42
Lila
The apartment felt wrong the second Jackson walked out.
Too quiet where Jade should have been, too crowded everywhere else.
Fear had taken up space in every room, sitting between people, clinging to the walls, turning ordinary sounds into something sharp.
I stood staring at the closed door for a second with one hand still half lifted, like some part of me thought I could call Jackson back and keep him from disappearing into the same night that had swallowed our daughter.
Then my knees started shaking, and I sat.
At some point in the chaos, I had gone into Jade’s room for the phone she’d left behind and pulled Jackson’s old high school hoodie from the back of my closet.
I didn’t remember deciding to put it on.
The faded Wicker Falls colors were cracked with age, the cuffs worn soft from years I had refused to throw it away, and somehow wrapping myself in something that had once belonged to the boy I loved made breathing a little easier.
Jade’s phone rested heavy in the front pocket. I kept one hand around it.
Across the room, Matty paced near the window.
Evan had retreated to the kitchen, where he was taking his anger out on the kettle, and Cage stayed folded over in the dining chair with both hands around his own phone.
He stared at the screen without blinking, like enough concentration might make Jade’s name appear.
Looking at him hurt.
He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t talking. He just looked too young to be carrying that much guilt inside his body.
Matty stopped so abruptly I looked up. “Dad,” he said.
I blinked at him.
He pointed toward me, impatience sharpened by fear. “We need to call Dad. Tell him what happened. He’d be crushed if he found out we kept this from him.” His voice tightened. “He’d want to be here for you.”
I rubbed both hands over my face. “Yeah. You’re right.” Even my own voice sounded far away. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking past...”
Past Jade’s empty room. Past her phone sitting against my stomach with no daughter attached to it.
Matty crossed the room and bent over me before I could finish. His arms closed around my shoulders, and for one brief second he held me the way he had when we were kids and whatever hurt me had still been small enough for my brother to fix.
“I know,” he said quietly. “I know.”
Then he straightened and moved toward the window again, already calling Dad.
I watched Matty’s face change when our father answered. He didn’t waste time trying to soften anything. There was no version of this that could be made gentle.
“Dad, listen to me,” he said, low and clipped.
“Lila came home and found Jade missing. Cage was outside the apartment door because Jade was supposed to meet him and didn’t show.
He called her, texted her, got no answer, came here, and could hear her phone ringing inside.
Lila got here, let him in, and Jade wasn’t in the apartment. Her phone was. She wasn’t.”
Dad’s voice exploded loudly enough through the phone that even I could hear it from across the room.
Matty pulled it away from his ear. “Dad, yelling isn’t helping. We’re at Lila’s. Police are on the way.”
More shouting followed. Cage flinched without looking up.
Matty’s jaw tightened. “Yes. Yes, I said police. No, I don’t know anything else yet. Just get here.”
He listened another few seconds before ending the call. Instead of immediately moving again, he stared at the phone.
“He’s already half way here.”
Something about the way he said it made me sit straighter. “What?”
“He said he was coming out to visit you and Jade tonight, so he was already halfway here.” Matty’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Did you know he was coming?”
I shook my head. “No. We didn’t have plans.”
His gaze held mine for a beat.
Then someone knocked.
Matty answered with his shoulders already squared, the brother disappearing beneath the detective as soon as he saw the two men outside.
One was older, his face weathered and tired around the eyes.
The other looked younger and sharper, notebook already in hand.
Both wore the kind of careful expressions people used around families who might shatter if handled too roughly.
They stepped inside, and I hated them for one irrational second because they had arrived without Jade.
Then I answered everything they asked.
Matty made the introductions and explained the facts in the clean, ordered way I couldn’t. Jade had no missing clothes. No packed bag. Her phone was still here. She had plans with Cage and never arrived. Every detail became evidence once it left his mouth.
The older detective asked when I had last seen her, what her mood had been like, whether we’d argued, whether anything had changed recently.
I told him about school and how much happier she had seemed since moving to Bay of Saints.
I told him about finding Cage frantic in the hallway, hearing Jade’s phone ringing through the locked door, then walking into her bedroom and seeing it lying there while she was gone.
Each answer made the same fact more real.
My daughter had vanished from the middle of an ordinary day.
When they turned to Cage, he sat straighter even though his hands still shook.
“Was she upset about anything?” the younger detective asked him.
Cage swallowed hard. “She was a little distracted lately. That’s all. Not upset exactly. Just... somewhere else in her head sometimes.” His voice roughened. “But she was supposed to meet me. She wouldn’t have just left me sittin’ there wondering. That’s not her.”
My hand tightened around Jade’s phone inside the hoodie.
Distracted.
I knew he was right. I had noticed it too. Asked her if she was okay. Let myself accept the answer when she said she was.
Evan and Matty answered what they could, and the detectives wrote everything down. They were beginning to explain the next steps, cameras, canvassing the building, patrol alerts, when another knock sounded.
Matty opened the door.
Dad came through it carrying anger like he needed something solid enough to stand on.
“It’s that biker father of hers,” he snapped before the door had fully closed behind him. “I told you he was dangerous to both of you. I told you he’d get one of you in trouble.”
Both detectives stopped.
The older one turned toward me. “Biker father?”
I closed my eyes for a second. I wanted to scream. Instead, I sat straighter and forced my voice steady. “My father has a prejudice against my daughter’s father. His name is Jackson Hayes. He’s with the Saints of Retribution MC here in Bay of Saints. He recently returned to her life.”
The detectives looked at Dad.
“Sir,” the older one said carefully, “we’ve never had issues with that club. They’ve actually done quite a bit for this city.” He glanced briefly at his partner. “Including helping fund and build the new ER.”
Dad’s face flushed darker.
“I’m telling you,” he said, voice rising, “bikers are corrupt. And it is his corrupt dealings that led to her kidnapping.”
The younger detective frowned. “Do you know for a fact she’s been kidnapped?”
Dad hesitated. Barely.
“Of course she was kidnapped.”
“As of right now,” the detective said, “we know she is missing. We have no ransom demand. No signs of forced entry. Her room is intact. The apartment wasn’t broken into. What exactly makes you believe this is a kidnapping?”
Dad’s mouth worked before the answer came. “I know because everything was fine before her father showed up.”
Something in me snapped taut.
I crossed the room before I had fully decided to move. “Dad.” He turned toward me, but I didn’t give him time to build another argument. “You need to let the detectives do their jobs so they can find Jade. Stop with your nonsense.”
He started to sputter, and I turned away from him.
“I’m sorry. My father doesn’t like my daughter’s father and blames everything down to if she sneezes on him.
Please just focus on finding her as quickly as you can.
” My throat tightened, forcing me to pause before the last part.
“Her father and his club are out searching the streets for her now too.”
The detectives’ expressions softened.
“We’ll do everything we can,” the older one said.
He handed me his card while his partner looked at Matty. “We’ll keep you in the loop, Detective.”
Matty nodded once. “Appreciate the courtesy.”
The door shut behind them. Dad drew in a breath.
I couldn’t hear another word from him.
“I need a minute.”
Everybody looked at me.
I wrapped my arms around myself and backed toward the hallway. “I have a headache,” I lied. “I just... I need to sit alone with her things for a little while.”
Nobody tried to stop me.
Jade’s room smelled like her.
The second I shut the door, whatever had been keeping me upright gave way. I sank onto her bed and buried my face in her pillow. Shampoo, lotion, something faintly sweet she had sprayed in the room that morning. Ordinary traces of my daughter everywhere except where she was supposed to be.
My body shook against the mattress.
I pressed my face harder into the pillow to muffle the sound because the second I let myself really cry, I was afraid I would never stop. Some ugly, animal part of me kept insisting I had to stay functional for when she came home.
When.
I held onto that word until it hurt.
Time stopped behaving normally. The room darkened while voices moved somewhere beyond the closed door, muffled enough that I couldn’t make out words. Eventually the first wave of tears dried against my skin and another came behind it.
I rolled onto my back and stared at Jade’s ceiling, one hand resting over the phone in my hoodie pocket.
It buzzed.
My whole body went still.
Then I sat up so fast the room tilted.
Jade’s phone.
I pulled it out with both hands.
Unknown Number.
Cold spread through my chest before I had even opened the message. Jade wasn’t allowed to keep a passcode from me. I’d made that rule years ago because kids could mistake secrecy for independence while the world was full of people willing to use both against them.
My thumb slipped once before I got the screen unlocked.
Unknown: If you want your daughter back don’t say shit to anyone and come straight to this address 2704 Mariner Way
For a second, the words stopped making sense.
Then they made too much sense.
My thumbs moved.
Lila: Who is this? Let me talk to my daughter!
The reply came almost immediately.
Unknown: If you don’t want your daughter hurt you’ll do as I say. Take the phone with you and get out of the apartment and get to that address. Your life for your daughter’s life. What’ll it be? If you tell anyone, Jade dies.
My fingers went numb around the phone. I tightened them until I could type.
Lila: Fine! I’ll come, just don’t hurt her!
Unknown: Better hurry!
I stared at the last message, pulse beating in my throat.
Then I scrolled upward.
More texts waited above it.
Sent earlier that afternoon.
The first one made my stomach turn. By the third, I couldn’t breathe right.
Whoever had been messaging Jade knew how to hurt her.
They mocked her, threatened her, dragged me and Jackson into it, pressing against the exact fears a sixteen-year-old girl would hide from her mother because she thought she could handle them herself.
The distraction Cage had noticed.
The way I had kept checking Jade’s face lately because something felt off.
She had been carrying this alone.
And now whoever sent those messages had her.
I got off the bed.
My thoughts crashed together so quickly I could barely separate one from another. Matty would stop me if I walked through the living room. Evan would follow. Dad would call the police before I made it to the elevator. One look at my face and somebody would know something had changed.
And if the person holding Jade saw police, saw Saints, saw anyone...
If you tell anyone, Jade dies.
I went to her desk.
My hands shook so badly that the first pen slipped out of my fingers. I grabbed another, tore a sheet from the nearest notebook, and wrote fast enough that half the letters barely looked like mine.
Someone texted Jade’s phone. They say they have her. They told me to come alone they’ll kill her. I couldn’t tell anyone. I’m going to get my daughter.
I left it in the middle of the desk where nobody could miss it.
Then I looked toward the window.
The fire escape.
Jade had loved it from the day we moved in, insisting it made the apartment feel like something out of a movie. Tonight it was the only way out that didn’t take me past my brother, my father, and the people who loved me enough to stop me.
I eased the window upward.
Every scrape sounded deafening. I froze twice, listening for footsteps in the hall, but nobody came.
Cold night air hit my face when I climbed through.
For one absurd second, I thought about how many times I had warned Jade never to use this thing for sneaking out. Now I was lowering myself onto it with her phone clenched in one hand because someone had offered me the only deal a mother would never refuse.
Her life for mine.
There was nothing to consider.
I pulled the window down behind me and descended as quickly as I dared. Metal vibrated beneath my shoes, the fire escape trembling faintly with every step while my heart tried to beat through my ribs.
My feet hit the ground with fear already burned down to one purpose.
Get to Jade.
I hurried toward my car, keys cutting into my palm. My hands shook so badly I missed the ignition once before forcing the key in.
Hold on, baby.
Mama’s coming.