CHAPTER 16
Missing
°°°
Vivian's house was already full of barely-controlled chaos by the time Emery arrived, Rhys's mother pacing the kitchen with her phone clutched in both hands, Rhys himself on his own phone in the living room, voice low and urgent, coordinating something with Ghost that Emery could only half-follow from the doorway.
The house looked different in crisis than it had at the Saturday cookout weeks ago, every lamp in the front rooms switched on against a darkness that felt heavier than the hour warranted, and Emery found herself gripping the doorframe for a moment before stepping inside, some instinct wanting to brace against whatever the next several hours held.
"She left around six," Vivian said, catching sight of Emery and crossing the kitchen to grip her hands, her voice thin with barely-suppressed panic.
"Said she was going to a friend's. I didn't think anything of it, she does that all the time, and then seven came and went and she wasn't back and she's not answering and I don't — " Her voice cracked.
"I don't know where my granddaughter is, Emery. "
"We're going to find her." Emery said it with more certainty than she fully felt, but the words steadied Vivian anyway, some old instinct in both of them reaching for competence over panic. "Has she done this before? Just not come home?"
"Never. Not once. She's stubborn but she's not reckless, she always texts if she's running late, she — " Vivian stopped herself, some new thought visibly arriving. "Unless she's somewhere she knows we wouldn't want her to be. Then she'd go quiet instead of checking in."
Emery's stomach dropped, the same thought that had struck Rhys in the clubhouse parking lot landing now with its full weight. Sasha's name, spoken once at a cookout weeks ago, filed away by a sixteen-year-old who clearly heard more than the adults around her ever accounted for.
Rhys came off his phone call looking grim, crossing the kitchen in three strides.
"Ghost's got two prospects checking her usual spots — the diner, the park behind the school, a couple friends' houses.
Nothing yet." His jaw was tight, controlled fear radiating off him in a way Emery recognized now as his particular flavor of crisis management, competence deployed as a shield against panic he didn't have time to feel yet.
"I called her best friend Mia. She said Dally texted her around six-thirty asking if she'd cover for her if anyone asked.
Wouldn't say where she was actually going. "
"That confirms it," Emery said. "She's not just late. She's somewhere she planned to be, somewhere she knew she'd need cover for."
"Sasha." Rhys said the name like it tasted bad in his mouth. "I think she went after Sasha herself. God, Em, if she actually found her — "
"We don't know that yet. We're guessing." Emery kept her voice deliberately level, an anchor against the fear climbing in both of them. "Does anyone know where Sasha's actually staying? An address, anything concrete?"
"Ghost might. He's been tracking her movements since we confirmed she was working with Salazar.
" Rhys was already dialing again, pacing the small kitchen with barely-contained energy, and Emery watched Vivian sink into a chair at the table, her hands pressed flat against its surface like she needed something solid to hold onto.
Emery sat beside her, taking one of Vivian's hands in both of hers, feeling the older woman's fingers trembling.
"She's smart," Emery said quietly. "Whatever she's doing, she's smart, and she's braver than most adults I know. That's not nothing."
"Brave doesn't keep you safe around people like that." Vivian's voice had gone thin, eleven years of a particular kind of loss sitting audibly underneath the words. "I already buried my daughter, Emery. I can't — I don't think I survive losing her too."
The rawness of it landed hard in Emery's chest, and she found herself doing the thing she'd spent months relearning how to do — not retreating into careful silence to avoid the weight of someone else's fear, but sitting inside it with her, present and unflinching.
"You're not going to lose her," Emery said, and made herself believe it as she said it, some old peacekeeping instinct wanting to soften the certainty into something safer, something that couldn't be proven wrong.
She didn't let herself soften it. "We're going to find her tonight. I promise you that."
Vivian's grip tightened around Emery's hands, and for a moment the older woman looked at her with something raw and unguarded, eleven years of grief and eleven months of a different, quieter loss both visible at once.
"I'm glad you're here," she said. "I know that's a strange thing to say tonight of all nights.
But I am. Whatever happens with you and my son, I'm glad you're the one sitting with me right now. "
Emery didn't have words adequate to that, and settled for squeezing Vivian's hands back, the two of them sitting together in the too-bright kitchen while Rhys's voice continued, low and urgent, from the other room.
Rhys came back into the kitchen, phone still at his ear, and something in his posture had shifted — sharper now, more focused, a man who'd found a thread to pull.
"Ghost has an address," he said, covering the phone briefly. "A motel off Route 12 where Sasha's been staying. It's twenty minutes out. I'm going."
"I'm coming with you."
"Em — "
"Don't." She stood, meeting his eyes with a steadiness she hadn't fully known she possessed until this exact moment.
"Don't do the thing where you decide this is too dangerous for me to be part of.
Dally is scared of what happens if the adults in her life keep deciding things without her.
I'm not doing the same thing to you right now by staying quietly behind while you go find her. "
He held her gaze for a long moment, some old protective instinct visibly warring with the promise he'd made her weeks ago, and she watched him choose, deliberately, to honor the promise instead of the instinct.
"Okay," he said. "You're with me. But you do exactly what I tell you once we're there, no arguing, because if this goes sideways I need to know you're safe enough that I'm not managing two crises at once."
"Deal."
They left Vivian with a neighbor who'd arrived minutes later, some old network of club family already mobilizing to make sure she wasn't alone, and Emery rode behind Rhys on the bike for the first time in over a year, her arms wrapped around him, the twenty-minute ride to Route 12 passing in a blur of streetlights and rising dread.
The motel was exactly the kind of place Emery had expected — a low, tired strip of rooms off a frontage road, half the parking lot lit by a flickering sign that had lost most of its letters years ago.
Ghost was already there when they pulled in, leaning against his own bike with the particular stillness of a man who'd been watching a door for longer than he wanted to admit.
The ride there had passed in a strange, adrenaline-sharpened blur, Emery's arms locked around Rhys's waist, the wind too loud for either of them to speak even if either had trusted their voice to hold steady.
She'd forgotten, in eleven months away from this life, the specific vulnerability of riding on the back of a motorcycle at speed in the dark — how it stripped away every illusion of control and left nothing but trust, in the machine, in the road, in the man steering both of them toward whatever waited at the other end.
"Room 14," he said, nodding toward a door with light showing beneath it. "I saw movement about ten minutes ago. Didn't want to go in alone, didn't know what we were walking into."
Rhys was moving before Ghost finished the sentence, and Emery followed close behind, her heart hammering, every instinct in her body screaming with a fear she made herself set aside in favor of forward motion.
The door was answered on the second knock, and Emery felt the whole night crystallize into sharp, immediate relief at the sight that greeted them — Dally, very much alive, very much unhurt, standing in the doorway with red-rimmed eyes and an expression caught somewhere between defiance and relief of her own.
"Oh thank God." Rhys had her in his arms before he'd finished the sentence, and Emery watched Dally's carefully held composure crack, the teenager collapsing into the hug with a sob that sounded like it had been building for hours.
"I'm sorry," Dally said into his shoulder, muffled and raw. "I'm sorry, I just wanted to understand, I wanted to actually know instead of everyone deciding what I could handle hearing, and I thought if I just talked to her myself — "
"You're okay. That's all that matters right now. You're okay." Rhys held her at arm's length, checking her over with the same visual thoroughness Emery had seen him use on herself twice now, before his expression shifted toward something more complicated. "Where's Sasha?"
"She's not here. She left before I even got here, I think — the room was empty when I knocked, but the door wasn't locked, and I just — I sat down and waited, because I didn't know what else to do, and then I got scared to leave in case someone saw me in the parking lot, and my phone died an hour ago and I didn't have a charger and I didn't know how to get home without just walking and I was scared to do that too.
" The words tumbled out of her in an exhausted rush, the whole ordeal finally catching up to her all at once.
"I'm sorry. I know that was stupid. I know I scared everyone. "
"You did." Rhys's voice was gentle despite the words. "But we can talk about stupid later. Right now I just need you home safe."
Emery stepped forward, crouching slightly to meet Dally's eyes directly. "What were you trying to find out? What did you want to ask her?"
Dally's gaze flickered to Rhys, uncertain, and Emery watched her decide, visibly, to say it anyway.
"I wanted to know if she still loved him.
If that's why all this was happening. Because everyone keeps talking about Salazar and money and leverage, and I just — I wanted to know if it was actually simpler than that.
If it was actually just about somebody being hurt and angry, because that felt like something I could understand, even if I couldn't fix it. "
The question landed with unexpected weight, and Emery felt Rhys go very still beside her, some old guilt visibly resurfacing at the directness of a sixteen-year-old cutting straight to the emotional core of something the adults had spent weeks talking around.
"She's not here to ask," Ghost said from the doorway, his voice carrying a note of urgency that cut through the moment. "But we should be. This room being empty on a night this important isn't nothing. She might've bolted because she knew something was coming."
Rhys's expression sharpened instantly, the tenderness of a moment ago replaced by focused alertness. "What kind of something?"
"I don't know yet." Ghost was already scanning the parking lot, his hand resting near his hip in a way that made Emery's pulse spike again. "But I don't like an empty room and an unlocked door. Feels staged. Feels like somebody wanted this exact scene found."
The words settled over all of them with cold, immediate weight, and Emery found herself pulling Dally closer instinctively, some old protective urgency overriding everything else, while Rhys's hand moved, unconsciously, to rest against the small of her back — not managing her, not deciding for her, just present, solid, ready.
"Let's get out of here," Rhys said. "Now. All of us, together."
Nobody argued.