27. Ryder
RYDER
I wake with my hand reaching for Alex before I know why.
My palm slides over the place where her hip should be and finds sheets that don’t have a hint of her warmth.
For a few seconds, exhaustion keeps my brain from catching up with my body.
I remember her curled against me after I checked her pupils for the third time, complaining that medical surveillance was ruining what she called a perfectly good afterglow.
I remember her voice against my mouth, telling me she loved me until the words stopped sounding impossible and started sounding like something I should get to hear for the rest of my life.
The bathroom door is open. There’s no light beneath it, no water running, and I can’t hear her moving anywhere in the room.
“Alex?”
I’m sitting up before I finish saying her name. The movement sends the blanket down around my waist, and that’s when I see her phone on the nightstand beside my hand.
Her phone should be on her side of the bed.
The screen is still illuminated and I can see an open text thread. There’s no lock screen to get through. No notification I have to touch. She left the conversation sitting there where I couldn’t miss it.
My feet hit the floor.
I pick up the phone as I cross toward the bathroom anyway because some part of me is still trying to reconcile what I already know. I shove the door wider and check behind it, stare at the empty shower, then turn toward the hallway while reading the first message.
Unknown: No text. Just a photo where Mrs. Vance is tied to a chair.
Her bandaged hand is secured to the armrest. Her cane is broken on the floor beside her. I’ve seen enough fear in Alex’s face over the last several weeks to know exactly what that picture did to her when she saw it, and I know her well enough to understand what came next before I finish reading.
Unknown: She should have stayed out of it.
Unknown: Come alone.
Unknown: No Ryder. No police. No brother.
Unknown: Trade yourself for her, Alexandra. Or I finish teaching her what happens when someone touches what’s mine.
Unknown: You have 24 hours until she dies.
I make it halfway down the hall before another message stops me.
Unknown: You have until dawn now. Old Mason Ridge maintenance building. Service road. No phone. No Ryder. No police. Every minute you’re late is one she feels.
There’s a video beneath it. I press play because I need everything Alex saw, even if every instinct in me is screaming to get outside and start driving.
Mrs. Vance appears in the same chair with her mouth uncovered, looking furious enough to start another war despite the bruising beginning to show around one side of her face.
Preston says Alex’s name from somewhere off camera.
Mrs. Vance turns her head toward him and spits before the video ends.
I stare at the black screen for a second after it stops.
Alex knew about this while she was downstairs with all of us.
She knew when she told her mother she needed rest. She knew when she hugged Josh goodbye. She knew when she took my hands and let me help her upstairs. She knew when she stood in front of me barely able to keep her balance and told me she almost died before she could say something important.
I love you, Ryder.
The memory doesn’t feel the same anymore.
It was true. I know it was true. That almost makes it worse, because she wasn’t finally saying the words because the fire had scared the last of the hesitation out of her. She was saying them because she had already decided she was going to leave me.
I turn toward the bedroom again and see the empty side of the bed, her clothes gone from the floor, her phone deliberately placed where my hand would find it when I woke.
She didn’t forget it.
She left evidence.
By the time I get downstairs, I have jeans on and nothing else.
I nearly miss the bottom step because I’m reading the security tablet before both feet reach the floor.
All of the alarms are active. The system itself is still armed.
No footage has been deleted, no logs cleared, and she didn’t touch the front cameras at all.
She just turned off the notifications so she could go.
My chest hurts when I understand why.
Alex didn’t try to disappear.
She made sure she could leave before I woke up, and then she made sure I could reconstruct exactly how she did it.
The garage feed gives me the timestamp, and my eyes go immediately to the pale morning light pushing through the windows.
Dawn is already here. Whatever time Preston gave her has run out, which means Alex isn’t still on her way to Mason Ridge.
She should already be there, alone with him, while I was asleep upstairs believing she was safe beside me.
I pull up the feed just to make sure I’m not crazy.
Alex appears in the corner of the garage wearing my hoodie, one hand against the wall while she bends to put on her shoes.
She stops once and closes her eyes, standing there long enough that I almost reach toward the screen like I can steady her from here.
Then she forces herself upright, takes the spare key from her pocket, and gets into my truck.
She never once looks at the camera.
She doesn’t have to.
I watch her reverse out of the garage without headlights, wait until she clears the driveway, and disappear from view.
My phone is already in my hand when the footage loops back to an empty garage.
Remy answers on the second ring with none of the sleepiness a normal person should have at this hour. “Ryder?”
“Preston has Mrs. Vance, and Alex went to him.”
There’s movement on his end before I finish the sentence. I hear a drawer open, then a door, followed by the unmistakable sound of someone pulling on clothes while walking.
“Tell me where.”
“Old Mason Ridge maintenance building. Service road. She had until dawn.” I put him on speaker and go back to the messages while I drag a shirt over my head.
“It’s already morning, Remy. Whatever deadline he gave her is gone.
He told her no phone, no police, no me. She left her phone open beside me and took my truck. ”
Remy doesn’t waste time asking why she would do it. He has spent enough time around Alex now to understand exactly why Mrs. Vance would get her through every defense the rest of us built. I hear movement on his end before he asks, “How long has she been gone?”
I give him the timestamp from the garage footage, and the silence that follows lasts just long enough to tell me he’s doing the same calculation I already did.
She should already be there.
“Don’t leave yet.”
“I’m already leaving.”
“Then stop.”
My hand freezes on the deadbolt.
Remy keeps moving on the other end of the call, voice clipped but controlled.
“You have a location. That means we get one chance to approach without telling Preston we’re coming.
If you barrel straight down the service road in whatever vehicle you find first, he sees you before you see him, and Alex pays for it. ”
Every part of me wants to ignore him. The urge is so strong that my hand closes around the lock anyway, but I don’t turn it.
“What if he moves her?”
“Then we adjust, but you don’t hand him another hostage because you’re scared.”
I close my eyes.
He’s right, and I hate him for it.
“Josh needs to know.”
“He will. I’m calling Logan and Carter too. Call Josh yourself. You’re the one he’ll want to hear it from.”
Remy hangs up before I can argue about how many people he intends to drag into this.
Josh answers before the first ring finishes.
“What happened?”
There’s no hello. He knows from the time alone that this isn’t a social call, and the strain in his voice tells me he was probably barely asleep after leaving here.
“Alex is gone.” I rip off the bandaid.
Silence fills the line while I cross to the security tablet again and pull up the garage footage.
“What do you mean, gone?”
“Preston took Mrs. Vance. He sent Alex a trade demand while all of us were here. She hid it from us. She waited until I fell asleep, snoozed the security alerts, took my truck, and went to Mason Ridge.”
A heavy sound comes through the phone, like Josh has hit a wall or a counter with the heel of his hand. Nia says something in the background that I can’t make out.
“I knew she was hiding something.” His voice drops until it barely sounds like him. “When we left, I knew something was wrong. I fucking knew it.”
“So did I.”
“You stayed with her, though.”
“I fell asleep.”
The words scrape on the way out because I can still feel her body against mine and remember the way she held on to me. I had interpreted every touch as relief after nearly dying. Now I understand why she wouldn’t let go.
She was saying goodbye.
Josh breathes hard once, then I hear fabric and keys moving on his end. “I’m coming.”
“Bring Casey if he’s at the station or nearby. Mason Ridge has been part of Alex’s redevelopment work, and I want somebody there who understands what the building can do to us if Preston decides fire is still his favorite weapon.”
“I’ll get him.”
The call ends.
I stand in the middle of my kitchen with Alex’s phone on one side of me and the security tablet on the other, and for the first time since waking, I let myself look at the whole thing instead of one task at a time.
She left Preston’s messages open, and the security records intact. She didn’t take her car, either. Alex was smart and took a truck that everyone in town would recognize immediately as mine.
The woman who has spent weeks digging through public records, maintenance complaints, fire reports, property transfers, and every scrap of evidence she could get her hands on has done the same thing with her own disappearance.
She didn’t do that because she expected me to wake up and save her.
She did it because she expects Preston to kill her, and she wants us to prove he did it afterward.
My stomach turns hard enough that I brace both palms against the counter until the nausea passes.
The last thing she said before falling asleep was that she loved me.
She thought she was giving me something to keep after she was dead.
Headlights hit the front windows less than ten minutes later. Josh’s truck comes up the driveway too fast and stops crooked beside the house. The passenger door opens before the engine dies, and Casey steps out while Josh is still reaching for the keys.
They don’t bother knocking.
Josh comes through the door with one boot unlaced and his station sweatshirt thrown over whatever he slept in.
Casey is dressed like he either never made it home or got called out of bed and stopped caring halfway through pulling himself together.
Neither of them asks where Alex is. They both see her phone sitting in the middle of the table, Preston’s photograph filling the screen, and understand enough.
Josh walks toward it and stops before touching anything.
His eyes move over Mrs. Vance, the broken cane, the straps, then the demand underneath. He reads the location twice before his gaze lifts to me.
“She was looking at this while we were standing right there.”
I nod.
His face twists, but he doesn’t give whatever he is feeling enough room to become words. Instead, he yanks one of the dining chairs away from the table and shoves it toward the wall so hard the legs scrape across the floor.
Casey takes the chair Josh just cleared and drops into it in front of the tablet. “Show me her exit.”
I replay the garage footage.
Josh makes it as far as Alex leaning against the wall to put on her shoes before he turns away. He puts both hands on the back of his neck and walks toward the living room window, where he stands with his back to us and stares out into the dark.
Casey watches the entire thing.
When the truck disappears, he checks the timestamp and rewinds to the few minutes before Alex enters the garage. Then he moves through the other feeds, testing what she snoozed and what she left running.
“She didn’t disable anything,” he says.
“I know.”
“She could have.”
That makes Josh turn around.
Casey taps the screen, showing us the alert history.
“She knew this system. She helped you set up extra cameras. If she wanted hours before you noticed, she could’ve shut enough down to make us work for it.
A thirty-minute snooze gives her enough time to clear the driveway and make it there. That’s it.”
“She wanted us to follow,” Josh says.
I look at Alex’s phone.
“She wanted us to find her and prove he did it, not save her.”