Chapter 5
five
Zach
The apartment doesn’t feel right in a way that isn’t obvious at first, not empty, not quiet in any way that should stand out, but wrong somewhere underneath it, like something essential has been pulled out of the space and everything else is still trying to exist around the absence it left behind.
The light only makes it worse.
It’s late afternoon, the same heavy stretch of gold coming through the windows at the exact angle it did yesterday, catching across the floor, along the edge of the table, across the back of the couch in a way that feels too familiar, too precise, like the day has circled back to the same point and refused to move past it.
It’s almost the same time.
And she’s still gone.
Jackson has taken over the table completely, Lia’s laptop open in front of him, replaying footage, cross-checking timestamps, dragging windows across the screen and opening new ones like the answer is buried somewhere inside the repetition if he just doesn’t stop long enough for it to disappear.
He hasn’t looked up in a while.
Across the room, Elijah stands with Christian and Lucian, the three of them speaking in low, controlled tones that don’t match the weight of what they’re saying, names and locations and pressure points being laid out like something methodical is being built out of all of this.
“…Vegas is still their main base,” Christian is saying, voice even. “But they’ve got enough presence here to move something like this without pulling attention.”
Lucian shifts slightly, arms folded loosely, posture relaxed in a way that feels deliberate rather than natural.
“They wouldn’t do this without structure,” he says. “Not with who she’s connected to.”
Sanctioned. Contained. Keep it quiet.
The rules sit in the space whether anyone repeats them or not.
“I don’t care about their rules,” Elijah says.
“You will,” Lucian replies calmly. “Or you create another problem while you’re still dealing with the first.”
There’s a pause, not long, just enough to register.
“We keep it contained.”
It isn’t agreement. It isn’t compromise. It’s direction.
Christian’s phone buzzes in his hand and he checks it without breaking rhythm.
“You’ve been suspended,” he says, glancing at Elijah. “Effective immediately.”
“I don’t care.”
Of course he doesn’t.
The conversation moves on without slowing, shifting back into logistics, into people, into what can be pulled and what can be broken and how far they can push before it turns into something bigger than this.
I’m not part of that.
Not in the way they are.
I’m at the other end of the table with Lia’s phone in my hand, scrolling through it again, slower now, more deliberate, forcing myself to actually take in what I’m looking at instead of letting it blur past me.
There has to be something here.
Something she saw and ignored.
Something we missed.
Something that doesn’t belong.
The screen fills the second I unlock it, notifications stacked over each other in a way that makes it hard to separate one from the next, messages layered over requests and tags and mentions until it all starts to feel like a single, constant stream rather than individual pieces.
I open one of her social apps and wait half a second longer than I need to as it loads, like I already know what I’m about to see and still don’t want it in front of me.
Then it floods.
Messages from people I don’t recognise, names that don’t mean anything, all of them speaking to her like they know her, like they’ve been given access to something they were never invited into.
“Hey beautiful.”
“Been watching you for a while.”
“Let me take care of you.”
My thumb moves, steady, controlled, keeping the motion even so I don’t sit on any one thing for too long.
It doesn’t ease off.
“You’d look better with someone who knows what they’re doing.”
“I could treat you better.”
“You don’t even know what you need yet.”
My jaw tightens, but I keep going, because stopping means sitting in it, and sitting in it means thinking about how long this has been there, how much of it she just carried without saying anything.
The tone shifts the further down I go, losing whatever surface-level charm it started with and settling into something sharper, something that presses a little harder.
“Why are you ignoring me?”
“I know you’ve seen this.”
“You think you’re better than everyone now?”
My thumb slows without me meaning it to, catching on the shift, on the way it turns.
Then stops.
“I know where you live.”
It doesn’t stand out the way it should.
Not against everything else sitting around it.
It’s just there, buried in the middle of it like it belongs, like it’s no worse than the rest.
I tap into it anyway, more out of instinct than anything else.
The profile is empty.
No photo. No name that means anything. No detail that gives me something to work with.
Nothing.
I stare at it for a second, then back out, scrolling further, forcing myself to keep moving, to keep looking.
There are more like it.
Not always direct.
Some buried in comments.
Some in requests.
Some spaced out across days, weeks, threaded between everything else so they disappear if you don’t look closely enough.
All of it sitting there like background noise she just...lived with.
“She was dealing with all of this?” I say, not really directing it at anyone.
Jackson doesn’t look up.
“Yeah.”
Flat.
Like it’s nothing new.
“She didn’t say anything.”
“She wouldn’t,” he replies.
Of course she wouldn’t.
I keep moving.
Messages.
Call history.
Emails.
Everything that should matter is clean.
Everything that doesn’t help is where the noise is.
I go back to the social messages again, slower this time, forcing my eyes to actually track what I’m reading, to catch usernames, timing, repetition.
Something starts to repeat.
Not close together.
Spread out just enough that it would disappear if you weren’t looking for it.
Same name.
Different tone each time.
Casual at first.
Then sharper.
Then something that sits wrong in a way I can’t ignore.
I tap into it.
“Hey.”
“Did you get my last message?”
“You’re really going to ignore me?”
There’s a gap between each one.
Then...
“I saw you last week.”
My hand stills against the phone.
Something in my chest tightens, slow and deliberate, like something pulling inward rather than snapping.
I scroll.
“I know your schedule.”
Another gap.
Then nothing.
No escalation.
No follow-up.
Just silence.
I sit there with it longer than I should, staring at the space where something should have continued and didn’t, at the way it just stops like it was waiting for something else to happen next.
The apartment smells like her.
I didn’t notice it at first.
Or maybe I did and ignored it.
But it’s there now, sitting in the back of my throat, in the air, in the couch, in everything around me in a way that makes the space feel closer than it should.
Grounding.
And not.
Because she’s not here.
Because this is where she should be.
Something shifts in my chest, not sharp, not sudden, just wrong in a way that doesn’t settle, like my body is trying to correct for something that isn’t there anymore.
I drag in a breath, but it doesn’t sit right, too shallow, too tight, like it doesn’t go far enough to actually do anything.
Across the room, Elijah’s voice cuts through again, low and controlled.
“…I want everyone connected to them.”
“You’ll get them,” Christian replies.
Jackson mutters something under his breath, still working, still moving.
Still doing something.
I don’t look up.
I stay with the phone, with the messages, with the name that repeats just enough to matter, because I don’t know how to stand over there with them, don’t know how to move through this the way they do without something solid to anchor to.
And she, she was that.
The thing that steadied everything out without me thinking about it.
The thing that kept me level.
Now there’s nothing there.
Just this.
Just the noise.
Just the space where she should be.
My grip tightens around the phone before I force it to loosen again, forcing myself to stay with it, to keep moving, to keep reading, because if I stop, if I let myself sit in that space for even a second too long, I don’t know where I go from there.
So I don’t stop.
I keep scrolling.
I keep looking.
Because it’s the only thing I can hold onto right now and I’m not ready to let everything else slip.