45. Titan
TITAN
If there’s one thing I despise, it’s men who refuse to stand still long enough to face what they’ve done.
I see it constantly. Grown men who spend their lives wielding power—over women, over systems, over silence—only to fold the moment that power is reversed.
The moment the pain is theirs, instead of someone else’s.
Torture doesn’t make them brave or honest. It simply reveals what was never there to begin with.
Scott-Evans and Delaney are no different.
They collapse quickly. Too quickly. There isn’t even a shared backbone between them—just two men scrambling for air, for distance, for a version of events where responsibility belongs elsewhere.
From where I stand, their friendship is already a corpse.
Scott-Evans doesn’t defend Delaney. He doesn’t protect him. He watches him instead—waiting. Measuring. Almost hopeful that Marcus will speak first so he doesn’t have to be the one who gives voice to what they did.
Because something inside Scott-Evans still resists saying their names out loud.
Missy Hale.
Rowan Hale.
There’s a line even monsters hesitate to cross—the moment where cruelty stops being abstract and becomes personal. Where victims stop being faceless and start being remembered as girls with voices and choices and futures.
Scott-Evans can’t bring himself to narrate how they were noticed. How they were selected. How attention turned into entitlement and entitlement into violence.
But Marcus can’t hold it in forever.
He shakes. He sweats. He cracks.
And in the end, it isn’t the pain that breaks him.
It’s the silence.
And Marcus Delaney snaps first.
“It wasn’t my idea to take the girls,” Delaney blurts. “None of it was. We didn’t touch the younger sister—Jesus Christ, we didn’t hurt her.”
“What happened to Daniel Stockton?” I ask.
The name cuts through the room.
Delaney looks between us, genuinely confused now, like the question doesn’t belong in this place—or maybe like he hoped it never would. His brow furrows, irritation flickering beneath the fear, as if he’s trying to decide whether this is a trick or a mistake.
Before he can answer, Justin’s phone vibrates in his pocket.
The sound is small. Ordinary. But equally devastating.
He doesn’t break eye contact as he pulls it free, his gaze still locked on the men in front of us.
“Silas,” he announces into the phone.
I watch him closely.
Justin’s face doesn’t change. There’s no flash of anger, no visible reaction at all. Just stone—set and immovable. But I’ve known him long enough to catch the fracture beneath it. His jaw tightens, teeth clicking once, sharp and involuntary.
A tell.
A frustration tic he’s had since the first day I met him. Since before I taught him how to hide his emotions well.
Whatever Silas is telling him, it matters.
Enough to set something off inside him. Enough to shift the air in the room, subtle but unmistakable—like pressure building before a storm breaks.
Justin listens in silence.
And I know, before he says a word, that Daniel Stockton is no longer just a question.
He’s an answer we’re not going to like.
We step out onto the porch, the door closing behind us with a muted thud that seals the noise back inside. The night air hits cold and sharp, but it does nothing to cut the tension coiled in my chest.
Justin exhales hard, the sound uneven, like he’s been holding it in for longer than just the length of the call. He looks at me then, and for the first time since we dragged these men inside, there’s something uncertain flickering beneath his composure.
“Silas didn’t find a Thomas Harding,” he says. “Not traveling to Australia in the timeframe we’re looking at. He widened the search—every manifest, every port, commercial and private. No one by that name left the US.”
I don’t interrupt. I already know this isn’t the worst part.
“Neither did Daniel Stockton,” he continues. “No entry records. No departures. Nothing. And he didn’t show up in any hospital admissions either. Not when the dean claimed he was treated.”
The words settle between us, heavy and wrong.
“You think the dean got his dates mixed up?” I ask him.
Justin’s mouth tightens. “That’s a hell of a mistake to make. Not with events this significant.”
I nod once, the pieces shifting in my head, grinding against each other as they realign. “So Daniel Stockton is a ghost. We know he exists—we’ve seen proof of that. But at some point, he disappears and he doesn’t leave a trail.”
Justin’s gaze drifts back toward the door. Toward the men inside tearing each other apart. “The dean is either lying,” he says, “or hiding something.”
“To protect his son?”
“Possibly. Or he’s worried that if we trace Daniel back here, the truth will put him in prison right alongside the rest of them.” His eyes harden. “Either way, there’s only one way to find out.”
Inside, raised voices bleed through the walls—accusations, denial, panic unraveling into something feral. Delaney and Scott-Evans are already turning on each other, years of shared history evaporating under pressure.
Whatever bond they formed in college didn’t survive adulthood. It didn’t survive the consequences of their evil. And we always knew it would come to this. Pitting them against each other was the only way the truth was ever going to surface.
We step back into the cabin and I close my eyes for half a second as I stand before the men.
When I open them again, Scott-Evans is staring at me like a man drowning who’s just seen the surface move farther away.
“Daniel Stockton,” Justin reminds them where we left off, waiting impatiently for a response.
“What about him?” Delaney rasps, drawing our attention towards him.
“He has nothing to do with this,” Scott-Evans says, and I wonder why he’s so eager to protect the man.
“Then start talking,” I say. “From the beginning.”
Scott-Evans swallows. His bravado is gone now. All that’s left is desperation and something dangerously close to relief.
Delaney watches him, before he lets out a single word of warning.
“Don’t!”
Scott-Evans skirts his eyes toward Delaney, then decides to ignore him.
“What do you want to know?” He sighs. There’s only resolve in his voice now.
“Daniel Stockton was the third man in that car that day. Where…”
But I don’t get far, because Scott-Evans looks at me like I’ve grown two heads and interrupts me.
“Daniel had nothing to do with anything!” he hisses.
Marcus makes a strangled sound, as though his soul is leaving his body.
“You dumb fucker! He’ll kill us!” He shrieks.
Scott-Evans has gone still.
Not calm—empty. The kind of numbness that comes after the body has exhausted every other response.
His eyes are dull now, unfocused, like he’s already stepped halfway out of himself.
There’s no fight left in him. No fear either.
Just the faint impression of a man who would welcome the end if it meant this would finally stop.
“Not if they kill us first,” he mutters, tipping his chin toward us.
It’s hard to tell whether it’s resignation or calculation.
That’s the problem with men like him. They understand despair well enough to wear it convincingly. I can’t tell if he’s reached true defeat or if this is just another mask—one more version of himself deployed to provoke doubt, to blur intention, to make us hesitate.
It’s classic sociopathic behavior. I’ve seen it before. Not recently—but often enough to recognize the shape of it. The way hopelessness becomes a tool. The way surrender is used not as an ending, but as leverage.
And standing here now, watching him hollow himself out in real time, it’s becoming harder to tell which version of Scott-Evans is real.
The broken man. Or the one still playing the game.