Chapter 51 Theo
Beckett's phone chimes, and I watch his face before he looks at the screen.
Beckett doesn't give much away. That's the thing most people don't understand about him — they see the size, the quiet, and they think slow, but he is controlled. But this is different.
His eyes meet mine, and I know something’s wrong.
He hands me the phone.
There’s Adela on a bed, tied up with a blindfold. The two-second clip plays on a loop. I don’t know this room. It’s unfamiliar. It’s not the Ravenshaw house, not his bedroom, not her bedroom, not her dorm.
I turn the sound up. Fuck. The sound she makes in those two seconds is completely involuntary and completely real. Cody knew, and he’s sending this to Beckett’s phone tonight like he’s sliding a business card under a door.
Here. I want you to know who she belongs to. Look at what I do with what's mine.
I set the phone down on the coffee table, silencing that sound.
The hockey game plays on behind us, but I stare past it.
"Why the fuck would he send that to me?" Beckett doesn't phrase it like a question. He phrases it like a man trying to make sense of Cody’s nonsense. Anything Cody does has never made sense to me. The man operates out of spite. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for me, but it’s clear he has his priorities straight, which means he must not know about Adela and me yet.
"It's a warning."
Beckett grabs his phone and watches the video again.
"He saw you leaving, so he took her, and now he’s showing you who she belongs to."
"Does he know about you?"
I'm quiet.
This is the question of the hour. What Cody knows versus what Cody suspects versus what Cody can prove.
What Nessa might have said — not maliciously, Nessa doesn't do malicious, but Nessa talks, and Cody listens.
Cody has always been better at listening than people give him credit for.
What Serena has given him. What the library connection looks like from Cody's angle when you don't have the full picture, when you only have fragments, and you're working backward from them.
"I doubt it," I say. "But he's close."
Beckett pulls up her contact and calls it.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Do you think maybe he left her tied up somewhere?”
We both listened to it go straight to voicemail.
I don't reach for my own phone. I look at the hockey game and let the anger sit where it wants to sit, which is low and heavy and very, very still. Not the kind that needs to move. Not the explosive kind that burns up its own fuel before it can be useful. The kind that waits.
"He probably has her phone," Beckett says.
We look at each other.
“I shouldn’t have called.” He stares at the phone now like he’s waiting for her to call back.
"He's made his first move," I say.
"Because she told him she wanted to break up." Beckett exhales.
I look at him. “She told you that, but it doesn’t mean she did it right then and there.”
“I think she did,” he says.
I look at the phone on the table.
So the sequence is this: Adela decides this afternoon that she's done.
Adela tells Beckett — which means some part of her is already building the bridge toward what comes after Cody, already testing the weight of it.
And then tonight, within hours, Cody takes her somewhere and ties her up and films her.
He sends two seconds of it to the person Cody saw with his own eyes leaving Elm Hall.
The timing is not a coincidence.
The timing is a message about what happens when she tries to leave.
I dial Silas. He doesn’t answer.
"Silas isn't answering either," I say.
This lands differently than the other things. I watch the shift move through Beckett.
"You think Silas—"
"I think Silas has been running his own game this entire time," I say. "And I think I underestimated how long he's been doing it."
I pick up my phone. Nothing. The screen is clean and bright, and tells me nothing.
“He’s not a team player, just like Crick always says.”
"Yeah."
We sit in silence, unsure of our next move. My phone is face down on the counter when it starts to ring.
We both look at it.
“Think it’s him?” Beckett asks.
I shrug. “Fuck.”
I pick up my phone, and it’s my mom calling. I answer before the third ring.
"Theo." She’s out of breath. "Nessa just left. She wouldn't tell me where she was going. And she had that look."
I know that look.
I grew up watching it move across Nessa's face when something didn’t go her way.
Our father always joked that she was a bit too sensitive for this world, but he spoiled her anyway.
My mother sat back and let it happen, thinking it would make Nessa happy.
The poor psychologist ruined her own daughter.
"I'll find her," I say, already walking out the door. Beckett is right behind me.
We're in the car in under two minutes.
Neither of us speaks as I drive.
Nessa answers on the last ring.
I hear her breathing first. I can tell she’s crying.
"Come back home," I say. "We can talk."
"You don't understand." Her voice breaks on the last word, and she lets it, which tells me she's past the point of holding it together. Nessa cries clean when she's sad. She cries ugly when she's angry. This is somewhere in between, which is the version that worries me most.
"You don't have to stay," I say. "Just come back and pick me up. We'll talk."
She doesn't respond.
The line stays open. I can hear road noise. I let the silence sit for one beat, and then I say, "The talk, Nessa. I got you."
A long pause.
"Okay," she mutters.
By the time I reach my parents’ house, she pulls in two minutes after. My mom stands outside, looking at Nessa’s car. I put my hand out and say, “I got this, mom.”
Beckett and I get in, and Nessa pulls away from the curb before the doors are fully shut. She's driving with one hand. The other is moving to her face every few seconds, wiping at her cheeks with the back of her hands like she's angry at herself for the tears.
I don't say anything yet. I watch the road and let her drive. She's not heading toward Cody's. As far as I can tell, she's not heading anywhere specific.
"What happened?" I ask.
She glances in the rearview mirror. Her eyes find Beckett and stay there for a second.
"Beckett's got you, too," I say. "He's on our side."
She looks at the road. A beat passes.
"Silas?" she asks.
I stare at her.
She's asking what the roster looks like before she decides what to put down.
"It's best if we keep him out of it," I say.
She nods once.
"What happened?" I ask again. "Why are you crying like this?"
She's quiet for long enough that I think she might not answer.
"Cody… he told me…"
She doesn’t finish her sentence, and as the trees pass by, I don’t think she will.
"What did he tell you?"
She looks at me and wipes her face.
"That he never gave a fuck about me." She says it flat. "That it was always to get back at you."
I don't say anything.
"The whole time." She laughs, but it's not a laugh. It's the sound that comes out when the alternative is something worse. "The whole time it was about you."
The tears are gone. That knowledge has hollowed her out, even when I told her nearly every day that he was using her.
Beckett leans forward from the back seat and holds out his phone.
"Do you know where this place is?" He holds the screen up so she can see it.
Her eyes go to the image and flare open. Not the flinch of someone seeing something upsetting. The recognition of someone who knows exactly what they're looking at.
"When was that?" she says.
"Tonight," Beckett says. "Do you know where it is?"
The sound she makes is high and sharp, filling the car. Then she presses down on the accelerator, and the car accelerates.
I put my hand on the dashboard to catch myself. "Nessa," I warn, looking forward at the open road.
She's gripping the wheel with both hands now, knuckles pale, jaw tight, eyes wet again but differently — not the sad kind, the furious kind, the kind that has somewhere to go.
"Nessa. Do you know where it is?"
"We think he left her there," Beckett says from the back. "Tied up. We need to know if you recognize it."
"What is so special about her?" She's not asking either of us. She's asking the windshield, the road, the dark. "What is so special about her that even you—"
"Nessa—"
"Why does everyone want her so badly?" Her voice cracks wide open. "Cody. You. What does she have that—"
"If you know where that place is—"
She spins the wheel.
The car whips through a full 180, tires grabbing, then sliding, then grabbing again, and for one second, the headlights are pointing back the way we came.
I have my hand braced against the dash, and Beckett has gone completely silent in the back seat.
Then she straightens it out and accelerates again, going the other direction now, going somewhere specific, and neither of us says a word.
She's crying again, but she doesn’t speak until we’re ten minutes down another road.
“I saw you with her,” she says.
“What are you talking about?”
“You took her to Gas Works Park, laid out a blanket, and read a book to her.”
I still. “Did you follow me?”
“I followed her.” She glares at me. “So tell me why my boyfriend and my brother are so fucking obsessed with her? What’s so special about her, Theo?”
I glance at Beckett in the mirror. He looks back at me.
She knows where Adela is.
She's already taking us there.
We just handed the wolf the location of the lamb.