Chapter 22 Devil in Disguise
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
DEVIL IN DISGUISE
ZACK
The ride to the breakfast place feels longer than it should, even though my motorcycle eats up the miles easily.
She’s fast and beautiful, just like the radiant sunshine that is grasping onto me for dear life.
I love that my guys know to have a bike ready for me at every safe house, cause truly were up to me a bike would be my only form of transportation.
Hazel sits pressed against my back, her arms tight around my waist and her grip firmer than usual.
I can feel her tension in the way she holds on, in the stiffness of her posture, and the way she keeps her head slightly down—as if bracing against more than just the wind.
The morning air is chilly—sharp enough to sting—and each time I feel her exhale against my shoulder blade, I am reminded of the weight I put on her by pulling her into all of this.
Is this somehow my fault?
The guilt settles deeper with every mile.
I try to focus on the road, on the neat rhythm of lines flashing beneath us, but Lincoln’s message from last night pushes through every thought.
The patterns he found, the movements of The Whispering Killer, and the inconsistencies in behavior.
The warning threaded through it all…it sits in my chest like a stone.
Hazel taps lightly against my ribs once as we slow down at a light, a small gesture to check if I am okay. I want to tell her she should not worry about me, that she should be worrying about herself, but the engine revs as the light turns green, and I take the turn instead.
We pull into the diner ten minutes later.
It is small and tucked between a repair shop and a hardware store, the kind of place that serves breakfast all day and has not changed the decor since the nineties.
Hazel swings a leg off the bike and pulls off her helmet, her hair falling loose and wind-blown.
She looks at the building, takes in the flickering neon sign, and raises an eyebrow.
She lets out a soft laugh, the first real sound she has made since we left the house.
It is faint and tired, but it helps settle something rough in my chest. We head inside, choosing a booth in the back corner, both of us automatically sitting where we can watch the entrance.
The instinct is mutual now, and that scares me more than I want to admit.
The waitress comes by, and I order a black coffee.
Hazel picks something warm and sugary. When the waitress leaves, I reach into my backpack for my laptop.
I hesitate with my hand on the lid. Hazel notices, because of course she does—she’s so damn observant.
Her expression shifts, softening around the edges
“This is where you take someone when you want to make them question your taste in food,” she says, with a half-smile.
“It’s quiet,” I defend. “That is what matters.” The look I give her is complicated but the one she gives me is deceptively easy.
I never quite understood how there could be people who seem inherently good and somehow people who are inherently bad.
Me? I’m the worst possible person to be here with her, but this is where she either decides to run for the hills or that she’s fully in this now.
“Are you okay?” Hazel’s voice is so soft, so kind and caring, and my broken soul somehow preens at the slight chance of someone caring about me. No, Zack. People like you don’t get this life. They don’t get good people or good things that happen to them.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I just thought about something and it—never mind, it’s not important.” My voice is probably the furthest thing from believable, and I know she sees right damn through me. It’s only fair I ruin it by opening my damn mouth. “I recommend the cinnamon pancakes.”
I could see the words passing over her face. I watched an entire movie and a lifetime pass behind her and she smiles—a beaming smile, almost childish in nature, but so soft and caring and it almost makes me feel alive. “I’m allergic to cinnamon, but I was thinking chocolate chip.”
My face falls, and I almost feel guilty for not asking the damn girl if she had any allergies.
“Why didn’t you tell me yesterday when I was cooking dinner that you have allergies?
” I didn’t really need to have this conversation now, but for some fucking reason I feel the need to say this shit instead of opening the laptop.
“You are stalling,” she says, simply.
I exhale and open the laptop. The screen lights up, the encrypted folder waiting like a threat.
Hazel leans closer, her shoulder brushing mine, her presence steady and grounding.
I open the folder and pull up the files Lincoln sent.
The first few are familiar—the usual shit—reports, timelines, digital trails from The Whispering Killer.
Things changed, though, and it all kind of starts to make sense.
Around sixteen years ago, when Cameron’s dad stopped being The Whispering Killer, the motive changed.
Things stopped adding up, but The Whispering Killer continued.
But the real problem lies deeper. It's starting to become more clear and prevalent, and it hits me like a damn truck off the tracks.
“This is not about the pattern we already knew,” I tell her, quietly. “It’s about something older. Like before we thought all this shit had started.”
Hazel tilts her head, frowning slightly, this adorable crease forms in between her brows. “Older how?”
I scroll to the file Lincoln marked in red.
It’s an old police report with a bunch of old scanned pages—newspaper clippings from nearly thirty years ago—and…
and a missing child bulletin. Hazel’s brow furrows as she reads the header.
She gingerly tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, looking closer at the clipping like she could figure it out through osmosis.
“A kidnapping?” she whispers.
“A baby,” I say. “Taken twenty-eight years ago. Never found.”
She looks up slowly, confusion tightening her features. “What does this have to do with The Whispering Killer?”
I swallow, because the truth unsettled me, too.
“Lincoln ran comparisons between the killer’s earliest activity and old police databases.
It looks like he found something that wasn’t adding up.
There are redacted sections in the original kidnapping report.
Pages missing. Most of the digital archive is corrupted or erased entirely.
And someone tried very hard to bury the case.
Like a simple search wouldn’t bring this up. ”
Hazel leans in, studying the faded photograph attached to the file: a grainy hospital picture of a newborn wrapped in a blanket. There’s no identifying name on it, just a smudged year written on the bottom of it, dated twenty-eight years ago.
Her voice softens. “Why would Lincoln think it is connected?”
“Because someone accessed this file two days ago,” I say. “Illegally. From the same masked network The Whispering Killer uses.”
Hazel stills completely, the weight of the implication settling over her.
“You think The Whispering Killer is looking into their own past,” she says, quietly.
The waitress comes back with our drinks, and we order ourselves breakfast, the tense moment broken. Hazel’s question lingers in the air around us. It’s loud and present, and I’m ready for these answers to finally make sense.
I nod, a moment passing before I speak again as I gather the courage to bring this all up. “Lincoln thinks whoever this is may have been that baby. Or connected to them. And now they are spiraling, trying to dig up something buried this deep.”
Hazel turns the laptop slightly so she can study the blurry image again.
The baby is small—someone helpless and so fucking innocent.
It makes something cold ripple through me, nearly making me sick.
All this new information making its way to the forefront is honestly fucking disgusting, and there isn’t a single thing I like about it.
“This happened twenty-eight years ago,” she murmurs. “That means the baby would be around my age.”
“Exactly,” I say. “And if the killer is trying to understand who they were, or what happened, or why someone took them, it could explain the instability in their recent behavior.”
Hazel shivers slightly, her eyes still on the screen. “This is not just a killer losing control. This is someone trying to understand themselves.”
“And doing it violently,” I add. “Which means they are not going to stop until they either find what they are looking for or destroy everything in the way.”
For a moment, neither of us speak. Hazel slowly closes the laptop, her fingers lingering on the lid.
“So, what do we do?” she asks.
Before I answer, my phone buzzes with a message from Lincoln.
A location ping. A place connected not to recent kidnappings, but to the old case.
A storage unit rented under a false name, the same one that accessed the archived file.
My stomach tightens. Something about all of this doesn’t fucking feel right.
It feels too easy, but when it comes to me, nothing is ever easy.
“That’ll be where we go next,” I tell her, a lump forming in my throat. Her smile is wide, as if this isn’t going to end terribly for her, but her optimism is fucking infectious, even if it is forced.
“Okay, well…I guess we’re going back to Michigan?” A big beaming smile sits on her face now. The childlike glee that emanates from her is refreshing. It’s something different and something I haven’t felt or truly seen in far too damn long.