Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
Zane
The first thing I do is quiet everything that doesn’t help.
Fear has a sound to it. So does panic. It fills a space, pushes at the edges, and makes everything feel urgent and directionless at the same time. Finn’s pacing feeds it. Ryder going still feeds it more.
Aurora doesn’t need any of that.
So I step back into the alley and let the noise fall away.
The air still carries it. Disturbed gravel. Rubber. That faint chemical tang from a vehicle that sat here too long with the engine running. It lingers in a way most people wouldn’t notice, but once you’ve learned what to look for, you don’t miss it.
I crouch near the edge of the blind spot.
Start with the ground.
There’s a shift in the gravel where her footing went wrong. A drag, brief but sharp, she fought for balance before she lost it. No long struggle. No scattered debris. He didn’t give her time for that.
My jaw tightens slightly.
I follow the disturbance outward, tracking the line until it thins into the rest of the alley traffic. It almost disappears there, almost, but the weight tells a different story. Tires pressed deeper than the usual pass-through. A vehicle that paused.
The marks angle toward the street, subtle but consistent, and I follow them out on the video on my phone, letting my focus narrow until the rest of the world fades into background noise.
There’s a storefront across the way. Dark now, but the glass still holds reflections from earlier. I step closer, adjusting my angle until the faintest ghost of movement sharpens into something usable.
Headlights. A turn. A partial plate caught in the curve of the reflection.
It isn’t clean, but it doesn’t need to be.
Behind me, the door opens.
“Zane.”
Ryder’s voice carries that tight control he leans on when things start slipping.
I don’t turn right away.
“Pickup,” I say, still looking at the screen. “Older model. Heavy suspension. It sat low when it took off.”
Finn’s footsteps close in. “You can tell that from dirt?”
I hand him the phone instead of answering. He studies the footage, then looks up at me with a sharpness behind his usual expression.
Ryder steps closer, eyes already moving over the details, taking it in, fitting it into the bigger picture he’s building in his head.
“Tell me we can find him,” he says.
There’s no hesitation in my answer. “We will.”
Because that part is simple.
Inside, The Hollow has shifted.
It happened fast, almost instinctively. Doors locked. Movement controlled. The energy tightened, becoming purposeful; the building itself understood what it needed to become.
Finn’s pacing again, the restless kind that means he’s trying to outrun something he can’t.
Ryder stands too still.
That’s where I focus.
I set the laptop down, pull up the footage on the bigger screen, and run it frame by frame. Aurora crosses the screen, hands tucked into her jacket, head slightly tilted, thinking about anything softer than the space she’s walking through.
Then she’s gone.
“She disappears at the blind spot,” I say, mapping it out as I go. “From there, he had two clean routes out of town without giving us a full plate.”
Finn leans over the table. “So we guess which one?”
“We don’t guess,” I reply, bringing up the map. “We narrow.”
I zoom out, layering what we know over what we’ve seen before.
Cole doesn’t improvise. He reuses what works. Patterns matter with him.
“Short-term hold,” I continue. “Somewhere controlled. Somewhere he knows we’ll need time to reach.”
Ryder nods once. He’s following.
“Storage units north of town,” I add, pulling them up. “Old service roads off the ridge. A couple of structures that stay off the grid if you know how to use them.”
“He won’t use anything too exposed,” Ryder says.
“No,” I agree, adjusting the list. “He’ll want time. Control.”
Time to make a point.
Time to make us react.
I run the partial plate through what access we still have, calling in threads we said we’d leave alone when we came here. They answer anyway. They always do.
It doesn’t take long.
“There,” I say, turning the screen. “Truck’s tied to a shell, but it’s been flagged before. Connected to a unit complex off the north access road.”
Finn straightens. “Then we go.”
Ryder doesn’t move yet.
Neither do I.
Because it isn’t that simple.
“He’ll expect that,” I say.
Finn’s jaw tightens. “I don’t care what he expects.”
“I do,” I answer, meeting his gaze. “Because he’s building the field we’re about to walk into.”
That lands.
Ryder’s attention shifts back to the map, but something else is moving underneath it now. I can see it in the set of his shoulders, the way his focus drifts half a step inward.
I’ve seen that before.
When everything breaks.
When he decides it traces back to him.
“I brought this here,” he says quietly. “I knew what Cole would do. I knew what he—”
I step closer, enough to pull him out of it before it goes too far. “You don’t get to fall apart,” I interject. “Not while she’s out there.”
Ryder holds my gaze, a sharpness flickering there before it settles back into control.
“Blame yourself later,” I add. “Fix it now.”
The shift is immediate.
It doesn’t erase what he’s feeling, but it puts it where it belongs.
Later.
“Alright,” he says.
That’s enough.
I turn back to the screen, locking the plan into place.
“North access road,” I say. “Units are here. Limited entry points. He’ll have visibility on approach.”
Finn cracks his knuckles, tension rolling off him in waves. “Good. Then we hit it fast.”
“We go smart,” I correct. “Fast comes after. When we get to her, we need to do it right.”
No one is getting hurt, not under my watch.
Least of all Aurora.