15. Ryder
RYDER
The man pinned in the upside down SUV on the side of the hill is bleeding through a towel, and I’m thinking about Alex instead of getting him out and to safety.
The driver is conscious, scared, and trying to keep his eyes on me instead of the cracked windshield or the blood on his sleeve, which means he deserves every bit of focus I have.
I give him most of it.
My phone sits heavy in my pocket anyway.
“Cook,” Josh says from the other side of the door, rain dripping from the edge of his helmet. “You with us?”
I adjust my grip on the tool instead of looking at him. “Yeah.”
The driver’s eyes flick between us, and I force my expression back into something steady.
“You’re doing good, Mark,” I tell him, because his license is somewhere in the mud and his name is easier for him to hold on to than the sound of metal shifting around his legs.
“We’re going to open this side up. It’ll be loud, but you’re safe. ”
He nods too fast. “My wife?”
“She’s with EMS.” I glance toward the ambulance, where Casey has the woman wrapped in a blanket with an oxygen mask over her face. “She’s talking. That’s what we want.”
Josh gives me the spreaders, and for the next few minutes, I make myself useful.
Metal groans. Rain hisses against the road.
Someone behind me tells traffic to move back, and the driver grips my sleeve when the door finally gives with a hard, ugly pop.
I talk him through it because that’s the job.
I keep my voice low and my hands sure, and by the time we get him loaded, no one but Josh would know half my brain has been counting the minutes since Alex stopped answering.
Forty-eight.
I step behind the engine, pull one glove off with my teeth, and take out my phone.
Nothing from Alex.
Two texts from Remy.
I open Alex’s thread first anyway.
Me: You okay?
The message sits there. Delivered. Not read.
My hand tightens around the phone until the edge bites into my palm.
She was going to file the report after I left the newsroom.
Remy was with her. Marcy was with her. She promised she would call if she needed me.
All of that should be enough to keep me from imagining Preston between her and an exit, Preston with another note, Preston finding another way into a place she thought was safe.
It isn’t.
Josh steps into my peripheral vision, quiet enough that I know the next conversation is going to be a problem. “Who isn’t answering?”
I lock the screen. “Nobody.”
“Try again.”
“Not now.”
His jaw shifts beneath the rain dripping down his face. “Every time I ask you a simple question today, you look like you’re deciding whether lying to me is worth it.”
I look past him toward the ambulance because it is easier than looking at my best friend. “Alex filed a report.”
Josh goes still. The scene keeps moving around us, but he doesn’t. “What kind of report?”
My phone buzzes before I can answer, and I hate the relief that cuts through me hard enough to make my knees feel unsteady.
Alex: Still alive. Statement done. Remy bought me coffee that tasted like punishment, so I’m going back to your house before anyone else tries to be emotionally supportive at me.
I read it twice while Josh watches my face.
Me: Are you headed there now?
Alex: Almost. Marcy drove me because apparently people have thoughts about me operating heavy machinery while rage-shaking.
Me: Your car is not heavy machinery.
Alex: It is when I’m mad enough to drive it into a municipal building.
A rough breath leaves me before I can stop it. Josh sees that too.
“Ryder,” he says. “Why the fuck is my sister filing a report and you know about it and I don’t.”
I slide the phone away because I cannot explain this with mud on my boots and a wrecked truck behind me. Not without making it sound smaller than it is or worse than Alex wants him to know. “She’s safe. That’s all I can tell you right now.”
His expression hardens. “That’s my sister.”
“I know.”
“No, I’m starting to think you don’t.”
Captain Bell calls us back before I have to choose between an answer and another lie. Josh turns away first, but the look he gives me stays under my skin for the rest of cleanup.
By the time my shift ends, I’ve checked my phone so many times Casey stops pretending not to notice. Alex has answered enough to keep me from driving straight out of the station with my gear half on, but every gap between messages chews through another piece of my control.
She is at my house. Alarm on. Door locked. She sent a picture of the monitors and a cup of coffee in her hand with that book she was talking about. Alex: Your creepy robot children are behaving.
I saved the image before I could talk myself out of it. You can barely make out her face with the backlight of the monitors but I give zero fucks. She’s perfect.
Remy calls while I’m standing by my truck with a coffee I forgot to drink.
“Tell me you have something,” I say.
“I have several things, and all of them are going to ruin your mood. So don’t blame me when you have a shitty attitude later”
“My mood’s been gone all day.”
“Preston doesn’t have a stable address,” Remy says, the teasing gone from his voice. “Last lease ended months ago. No new one that I can find. He’s using motel rooms, short-term rentals, maybe couch-surfing with people who either don’t know what he is or don’t care for all I know.”
I set the coffee on the hood of my truck before I crush the cup. “What about his phone?”
“At least three burners that I can find he was stupid enough to register. One lines up with calls to Alex. Another pinged near Lucy’s the night he grabbed her. I’m still digging on the third, but it looks like that’s the one he’s using to call your place.”
Rain drips from the bay roof and hits the concrete in a steady, irritating rhythm. Through the open doors behind me, Josh laughs at something Mason says, and the sound makes my stomach twist. He is ten yards away from me, still outside the truth because I keep standing between him and it.
Remy exhales into the phone. “There’s more.
I have a clerk two towns over who remembers a guy matching Preston’s description buying wire cutters, electrical tools, work gloves, and gas cans in separate transactions.
Same build, same polished-friendly routine.
Not enough for cuffs or even to talk to him, but it’s enough for me to start hating the pattern. ”
My skin goes cold under my shirt. “Gas cans.”
“Yeah.”
“The breaker at her place,” I say. “The motion light at her apartment being shattered. Her window. He’s testing access and power because he’s planning something.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Remy says. “And with the old-building articles she’s been writing, I don’t like him circling fire. Parker pulled more footage from Lucy’s too. He was watching the door before he approached Alex, like he knew he had a window before you came in.”
I look at my truck door and picture Alex on my couch with her book, pretending not to stare at the monitors. “Does she know about the purchases?” Or any of it, really.
Fucking hell, my girl is going to lose her shit.
“Not from me. I figured that should come from someone she trusts.”
My laugh has no humor in it. “That’s a dangerous amount of faith in me.”
“No. It’s me telling you not to hoard the bad news because you think fear belongs better in your hands than hers.”
I press my thumb against the bridge of my nose. “I hear you.”
“Then act like it. We don’t put enough trust in the women we love.”
When I end the call, Josh is watching me from the bay doors. He has one shoulder against the frame and his arms crossed, and the look on his face tells me he heard enough to build questions out of the silence.
“This is about Alex,” he says. “And you need to tell me what the fuck it is, before I lose my shit and our friendship implodes.”
I unlock my truck. “I have to get home.”
“To Alex?”
My hand stills on the handle.
There’s the line I’ve been walking close to this whole time. I haven’t crossed it. Not yet, and now all the way, but it’s visible now. Josh sees it. I see him seeing it, and I know that I’m about to pick a side. One I can’t walk back from.
“She’s safe,” I say again, and this time even I hate how little that gives him.
His eyes narrow. “At your house?”
I don’t answer.
Josh’s face changes in a way I’ve known since we were kids. Hurt first, then anger rushing in to cover it. “You better have a damn good reason for keeping me out of whatever is happening.”
“I do.”
“Then say it.”
“Look, Josh. I love you. You’re my best friend and I would do anything for you. But I’m not going to betray her by saying shit to you that she isn’t ready for you to hear yet.”
That stops him, but it does not calm him down.
If anything, it makes him angrier because he knows exactly what I’m implying.
Alex asked for time. Alex chose not to tell him yet.
Alex is the only reason I’m still standing here instead of getting shoved into the side of my own truck while he punches the shit out of me.
And I’d deserve it too.
Josh points at me. “This conversation isn’t over.”
“No,” I agree, opening the door. “It isn’t.”
Alex doesn’t meet me at the door when I get home, but I don’t expect her to.
The alarm is set and the porch is empty.
The driveway feed only shows my truck pulling in behind her car, and I haven’t gotten a single alert for it since she was dropped off.
I still check every angle from my phone before I unlock the door, because knowing she is inside does nothing to quiet the part of me that has spent all day imagining how fast safe can turn into her being taken from me.
The living room lamp is on. Alex is asleep on the couch with one hand under her cheek, her bare feet tucked beneath the throw blanket she’s hijacked to nest in, and her laptop is open on the cushion beside her.
One of my hoodies is draped over the armrest within reach but not laying over her, like she wanted it close and got stubborn about needing it.