36. Holden
THIRTY-SIX
HOLDEN
“Why the hell are they still there?”
My phone is in my hand before I’m fully awake. Sage’s tracker is still at her apartment. I stare at the dot, waiting for it to shift. It doesn’t.
I called Eli twice last night. Sage once. Texted both of them. No answer.
For hours, I told myself they were just sorting their shit out. Eli said he was with her, that they’d be back late. And that would have been fine if the tracker wasn’t showing them at her fucking apartment. The same building where some asshole got to her and strung her up by the throat.
I spent all night oscillating between showing up there and listening for the front door.
When it finally opened sometime after two, I was out of bed and halfway down the stairs before I registered the footsteps were too quick. Too light.
Milo looked up at me from the foyer, one hand still on the door.
“Detective,” he said, pressing the other to his chest. “I never knew you felt that way about little old me.”
“Where’s Sage?”
His smile slipped just enough to show me he understood.
“She’s fine. She’s with Eli.”
“At her apartment.”
He grimaced. “I know. Not my first choice for a romantic evening, but Eli isn’t all rainbows and unicorns like yours truly.
” He kicked off his shoes. “They’re probably just talking and crying it out.
Or they could be committing murder, having kinky sex, or doing an exciting combination of all four.
Either way, barging in at this hour probably won’t improve it.
But we can spoon if it’ll help you feel better. I don’t mind being the little one.”
I told him to go fuck himself and went back to bed.
I never really slept.
Now morning light is cutting through the curtains, and the tracker still hasn’t moved.
I call Eli again.
Nothing.
Then Sage.
Straight to voicemail.
The dot tells me where the choker is. It doesn’t tell me whether Sage is still wearing it.
Someone could have taken it off her and left it at the apartment. Someone could have taken their phones. Eli could be unconscious on the floor while I lie here convincing myself silence means privacy.
I’m done guessing.
I throw back the covers, drag on a pair of jeans, and grab my keys.
If they’re asleep, they can yell at me in person.
Sage’s building looks the same as always—paint peeling off the fire escape, a kid on a scooter doing lazy loops in the parking lot. Eli’s car is there. That’s something. At least I know they genuinely came here. The question is what state I’m going to find them in.
I take the stairs two at a time. The door is unlocked, which boils my blood. I scan the room the way I always do—entry points, sight lines, anything out of place. The kitchen counter has a duffel bag on it, unzipped.
My blood pressure spikes.
Voices carry from the living room. I round the corner and find Jamie cross-legged on the floor with a mug of tea, and Amy on the couch in pajamas.
“Holden,” Jamie says, eyes going wide.
Amy jumps up from the couch. “Oh, hey. Everything okay? We weren’t expecting—”
“Where’s Sage?”
“Bedroom. She’s—”
I’m already moving. Past the bathroom, down the hall. Her door’s cracked open. I push it wider and stop.
Sage is curled on her side, blankets pulled up to her chin, face pale and sheened with sweat, hair matted to her forehead. She hasn’t slept. The room smells like sex and sweat, with a touch of something metallic underneath.
Then I see her wrists. Red marks, circling both, the unmistakable imprint of ligature.
Don’t wait up.
Every molecule in my body rearranges into a single, clean intention.
Eli is dead.
“Wildcat.” My voice comes out rough. “What did he do to you?”
She opens one eye. Squints at me like I’m a light source she didn’t ask for. “What?”
“Your wrists.” I’m at the bedside now, taking her hand, turning it over.
The marks are symmetrical. Rope, not hands.
A deliberate binding, not a struggle. The detective in me is processing this even as the rest of me is calculating how far Eli could have gotten without his car. “What did he do to you?”
“Holden.” She pulls her hand back and presses it against her lower abdomen with a wince. “Calm down.”
“I’m calm. I’m extremely calm. I’m the calmest person in this building, and I’m asking you what happened.”
“He didn’t hurt me. Well—” She almost smiles. “He did. But I asked him to. Enthusiastically. Multiple times.”
My brain recalibrates. Slower than it should.
“Your wrists—”
“Silk rope. Consensual. Very, very consensual.” She shifts and grimaces, curling tighter. “What you’re looking at right now isn’t Eli damage. It’s my uterus staging a military coup.”
“Your—”
“My period, Holden. I got my period.” She says it with the exhausted patience of a woman who does not have the energy to manage my reaction.
“First one since everything happened. To be honest, it’s probably the stress that shut it down.
And now it’s back and it’s furious. I feel like Aunt Flo decided to wring out my organs like a wet towel. ”
I stand there, trying to reconcile what I thought with what she’s telling me. The rope marks. Her wrists. The metallic smell. All clicking into a different configuration than the one I’d assembled on the way in.
“So Eli—?”
“Is at the store buying tampons like a good boyfriend.”
I close my eyes. Open them. Sit on the edge of the bed.
“You didn’t come home,” I say.
“I know. I’m sorry. We were talking and then I fell asleep and then I woke up at three a.m. bleeding through my underwear. It’s been a whole thing since then.” She reaches for my hand. Her fingers are cold. “I should have texted. I wasn’t thinking.”
“You weren’t thinking.” I repeat it, not as an accusation.
Just letting the words exist so she can hear how they sound from this side.
Twelve hours of silence. No check-in. The woman I’m trying to keep alive went dark for twelve hours and my first thought wasn’t she’s on a date with the guy who put her in danger in the first place—it was she’s dead in a ditch and I’m going to have to be the one who finds her.
She sees it in my face. The things I’m not saying.
“Hey.” She tugs my hand until I look at her. “I’m here. I’m okay. I’m just bleeding and miserable and I want to die, but only in the period way, not the actual way.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
It’s not. But her mouth is twitching, and I can’t hold on to any of it. I’ve interrogated suspects who couldn’t crack my composure with a crowbar, and this woman dismantles me with a half-smile and cold fingers.
“What do you need?” I say.
“What?”
“Right now. What do you need?”
“Ugh. I could do with a refresh of my hot water bottle.” She pulls it out from under the covers and hands it to me.
“You want tea while I’m up?” I ask.
She blinks. “Sure. But only if you put that gross honey in it. The one Knox hates.”
“Orange blossom?”
“That’s the one.”
I nod. The discipline of being useful settles me, shaves off the anger and the worry with each new task. I fill the kettle. Empty the water bottle. Prepare the tea.
Jamie watches me measure out the honey with a kind of morbid fascination. “I know you and I only really met briefly at the hospital. But is everything okay?” he asks, chin tucked down so his hair hangs in his eyes.
I nod. “I’m fine.” My voice sounds like someone else’s. “Do you know how long ago Eli left?”
“I sure do. He left about ten minutes before you got here. I assure you, our girl was not without supervision at any point.”
My eyes roam over him. He looks like the kind of person who could take a punch if it came to that, but right now he sips his tea and watches the hallway like he expects a SWAT team to breach at any moment.
“Thank you,” I say. “For watching over her.”
“She’s my best friend,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the universe. “I’d run into traffic for her. Or hide a body. Oop. Pretend I didn’t mention that last part, detective.”
I almost smile. The kettle whistles. And I go back to preparing the tea and hot water bottle for Sage.
“Move over,” I say when I return to the bedroom.
“What?”
“Move over. I’m getting in.”
The tea is cooling on the bedside table, and the hot water bottle is already pressed to her lower belly.
She scoots slightly, and I toe off my shoes and slide in behind her, back against the headboard, pulling her into my chest. She makes a small, grateful sound and melts into me, her head finding the spot below my collarbone that she always gravitates toward when we share a bed.
Which we do, often. More than the others.
She says it’s because I run warm and don’t move in the night.
I think it’s because she feels safe enough to close her eyes around me.
Amy appears in the doorway a minute later and knocks lightly against the frame.
“Everything okay, Amy?” I ask, assessing her as she takes in the scene—me in the bed, Sage curled against my chest, the rope-marked wrists, the general domestic chaos—and just nods, like this is all perfectly normal. Which for Sage’s life, I suppose it is.
“I know you have tea, but Jamie’s making toast. Do you want toast?”
“I want to be dead,” Sage mumbles.
“Toast it is.” Amy smiles bright and leaves.
From the living room, I hear Jamie’s voice. “Should I do margarine and jelly or is she a peanut butter person? This feels like a critical decision and I don’t want to get it wrong.”
“Honey,” Amy says. “And make one for the grump in the bed too.”
“The handsome grump or the scary grump?”
“There’s only one grump in the bed at the moment, Jamie.”
“Right. The handsome scary one. Got it.”
Sage snorts against my chest. It turns into a groan as another cramp hits and she curls tighter, pressing the hot water bottle harder against her abdomen. I put my hand over hers, adding pressure the way I’ve seen it done—firm, steady, grounding.
“That helps,” she whispers.
“Good.”
She tilts her head up, and I lean down and press my lips to hers, kissing her softly.
“That helps too.”
The front door opens. Footsteps. A rustling of bags.