Chapter 40
JESS
The verdict comes down just before noon.
Guilty.
The word lands like a punch under my ribs—sharp, hollow, echoing.
I swear the air thins and my ears ring. Sabrina’s face flashes behind my eyes, the way she used to grin when she beat me at cards, her wrist flicking that stupid silver bracelet.
Blake looks stunned, then narrows his eyes at me and mouths, bitch. Something animal and vicious surges through my chest—good, you piece of shit, I hope you rot—and I bare my teeth in a grin that feels carved from bone.
I flip him off. My hand is steady. My heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my throat, my wrists, behind my eyes. I want to scream at him. I want to ask him if he still feels her nails as she fought for her life.
I want to claw his face until there's nothing left to look at, until the world can finally stop pretending he’s human. Instead, I hold that grin until my cheeks ache.
Eli, Cassian, Rowan, and my dad step between us as cops drag him toward the doors.
My hands shake so hard my fingers ache, but I don’t cry. Not here. Not in front of him.
I won’t let the man who stole my sister’s last moments steal my tears, too.
Blake Callighan. Guilty.
The word tastes like vengeance and sea salt and every nightmare I’ve had since she vanished.
His father. Guilty.
The man who bankrolled the monster.
My nails bite into my palms.
The tech guy—the one Blake paid to wipe the cruise footage. Guilty. I stare at the back of his head and imagine grabbing him by the collar, shaking him until his teeth rattle.
You watched her die. You saw what he did to her, and you made it disappear. You made her disappear.
Every Nexus executive, counselor, and guard named in the case—guilty. Guilty. Guilty. The word stops sounding like a word. It becomes a drumbeat. A verdict. A door finally, finally slamming shut.
A whole system that should’ve protected girls like us…rotting now behind bars.
Good.
The news cycle runs wild for days with photos of their arrests, interviews with families of the missing, endless footage of the Nexus building being emptied and padlocked.
A few days later, my phone buzzes with a news alert.
My throat tightens before I even read it.
“Inmate found dead in state prison, no foul play suspected.”
Blake Callighan.
For a long moment, I feel nothing. My brain runs the sentence back like a skipping record: dead, dead, dead.
I wait for satisfaction. For closure. For the thing everyone says you're supposed to feel when the monster stops breathing.
It doesn't come.
Then something hot and dizzy cracks through my chest, not relief, not really. Something uglier.
Rage that I didn't get to watch. Grief that makes no sense, grief for the trial that's over now, for the answers I'll never get to demand.
And underneath it all, this terrible, shameful, gut-deep gladness that he suffered. That someone made him afraid. I don't know what kind of person that makes me, but I’m not sure I care.
Dad reads the article at the kitchen table, folds the paper slowly, deliberately, and sets it aside.
When he passes Eli on the porch, something in his eyes flickers that’s dark, certain, final. The kind of look that doesn't belong in daylight.
Cassian meets it without flinching. Something passes between them that I'm not supposed to see. Some debts settle themselves. Some debts don't need witnesses.
I don't ask. I don't have to. And maybe that should horrify me…the possibility curling at the edges of my mind, the questions I'm choosing not to voice.
But all I feel is my father's hand squeezing my shoulder as he walks past, warm and steady.
Good, I think, and the word doesn't taste like shame. It tastes like family.
Aweek later, we’re piled into a yacht, some guy my dad knows who owes him a favor. I know better than to ask why or what.
We anchor about twenty miles offshore, at the coordinates Detective Garcia marked, where the missing cruise footage said Sabrina’s body might have gone under.
The water’s too calm, too blue. It doesn’t look like a place that could take someone away and never give them back.
I grip the railing until my knuckles go white, until the metal bites grooves into my palms. The salt air burns my eyes—or maybe that's just the tears I'm refusing to let fall. Not yet. If I start now, I won't stop.
My stomach cramps. My throat feels like I swallowed glass, and it’s still scraping on the way down. Everything in me wants to scream her name across the water, as if she might answer.
Mom joins me at the railing, the wind tugging at her hair. She looks lighter somehow, even with red eyes and tear tracks on her cheeks. Dad stands beside her in a crisp linen shirt, sleeves rolled up, trying to pretend this is just another family outing.
Rowan, Cassian, and Eli hover near me along the rail, waiting and ready if I need them.
Sabrina’s bracelet sits cold in my hand. The crescent charm glints in the sunlight, silver worn soft from years of her wearing it.
Dad moves first. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out something small—smooth, carved wood, the color of old whiskey. A compass.
He clears his throat. “So she never gets lost again.”
He tosses it over the railing. It breaks the surface with barely a sound and drifts down into the waves.
Mom kneels next, holding something round and green—a wreath she wove herself from seaweed, pressed flowers, and biodegradable ribbons. It’s delicate, beautiful in the simplest way. “For peace,” she whispers, and releases it. It floats, rocking gently with the tide.
The crescent charm presses cold into my palm—her charm, her favorite, the one she never took off.
"Hey, Bree." My voice comes out wrong—scraped raw, barely a whisper. I try again. "Hey."
God, this is stupid. She can't hear me. She's gone. She's been gone for years, and no amount of talking to the ocean is going to bring her back. But I keep going anyway, because what else do I have?
"I know you always loved the ocean more than anything. More than land, more than people, more than—" My voice cracks clean in half. I have to stop.
Breathe. Start again. "More than me, probably, you jerk."
A laugh slips out that’s thin, crooked, more sob than sound, and then the tears come. Hot and fast and completely beyond my control. I swipe at them uselessly, but they just keep coming, blurring the horizon into watercolor smears.
“I hope wherever you are…it’s like this. Warm, endless, beautiful, and safe. No more running. No more being afraid.”
The wind brushes my face, gentle as fingers through hair, and I pretend it’s her. Just for a second.
“I’m learning to surf,” I add with a snort. “Cassian’s teaching me, so…maybe don’t laugh too hard when I wipe out, okay?”
Mom lets out a watery sob behind me, and something in me cracks open.
I press the bracelet to my heart, hard enough the charm digs into my sternum, hard enough to bruise. I want it to hurt. I want to remember this.
Then, I kiss the metal once. It tastes like salt and tarnish, and every sleepover where she'd dangle it over my face to wake me up.
My arm won't move.
Let go, I tell myself. Let her go. But my fingers won't unclench. Because once I throw this, it's real. Once the ocean takes this last piece of her, I have nothing left to hold.
Cassian's hand settles warm on my shoulder. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to.
I throw and the silver arcs through the sunlight—spinning, flashing, impossibly bright—and then it's gone.
The sea swallows it without a ripple, like it was never there at all. Like she was never here. A sound rips out of me. I don't know if it's a scream or a sob or something in between.
Mom cries openly now. Dad wraps an arm around her, and this time she doesn’t flinch. She leans into him like she used to, before everything cracked open.
My legs wobble, but Rowan’s hand finds the small of my back. Then Cassian threads our fingers together. Eli pulls me into his side, breath shaky against my cheek.
I stop fighting it. I turn my face into Eli's chest and let myself break. Not gracefully, not quietly—ugly, heaving sobs that make my whole body shake.
Rowan's forehead presses against my hair. Cassian's thumb strokes my knuckles in slow circles. They hold me like they're not afraid I'll shatter. Like even if I do, they'll keep every piece.
And for the first time since Sabrina vanished, I stop holding myself together. I let them do it instead.
Later, we eat together on deck.
Grilled fish, bread, fruit—simple food that tastes better under late afternoon sunlight. The kind of meal that feels earned.
Dad sits across from my pack, arms crossed, eyes narrow. “So,” he says, tone all business, “any of you hurt my daughter, I’ll make sure no one ever finds out what happens. Capisce?”
Cassian doesn’t miss a beat. “Yes, sir.”
I choke on my drink. “Dad, please don’t interrogate them.”
He scowls. “I’m not interrogating. I’m telling them how it is and will be.”
“Pretty sure that’s worse.” Dad being Dad, protective and terrifying and here.
Sabrina would've loved this. She would've made popcorn and narrated the whole thing like a nature documentary. And here we see the alpha father asserting dominance over potential suitors...
The thought hits like a sucker punch. I cover it with another sip of my drink, but Eli's hand finds my knee under the table, grounding me.
Mom actually laughs—light and genuine. “Stop it, Antonio. They seem like good men.”
“‘Good’ is relative,” he mutters, but he leans back in his chair anyway.
Cassian catches my eye, smirking. Rowan hides a smile. Eli winks.
Dad sighs, pinches the bridge of his nose. “Don’t know if anyone will be good enough for my daughter.”
Mom reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “She’s happy,” she says softly. “That’s what matters.”
For once, Dad doesn’t argue. He just nods and looks out at the horizon, face unreadable but calm.
As the yacht heads back toward the docks, the sky melts into gold. The waves roll gentle beneath us, sunlight scattering like broken glass.
We say goodbye to my parents, and I hug them.
Watching them go, something in my chest loosens. Not healed—not even close—but less jagged.
Sabrina’s disappearance cracked us open in different ways, left us bleeding in places we didn’t know could bleed. But she also fought a monster with everything she had left. She left clues. And she didn’t let herself become just another missing girl.
And now…we’re finally giving her back to the ocean she loved.
I wrap my arms around myself, breathe through the ache, and turn toward Rowan, Cassian, and Eli—my constant, my present, my future all wrapped up in three amazing men.
The wind shifts, carrying the smell of salt and something else…coconut, maybe. Sunscreen. Sabrina's stupid expensive sunscreen that she used to steal from Mom.
I go still. It's nothing. Just the ocean, just my mind playing tricks. But for one breath, one heartbeat, I let myself believe she's here. That she sees this. That she's proud of me.
Miss you, Bree. Miss you every day.
The wind dies. The smell fades. I exhale, long and slow, and turn toward my future.
Rowan clears his throat behind me. Cassian and Eli are on either side of him, but something in his expression makes my heart trip.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, walking toward them.
Rowan shakes his head. “Nothing.”
Cassian meets my gaze. “We found them.”
Eli’s voice is quiet but sure. “Your friends. Danica. Casey. Kayla.”
For a second, I forget how to breathe. The relief hits so hard my knees nearly buckle. I grab the railing to steady myself, breath catching like a snapped string.
“They’re safe?” I whisper. Hope, sharp and terrifying, flares alive in my chest.