like something interesting just turned inconvenient.
“Okay,” he mutters, straightening just enough to crack his spine, eyes glued to the monitor. “This is gonna take longer than I thought.”
I stop pacing, my heart falling through my stomach. “Why?”
“Their security’s better than I expected.
” His fingers resume a restless tap, like he’s drumming irritation straight into the desk.
“These pendants aren’t just fancy panic jewelry; their code is layered like a goddamn onion.
Encryption, rolling IP masks, and auto shutoffs if I sneeze at the wrong endpoint.
Whoever made this wanted to keep out anyone trying to poke around. ”
Shiloh folds her arms, weight shifting like she’s bracing for impact. “So what does that mean?”
“It means—” Linkin spins the chair to face us, eyes bright with challenge and annoyance. “—I can find her, but not in five minutes. I need, like, an hour. Maybe two. I’ve gotta build a bridge into their servers and spoof her device first.”
I drag a hand down my face, jaw tight enough to crack. My gaze flicks to Torres. “What can we do while he’s doing that?”
Torres sighs, the kind of long, practiced exhale of a man who’s seen too much and still has to pack lunches in the morning.
“I’ve only got this one workstation,” he says, nodding toward Linkin.
“But I can call a buddy. Ex-traffic control. He can pull DOT feeds and corner-store cams faster than I can.”
“Do it,” I say, sharper than intended, the edge of panic bleeding through.
Torres doesn’t blink. He just steps into the hall, phone already to his ear, voice dropping to a low murmur as he starts making things happen.
Linkin’s fingers are a blur again, the keys rattling under them like they’re trying to keep up. “If I can’t get a clean trace yet, I can still cage the search radius when it pings,” he says, voice low, focused. “We just have to be patient.”
Fuck patient.
My knuckles throb where I’ve been grinding them into my thigh, like the word itself is an insult.
Shiloh’s perched on the arm of the couch, one knee bouncing, gaze fixed on the hallway Torres disappeared down. The whole room feels like it’s holding its breath.
“The firewall’s loosening,” Linkin murmurs, still not looking up. “Give me thirty minutes. Maybe less if Torres’s guy is as good as he swears and can give me a good jumping off point.”
Torres walks back in, as if hearing his name summoned him. He glances up from his phone. “He’s already scrubbing feeds. He was able to pull traffic cams near the bar and some street-level stuff. We have the timeline, so they’re getting everything pulled.”
“Good,” I reply. “We need every angle.”
My phone buzzes in my palm. Orion’s name lights the screen. I skim the message, jaw tightening. “Orion’s en route,” I tell them. “He’s three and a half hours out, and he’s bringing backup.”
Linkin glances over, mouth tugging into something sharp. “FBI cavalry. Fancy.”
“We’re not waiting for them,” I mutter, eyes cutting to Torres. “We move the second we have a ping. But if Orion’s close, we’ll have backup.”
A low hum of agreement settles over the room.
I drop into the chair beside Linkin, watching lines of code pour down the screen like rain.
My chest aches from holding too much. All the fear, fury, the hollow space where her voice should be.
She’s out there somewhere. Maybe waking up. Maybe terrified. Maybe fighting.
Hold on, Wildflower. Just hold on. We’re coming.