Chapter 16
sixteen
Elijah
Zach comes back to himself in pieces, the change showing first in his breathing before it reaches his eyes.
I’m already in the doorway when it happens, watching the small, uneven pull of his chest settle into something steadier, watching the way his fingers twitch against the sheets like his body is checking its own weight again.
He opens his eyes and finds the ceiling, then the room, then me.
Recognition lands.
Not confusion, not panic, recognition, and with it the understanding of what he did.
I don’t give him time to sit in it.
“The dealer works for Vargas.”
The words cross the room without force and land anyway.
“You went to him.”
He pushes himself up too quickly, the movement betraying him as his balance lags a fraction behind, his hand catching against the mattress to hold himself there.
“I didn’t know,” he says, and there’s no delay in it, no attempt to shape it into something better. “I didn’t know.”
I take another step into the room, the door left open behind me, the rest of them just out of sight but not out of reach.
“You didn’t think to question it,” I reply. “You didn’t think to look at who you were dealing with while she’s out there—”
“I didn’t know,” he repeats, louder now, something in it splintering. “I’ve been seeing him since I got picked up by the expansion team. It wasn’t new.”
The answer isn’t an excuse, and it doesn’t soften anything, but it settles into place with a kind of clarity that wasn’t there before.
“My hip,” he continues, dragging a hand over his face as he steadies himself. “That’s where it started. The painkillers. I kept taking them longer than I should have and then I just… didn’t stop.”
He doesn’t look away when he says it.
“I couldn’t play without them,” he adds. “Then I couldn’t function without them.”
The room feels smaller than it should, like the walls have shifted inward while we weren’t paying attention.
“I thought I had it under control,” he says, and there’s a brief, humorless edge to it that doesn’t last. “Until Lia.”
Her name changes the space.
“She made it quiet,” he says, and his voice drops, not softer but lower, like he’s speaking around something lodged in his throat. “I didn’t need them when I had her.”
I hold his gaze.
“And then she was gone,” he finishes. “And I didn’t know what to do with it anymore.”
There’s no one here who needs that explained.
“They started leaning on me,” he goes on, the words coming faster now that he’s committed to them. “Told me to throw games or they’d expose everything. The pills, the prescriptions, all of it.”
From somewhere behind me, Jackson exhales in a way that sounds like recognition landing hard.
“That’s why Chicago,” he says. “Those goals.”
Zach nods once.
“I thought if I got clean, they’d lose leverage,” he says. “I thought if I cut it off, it would stop.”
It didn’t.
It led him straight back to them.
I don’t say it out loud. I don’t need to.
Lucian steps forward, his presence settling into the space between us before anything can tip.
“He fucked up,” he says, not looking at me when he says it. “That doesn’t make him your enemy.”
I don’t move.
“It gives us a line,” he adds. “So we use it.”
There’s a moment where it could go either way.
Then I let it go.
Not because I agree.
Because I don’t have the luxury of wasting anything that might get me to her.
“Message him,” Lucian says to Zach. “Set it again. We take him when he shows.”
Zach reaches for his phone. His hands aren’t steady, but they don’t need to be for this.
“I can do that.”
He types.
We wait.
The silence fills in around us, not empty but dense, the kind that makes the smallest sound feel out of place.
His phone buzzes.
He reads, then looks up.
“Already?” he says, reading it out as much for us as for himself. “You just had a supply.”
Zach exhales and types back.
“I need more,” he says under his breath as he sends it. “I used most of them.”
Another pause.
Shorter.
His phone buzzes again.
“Tonight.”
He looks up, something uneasy settling into his expression.
“He’s suspicious.”
“He should be,” Lucian says. “He’ll still come.”
I don’t respond.
I can feel the time sitting in the room with us, heavy enough that it doesn’t need to be named.
Three days.
Three days since she was taken.
Three days without her.
Her phone goes off.
The sound cuts through everything with a clean edge.
Jackson is closest. He picks it up and whatever he sees lands before he speaks.
“Fuck.”
“Show me.”
He hesitates just long enough to register, then turns the screen toward me.
The video starts.
She’s lying on the bed.
Not trying to sit up.
Not moving properly.
Just there, like her body has weight she can’t lift.
Her hair is tangled, falling across her face in places she hasn’t pushed it away from. Her eyes open and close without fully focusing, the movement lagging behind itself, like the signal isn’t reaching her cleanly.
She’s in her underwear.
The room around her is unfamiliar.
And then the camera moves closer.
My attention drops with it.
To her collarbone.
To the tattoo.
The words are still legible.
Property of Jackson.
The skin around them isn’t.
The cuts run across it at angles that don’t match anything deliberate, not a clean removal but something done in anger, the blade dragged through the same place more than once, the edges torn where it caught, where it didn’t slide cleanly.
Blood sits along the lines, fresh enough that it hasn’t darkened.
The camera lingers.
It takes its time.
It moves across her like it has nothing pressing it to hurry, pausing where the damage is worst, where her body doesn’t respond, where her head turns just enough to show she’s there without being able to do anything about it.
Behind me, Zach swears, the sound catching on the way out.
Lucian doesn’t speak.
Christian doesn’t either.
I watch the whole thing.
I take in every second of it.
The way she tries to form words that don’t come out right.
The way her body doesn’t follow through when she tries to move.
The way he stays just out of frame, present without being seen.
The video ends.
The message appears beneath it.
Say goodbye. She is no longer yours. Now she is completely mine.
I look at the words long enough for them to settle into place.
Then I hand the phone back to Jackson.
Carefully.
“We take the dealer,” I say.
The words come out level.
They don’t match what’s sitting underneath my skin.
“I’ll pull them apart,” I add, and this time I don’t look at anyone when I say it. “One by one, if that’s what it takes.”
There’s no argument. No attempt to redirect it.
Because at this point, it isn’t a threat.
I’m not interested in stopping.