Wells
TWENTY-FOUR
The Unmasking: At the close of the season the maskers reveal their faces, and you learn at last who you spent the night beside. He wakes to two truths bared in the same hour, the woman gone and the killer finally wearing his own name.
I wake slowly, the way you do when your body is heavier and warmer than it has been in as long as you can remember, like something good soaked into you while you slept.
My hand reaches across the bed before my eyes open.
Cold sheets.
I blink, groggy, and push myself up on one elbow. The bed beside me is empty, the comforter pulled back and tangled where she must have gotten out early this morning.
Blurry outlines of the city start to take shape out of the floor-to-ceiling windows. The sun is nowhere to be seen, but it's already burning off the blackness of the night. I scrub a hand over my face and sit up fully, listening for her.
Nothing.
Last night runs back through my head in fragments. We hit a new milestone last night, a place I've never gone with any other woman.
The words almost came. They rose in my chest, right there on the edge of my tongue, and I could feel the shape of them ready to spill out.
I love you.
I caught them, though, and swallowed them back down before they could land.
Saying them would have made it real in a way I wasn't sure I was ready for. That is the truth I did not want to look at directly.
Now, sitting here with the empty bed and the sunrise pulling color out of the river, that cowardice is thin. I know how I feel and I know that saying them out loud to her doesn't change anything, just like not saying them somehow protects me. I want her to know my heart
"Cera," I call out. Maybe she's in the living room. My voice cuts through the quiet, no response.
I swing my legs out of bed and stand, pulling on the pants I left on the floor last night. I walk through the open living space, checking the bathroom first. Empty. I move to the kitchen, and there's no coffee brewing, no note on the island.
I double back to the bedroom and check the chair where she draped her bag last night.
Gone.
I stop in the middle of the room, the quiet pressing in harder now. She must have had an early class or somewhere to be. That is the easy answer, and it fits. She teaches at the rec center sometimes, and I know she goes there before work sometimes to set it up. She probably didn't want to wake me.
I grab my phone off the nightstand and open a text to her.
You left before I could accuse you of stealing the covers. And tell you good morning, beautiful.
I hit send and set the phone down, moving to the bathroom to shower. The hot water helps clear the last of the sleep fog, and by the time I towel off and dress, more solid, more like myself than I think I've ever been.
I walk into the office at six thirty, before the floor lights fully warm up and before anyone else is moving through the halls. The city outside is still hazy and not fully light, the kind of gray hour that's useful because no one can interrupt it.
My phone sits face down beside the keyboard. I checked it a minute ago. Still nothing from Cera. I leave it where it is and wake my system. Last night is still sitting warm in my chest, and I want to do something with the good of it, and the thing I do with a good mood is to be productive.
I told Vin I'd leave it to him, and I meant it. He's earned that a hundred times over, and he's right that I can't build a year of my life on a drunk's memory of a parking lot.
But there's one thread I can't hand off frayed, not if I want to sleep, and it's the smallest one in the whole thing. Dane swore the guards never called Vin that night. Vin said they did. Dane said he didn't even have Vin's number, with no reason on earth to lie about something that small.
So before I let it go and let Vin run the rest, I'll close this one loose end myself, the way I close everything, and I already know how it ends.
The records will back Vin, the drunk will be wrong exactly like Vin said, and I'll finally be able to stop turning it over.
I pull the call logs from that night and start reading them with the question I never thought to ask a year ago, back when I already had my answer and only went looking to nod along with it.
Dane wasn't scrambled. There's no call from the guards to Vin that night. Not a connection, not a missed attempt, nothing. Whatever pulled Vin to that warehouse, it wasn't those two men, just like Dane said.
So I chase the calls that did get made, back into the burner traffic I cracked the first time and only ever read as Duvall's.
One number keeps surfacing, a burner that went dark within days of the murder, and when I run down what's left of it, it doesn't dead-end in a Duvall account like every other thread I tagged back then.
It runs into one of the offshore shells I mapped a year ago and could never find the bottom of.
And this time, with a thread in my hand I didn't have then, the bottom is there. The whole structure sweeps up and out into a single trust about eighteen months after Dad died, every dollar washed clean and tucked under one quiet name.
VDM Trust Services.
It takes me a second. Then all the air leaves my lungs.
Vincent Daniel Moreau.
But it can't be. He doesn't have money like that to front this sort of operation.
He was paid well, paid like the man my father trusted past his own blood, but not enough to amass this kind of fortune.
And the beneficiaries on that trust are coded, no name sitting behind the money at all. So maybe that's all this is.
I pull everything that trust ever touched, and all of it wears the same costume, art and acquisitions and antiques, the one corner of the world Vin knows better than anyone alive.
The floor goes out from under me. It's him.
Vin stood at the funeral in a black suit, gripping my shoulder when I couldn't make myself look at the casket.
He taught me how the docks worked the summer I was seventeen and too angry to sit in a classroom, showed me how a manifest breathes and how the whole machine moves.
He leaned across a booth from me a year ago at the Black Orchid and walked the money toward Duvall at my side, toward an answer that sat clean and never once sat right.
He steered me. He steered all of us, the whole time.
My chest aches. I close the file, and the name sits behind my eyes anyway. I lean back and try to make the math come out some other way, and it won't, and I can't make it come out his way either, so I'm stuck in the gap between the two with nothing holding me up on either side.
Where the fuck is Cera? I need her now, more than ever.
I pick up the phone again and type out another message, this one more urgent.
Please let me know you're okay. I'm starting to worry.
I hit send and watch the screen. The message delivers. I wait for the read receipt to update.
Five minutes pass. Then ten.
Nothing.
I set the phone face down on the desk and lean back in my chair, forcing myself to breathe evenly.
This is not a crisis. People do not answer texts immediately all the time.
She could be in the middle of something, caught up in her own day, completely unaware I am sitting here watching my phone like it holds answers.
Thirty more minutes crawl by.
I grab the phone and call her directly.
The line rings once. Twice. Three times. The fourth ring cuts off and her voicemail picks up.
Hey, you've reached Cera. Leave a message and I'll get back to you.
I end the call without leaving anything.
The quiet in my office is deafening now.
I could find her in thirty seconds. The tools are already running on my system. I know her address, her phone's IMEI number, the location services tied to her accounts. I could pull up her current position, see exactly where she is, and confirm she is safe.
I have done it a thousand times before. Surveillance is what I do. Tracing is second nature. I find people who do not want to be found, pull information out of systems that were built to keep it hidden. Locating Cera would take less effort than making coffee.
But I made a vow to myself surrounding her, and I won't break it again. I can't.
I set the phone down and close my eyes, forcing my hands to stay flat on the desk.
Ask and wait. That is what normal people do. They trust, they give space. They don't hunt the person they love because silence feels uncomfortable.
By four thirty, I break. I've been completely useless today. I can't concentrate on anything. Both things hit at once, and all I can do is sit here with my thumb up my ass.
My hands move before I can stop them. I enter two commands and feed in her IMEI, the one logged in the company directory like every employee's, and the location pings back in under five seconds.
A map loads on my secondary screen. A red dot blinks on North Broad Street, stationary, inside the building I already know is hers.
Home.
The relief hits first. She's alive, not in a hospital. She's not bleeding out somewhere while I sit here staring at my phone.
Then the relief twists.
If she's home, and has been for hours, she read my texts, ignored my calls, and chose silence.
Something is wrong.
I grab my keys and leave.
Traffic crawls through the Quarter, tourists crossing against the lights, delivery trucks double-parked and blocking lanes.
My hands stay locked on the wheel, knuckles white.
Somehow, I catch every red light, like it means to hold me in place.
My mind runs through scenarios, each one worse than the last.
The trace said she was there. It didn't tell me whether she was okay.
I take the turn onto North Broad too fast, my tires catching rough on the asphalt. Her building sits three blocks down, with brick and iron balconies, the kind of place that looks charming until you notice the paint peeling around the window frames.
I park in a loading zone and don't care.
The front door is propped open with a brick. I take the stairs two at a time, counting floors until I hit the third landing. Her apartment is at the end of the hall, number thirty-two, the brass numbers tarnished and hanging slightly crooked.
I knock.
No answer.
The hall smells like cooking oil and old carpet. A dog barks somewhere below me. I knock again, harder this time.
"Cera."
My voice comes out flat. I press my palm against the door and lean closer.
"Cera, I know you're home."
Still nothing.
My chest tightens, the calm I've been holding fraying at the edges. I picture her on the other side of the door, collapsed on the floor, unable to reach the handle.
I knock a third time, loud enough that the sound echoes down the hall.
"If you can hear me, you need to open the door." My voice drops lower, steady except where it shakes at the base. "I'm not leaving. If you don't answer, I'm kicking it down."
I'm not trying to scare her. I'm trying to reach her, to make sure she's okay.
The door finally opens.
Cera stands in the gap, one hand gripping the edge of the frame. Her face is swollen, her skin blotchy from crying.
I've never seen her like this.
Relief comes first again, just for a second. She's standing, breathing. Then the dread lands right behind it, sharp. Something happened.
My eyes move over her, scanning for injury, bruises, anything visible. Her arms are bare. No marks. Her posture is stiff but steady. She is not holding herself like someone in pain.
I look past her into the apartment, through the narrow opening the door allows. The living room is dim, the blinds drawn. A single lamp glows in the corner. I search for movement, for someone else in the room, for anything that tells me what did this to her.
Nothing.
She's alone. My gaze snaps back to her face.
Her brown eyes are red along the edges, and the way she looks at me tells me the warmth is gone. There is no relief, no pull toward me for comfort.
She looks at me the way you look at a stranger who showed up at your door uninvited.
My brain scrambles for an explanation. Locke. Something happened after I left this morning. He went back to the hospital. He died. That would explain this. That would explain why she is standing here, wrecked and unable to find words.
"Cera, I've been so worried. What's wrong? What happened?"
She doesn't answer me at first. Then she licks her lips and tilts her head, and I know immediately this isn't about anyone else. I've done something. I've upset her.
"I think you should go, Wells."
The first thing that rises in me is anger. How dare she treat me like this, disappear without a word, and only answer the door after a threat. But I know the anger is a cover for the fear under it, the sheer terror of what's happening.
"Why did you ghost me like that, Cera? What did I do?"
"Why did you ghost me like that, Midnight?"
The minute that word leaves her mouth, I know it's over. I know nothing I say will fix this.