Chapter 14
fourteen
Jackson
The apartment feels different now.
Not loud, not chaotic, not like it did when everything first hit and no one knew where to put the anger or the fear or the fact that she was just… gone.
Now it’s quieter.
Controlled.
And somehow worse for it.
Zach is in her bed.
That’s the thing that keeps dragging my attention back every few minutes whether I want it to or not.
The door is half open, and every time I look down the hallway I can see enough to know he hasn’t moved much since we got him in there.
He’s sprawled across the mattress like he dropped and never got back up, one arm across the sheets, his breathing slow and uneven in a way that still makes something in my chest tighten every time I register it.
He nearly didn’t wake up.
That thought lands harder than I expect every time it comes back around.
I get it.
I do.
I understand exactly why he did it.
That doesn’t mean I’m not still pissed off about it.
Not when she’s still out there.
Not when we’re running out of time and he just… checked out.
My jaw tightens as I drag my focus back to the table, to the laptop sitting open in front of me, to the video paused on the screen.
I’ve watched it too many times.
I know exactly how it plays out.
Exactly how long it takes for her to lift her head, for the fear to settle into her expression, for his hand to come into frame and touch her like he owns her.
It still makes me feel sick every time.
I zoom in again, adjusting the frame, trying to pull something new out of it, anything that I might have missed the first ten times I went through it.
There has to be something here.
There has to be.
“Anything?”
Christian’s voice pulls me just enough out of it to answer without looking away from the screen.
“Not yet,” I say. “There’s something in this, I just haven’t found it.”
Lucian is standing beside him at the counter, both of them going through Zach’s phone, scrolling through messages, call logs, anything that might connect back to the dealer, to Vargas, to something we can actually use.
Neither of them looks convinced by what I said.
They don’t dismiss it either.
Christian’s phone buzzes in his hand.
The sound cuts through the room sharp enough that all of us look up at the same time.
He checks it.
His expression shifts just enough that I know it’s something.
“We’ve got a hit on the plate,” he says.
I sit up straighter without thinking.
“What is it?”
He glances at Lucian briefly, then back at the screen.
“The dealer is a known associate of Vargas.”
For a second, the room just… holds.
Then Elijah moves.
Fast.
“You’re telling me he went to someone tied to Vargas?” he says, his voice low but sharp enough to cut. “After everything?”
“That’s not what that means,” I cut in immediately, pushing up from the chair. “We don’t know that. He didn’t know that.”
Elijah turns on me.
“You don’t know what he knew.”
“And you don’t know that he did,” I fire back. “The guy clearly had his own issues. We’ve all seen that. He’s not even awake to defend himself right now, so maybe don’t decide he’s the problem before we actually know what happened.”
The tension spikes hard, the kind that makes everything feel like it’s one wrong word away from turning physical.
Elijah holds my gaze for a second, something dangerous sitting just under the surface.
Then, slowly, he exhales and steps back.
Not calm.
Not even close.
But contained enough that he doesn’t push it further.
Lucian steps in before it can build again.
“This might actually work in our favour,” he says, his tone steady, controlled in a way that cuts through the edge in the room. “If the dealer is connected, then we don’t need to find the connection. We let it come to us.”
Elijah looks at him.
“What are you suggesting?”
“We set the meeting again,” Lucian says. “When Zach wakes up, we use him. The dealer expects him to come back for more. We let that happen, and we take him when he shows.”
Christian nods slightly.
“It’s clean. It gives us a direct line in.”
Elijah’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t argue it.
“What about your person inside?” he asks instead.
Christian doesn’t hesitate.
“I haven’t heard anything yet,” he says. “But I trust them.”
Elijah studies him for a second.
“You sure about that?”
A faint smirk pulls at Christian’s mouth.
“The Blackbird has never let the Bellandi’s down.”
Lucian goes still.
It’s subtle, the kind of shift most people wouldn’t notice, but I catch it anyway. Something in the room changes when that name lands.
“You asked the Blackbird to go into Vargas territory?” Lucian says, and this time there’s something sharper underneath it.
Christian doesn’t back down.
“I needed a new angle.”
There’s a pause after that.
Not confusion.
Not hesitation.
Something else.
Like a line just got crossed and everyone here knows it.
I look between them.
“Who the hell is the Blackbird?”
Christian’s gaze flicks to me, weighing how much to say, and then settles into something neutral again.
“Someone you don’t ask questions about,” he says. “And someone we can trust.”
That doesn’t answer anything.
If anything, it makes it worse.
I lean back slightly, letting it sit, filing it away for later because right now I’ve got bigger problems.
Like the fact that it’s been almost three days.
Three days since she was taken.
Three days and we still don’t have her.
My stomach twists as I drag my focus back to the screen, back to the video, back to her face frozen mid-frame.
There’s something here.
There has to be.
I just can’t see it yet.
The room settles again after that, not silent but close to it, everyone moving through their own tasks without speaking, waiting on things we can’t speed up.
Waiting for Zach to wake up.
Waiting for the dealer to make a move.
Waiting for something to break.
My eyes drift toward the hallway again without meaning to, toward her room, toward where Zach is still out cold in her bed, and something tightens in my chest.
He broke.
That’s the truth of it.
He hit a point where he couldn’t hold it anymore and he broke.
I get it. I just don’t have the option of doing the same. Not right now. Not when she’s still out there.
I look back at the screen.
Back at her.
Back at that moment.
Why hasn’t he sent anything else?
That thought settles in slowly.
He wanted us to see that video.
He wanted the reaction.
So where’s the next one?
I don’t like it. I don’t like the silence. I don’t like what it might mean.
Christian’s phone buzzes again. The sound cuts through everything. We all look at him. He checks it.
And this time, his expression shifts properly.
Grim.
“It’s the Blackbird,” he says.
The room stills.
“What do they say?” Elijah asks.
Christian reads it quickly, then looks up.
“Security is tight,” he says. “But they’re close to pulling one of the enforcers out.”
A pause.
“They want another day.”
Another day.
The words land heavy in the space between us.
No one speaks.
Because we’re all thinking the same thing.
We don’t know if she has another day.