Chapter 13: Taken

## Emily

November 22nd, 2021

The call came at 3:47 PM on a Monday.

I was in the alcove. Sixty-three pages deep into Chapter Twelve of the novel, the part where the girl finds her sister's old journal in a box at the bottom of a closet and reads her handwriting for the first time in three years and realizes that grief isn't about missing the person — it's about missing the version of yourself that existed when they were alive.

My phone vibrated against the windowsill. Unknown number. I almost didn't answer — unknown numbers in my world were either Jordan's creditors (still calling, even though he was dead) or telemarketers trying to sell me car insurance for a car I didn't own.

But something made me pick up. Instinct. Stupidity. The universe's sense of humor, which had been particularly aggressive lately.

"Emily Glass?" A woman's voice. Professional. Clipped.

"Who is this?"

"This is Sarah, calling from St. Benedict's Hospital. I'm trying to reach the next of kin for Richard Glass."

My father.

"What happened?"

"Mr. Glass was admitted this afternoon following a cardiac event. He's stable but asking for family. Are you available to come in?"

I was already standing. Already grabbing my bag. Charlie's bear was inside it, pressed against my laptop, and the paper rose I'd been using as a bookmark fell to the floor.

"Where is St. Benedict's?"

"We're on Route 7, about forty minutes north of Calloway University. The cardiac unit is on the third floor."

"I'll be there."

I hung up and texted Grey.

Emily: my dad is in the hospital. cardiac event. I'm going to St. Benedict's.

No immediate response. He was in a meeting — the real kind, the Malachi kind, the kind that happened in locations without cell service and involved people whose names I didn't know.

I texted Jeremy.

Emily: Grey is in a meeting. My dad is at St. Benedict's Hospital, Route 7. Cardiac event. I'm taking a cab.

Jeremy: Wait for me. I'll drive you.

Emily: I can't wait. He's asking for me.

Jeremy: Emily. Wait.

But I didn't wait. Because my father — the man who had blamed me for Jordan's death, who had stopped speaking to me two years ago, who had let his son beat his daughter while he wrote checks to make the complaints disappear — was in a hospital asking for family, and despite everything, despite all of it, he was still my father, and some wires never fully snap.

I called a cab. Got in. Gave the address.

The driver was a middle-aged man with a Red Sox hat and the radio tuned to a classic rock station. Led Zeppelin. "Stairway to Heaven." Which was either appropriate or darkly ironic.

"Route 7?" he repeated. "That's a haul. Forty-five minutes, maybe an hour with traffic."

"That's fine."

The city gave way to suburbs, the suburbs to fields, the fields to the kind of rural nowhere that New England specializes in — stone walls, bare trees, the skeletal remains of summer farms waiting for spring like patients waiting for a diagnosis. The November sky was the color of old dishwater.

My phone buzzed.

Jeremy: Emily, St. Benedict's doesn't have a cardiac unit. I just checked. There's no record of a Richard Glass admission at any hospital in the area.

My stomach dropped.

Jeremy: Where are you? What cab company? I need your location NOW.

I looked at the driver. At his hands on the wheel. At the rearview mirror, where his eyes met mine — briefly, flatly, with an expression that had nothing to do with Red Sox baseball or Led Zeppelin.

The cab turned off Route 7.

Not at a hospital. Not at a building. At a gravel road that led into dense woods, the kind of road that existed on no GPS and served no purpose except to take people to places where they wouldn't be found.

"This isn't right," I said. My voice was thin. Calm. The calm of a person who had spent three years surviving and whose body knew, before her brain did, that survival mode was activating again. "Where are we going?"

The driver didn't respond.

"Where are we—"

Something hit the back of my head. Not the driver — someone behind me, in the trunk space, a person I hadn't seen because I'd been stupid, because I'd been in a hurry, because Jeremy had told me to wait and I hadn't listened.

The world went bright white. Then dark red. Then nothing at all.

---

## Grey

November 22nd, 2021 — 5:12 PM

Jeremy's call came during the debrief.

I was in the warehouse on Meridian, the one Malachi used for operations meetings when he didn't want to be seen at the university. Eris's network was fracturing — we'd intercepted a shipment, turned two of his distributors, and the noose was tightening. Malachi was at the head of the table, his fedora on the chair beside him, mapping the next phase with the methodical patience of a chess player who could see twelve moves ahead.

My phone was off. Protocol. No phones during operational briefings.

When the briefing ended and I turned my phone on, I had seventeen missed calls from Jeremy and six texts that I read in the order they arrived and each one hit me like a bullet.

Jeremy: Emily's father reportedly at St. Benedict's. She's going alone.

Jeremy: No record of admission. St. Benedict's has no cardiac unit. This is a trap.

Jeremy: She's not responding. Cab company has no record of the dispatch.

Jeremy: Grey, pick up your fucking phone.

Jeremy: I traced her phone signal. Last ping was Route 7, two miles past the Meridian turnoff. Signal died at 4:23 PM.

Jeremy: She's gone.

I didn't remember leaving the warehouse. I didn't remember getting in the car. I didn't remember the drive — the speedometer climbing past 90, past 100, the engine screaming, the world reduced to a single point of focus so intense it burned everything else away.

She's gone.

Two words. The two worst words in any language. The words that meant the universe had done it again — taken the thing that mattered most and hidden it in the dark, and the dark was vast and I was one man and my hands were shaking on the wheel for the first time in sixteen years.

Jeremy met me at the Route 7 turnoff. He was calm — professionally calm, the calm of a man who had been trained to function in crisis and was doing so now with a precision that I envied and hated.

"Talk to me," I said.

"The call to Emily came from a burner. Untraceable. The 'hospital' story was designed to exploit the father connection — someone who knows her history, knows about Richard Glass, knows she'd respond to a family emergency. The cab was a setup. Driver matches the description of one of Diamond's mid-level operatives."

"Diamond is in prison."

"Diamond's network isn't. Eris has been restructuring. And there's someone new — we've been hearing the name Louis Nelson for weeks. I thought he was a ghost. He's not."

Louis Nelson. The name landed with the weight of a headstone.

"Who is he?"

"Former associate of Diamond's. We thought he was dead — you dealt with him three years ago in Lisbon. Apparently, the deal didn't take."

Lisbon. Three years ago. A mission that had gone sideways, a man I'd been sent to neutralize who had disappeared into the chaos of a port explosion. I'd reported him dead because the alternative — admitting failure — was something I hadn't been capable of at twenty-eight.

A mistake. My mistake.

And now Emily was paying for it.

"She's alive," Jeremy said. Not a question, not a hope — a statement of operational fact. "If they wanted her dead, they would have done it at the pickup point. They took her because she has leverage value. They took her because of you."

Because of me.

Because I had broken every rule Malachi had ever taught me. Because I had let a civilian into my life, into my apartment, into the part of me that was vulnerable, and someone had watched. Someone had waited. Someone had found the gap in my armor and driven a blade through it.

"How long?" I asked.

"Signal died at 4:23. That's fifty minutes ago. If they're moving by car, they're within a sixty-mile radius. If they've switched vehicles, wider."

"Malachi?"

"Already mobilizing. Azrael is en route from the coast."

Azrael. My brother. The one who wore masks and collected knives and existed in the space between sociopath and savant. If Azrael was coming, Malachi considered this critical.

"I want every camera on Route 7 pulled," I said. "Every gas station, every intersection, every traffic light. I want Diamond's network turned inside out. I want Remi Harris brought in — she knows something, she always knows something. And I want Louis Nelson's name in every database we have access to, which is all of them."

"Already done. Grey—" Jeremy paused. The professional calm flickered. Underneath it: worry. Real, human, unprofessional worry. "We'll find her."

"I know we will."

"How do you know?"

I looked at the road. At the gravel turnoff. At the tire marks in the mud that pointed into the woods like a finger pointing at the dark.

"Because if we don't, there's nothing left to find. Of her or of me."

---

## Emily

Unknown date. Unknown location.

I woke up in pieces.

Not all at once — in fragments, like a film with frames missing. Ceiling. Concrete. The taste of blood. A zip tie around my wrists, plastic biting into the bruise Jordan had put there weeks ago, the universe's cruel joke: new restraints in the same spot as the old ones.

My head was a cathedral of pain. The blow had done something — cracked something, loosened something — and the world tilted when I turned my head, the room sliding sideways like a ship in a storm.

Room. It was a room. Small. No windows. A single bulb hanging from a wire, swinging slightly, casting shadows that moved like breathing. Concrete walls, concrete floor, the smell of damp and rust and something chemical that I couldn't identify.

I was lying on a cot. Thin mattress. No blanket. My jacket was gone. My phone was gone. Charlie's bear was gone.

The bear.

That's what broke me. Not the zip ties or the concrete or the swinging bulb or the pain in my skull that pulsed with every heartbeat. The bear. Charlie's bear. The one I'd carried every day for three years, the one that smelled like her bedroom and contained the last traces of a life I'd never get back.

I closed my eyes and breathed. In. Out. In. Out.

Deep breath, Snowflake.

Grey's voice in my head. Not a memory — a presence. As real and steady as if he were sitting beside me, his hand on my ankle, his almost-smile barely contained.

We've risen out of the dark.

Not yet. Not quite. But halfway. Always halfway.

The door opened.

A man walked in. Not the driver — someone else. Tall, thin, balding, with a face that reminded me of a bulldog left out in the rain. He was carrying a water bottle and a phone and an expression of professional boredom, as if kidnapping young women was an administrative task that had been delegated to him unfairly.

"You're awake," he observed.

"Where am I?"

"Somewhere your boyfriend won't find you for a while."

"He's not my boyfriend."

"No? What do you call the man who moved you into his apartment, threatened your stepbrother, and has been systematically dismantling our employer's operation for the last three months?"

I said nothing.

"His name is Greyson. He works for a man named Malachi. He's responsible for the deaths of seventeen people that we know of, including three associates of ours who were found in a shipping container in Lisbon with their throats cut. Shall I continue?"

I said nothing. My head was throbbing. The zip ties were cutting into my wrists. Somewhere, in a part of my brain that wasn't consumed by pain and fear, I was cataloguing — the man's voice, the room, the direction the shadows moved, the faint hum of machinery that suggested we were near an industrial area.

Matthew had taught me this. Not Matthew — I didn't know Matthew yet. Ash had taught me this. No. Nobody had taught me this. I was teaching myself, in real time, in a concrete room with a swinging light, because survival was something I'd been doing for three years and I wasn't going to stop now.

"Mr. Nelson will speak with you tomorrow," the man said. "He has questions about Greyson's operation. The more you cooperate, the sooner this ends."

"I don't know anything about his operation."

"We'll see." He set the water bottle on the floor. "Drink. You're dehydrated."

He left. The door locked. The lock was heavy — industrial, the kind you saw on storage units and holding cells.

I stared at the water bottle. Didn't touch it.

I closed my eyes.

Deep breath, Snowflake.

I breathed.

---

Time didn't work in the room.

Without windows, without my phone, without any reference point, the hours bled together into an undifferentiated mass. I slept, woke, slept again. The man came back twice — once with food I didn't eat and once with questions I didn't answer.

Another man came. Shorter. Rougher. He hit me once, across the face, when I refused to tell him Grey's third phone number. The blow was professional — designed to hurt, not to damage. Jordan's hits had been worse. Jordan's hits had been rage and whiskey and the unfocused violence of a man who couldn't control himself.

This was different. This was controlled. Purposeful. And somehow, that was scarier.

I retreated into myself. Into the place I'd built during three years with Jordan — the internal room where the wire lived, where the pain was distant, where the world was muffled and soft and nothing could touch me because I'd already been touched by worse.

I thought about Grey. About his hands folding paper roses. About his voice at 2 AM: Tell me about the ceiling fan. About the way he'd kissed my scars like they were something sacred.

I thought about Ash. About Syn's lavender candles and Ash's burnt popcorn and the couch that smelled like leather jacket and loyalty.

I thought about Charlie. About the pillow and the red sneakers and the grin that held twice the light.

Halfway out of the dark.

I held onto those words like a rope in a storm.

I didn't break.

I didn't bend.

I waited.

Because somewhere out there, a man with paper roses and three phones and a cat named after the brightest star in the sky was looking for me. I knew this with the same certainty that I knew the sun would rise and the stars would burn and the wire in my chest would keep humming even when the world went dark.

He was coming.

And when he got here, Louis Nelson was going to learn what happened when you took something from a man who had already lost everything else.

---

## Grey

November 25th, 2021

Three days.

Seventy-two hours. 4,320 minutes. Every one of them a blade.

Jeremy tracked the cab to an abandoned property in Whitmore County — forty miles north, a decommissioned industrial complex that Louis Nelson had purchased through three shell corporations and a bank in the Caymans. Azrael confirmed the location through a network of contacts that I didn't ask about because Azrael's contacts operated in spaces that made our work look like community service.

Malachi coordinated. His men surrounded the complex at 3 AM on the fourth day. Silent. Professional. The kind of operation that left no trace and no witnesses and accomplished in thirty minutes what law enforcement would have spent months attempting.

I went in first.

Not because it was protocol. It wasn't. Malachi's protocol was systematic entry, threat neutralization, asset extraction. Cold. Clinical. Effective.

But she was in there. And I was done with protocol.

The complex was a labyrinth — concrete corridors, storage bays, the skeletal remains of machines that hadn't run in decades. Louis had six men. Had. By the time I reached the third corridor, he had two. Azrael handled the rest with the silent, methodical efficiency that made him both my brother and the thing that kept me awake at night.

The door was industrial. The lock was heavy.

I broke it in four seconds. Malachi would have been proud.

She was on the cot. Lying on her side, knees pulled to her chest, her hair matted, a bruise on her cheekbone that was already shifting from purple to yellow. Her eyes were closed. For one horrible, endless second, I thought—

But her chest was moving. Up. Down. Up. Down. The small, ordinary miracle of breathing.

I crossed the room. Dropped to my knees beside the cot. Cut the zip ties with a blade I kept in my sleeve. Her wrists were raw — red, swollen, the skin broken in places where the plastic had dug in.

"Emily."

Her eyes opened.

Blue. Glazed with pain and exhaustion and something else — something fierce and stubborn and unbroken that I recognized because I'd been seeing it since the night she'd eaten gummy worms behind a gas station and told me she had no faith.

"Hey," she whispered. Her voice was hoarse. Cracked. "You came."

"I always come."

"You took four days."

"I'm aware. I'll do better next time."

"Don't let there be a next time."

I picked her up. She weighed even less than before — four days without proper food or water, three of them spent on a cot in a concrete room. She pressed her face into my neck and her fingers gripped my jacket and I carried her out of the room, through the corridor, past the things I'd done to get to her, into the cold November air.

Malachi was by the car. His face, when he saw her, went through something I'd never seen on him before — a flash of raw, fatherly pain that he suppressed in the time it took to blink.

"Is she—"

"She's alive." I set her in the car. Wrapped a blanket around her. Jeremy appeared with water and a first-aid kit.

"The bear," she whispered. "Grey. Charlie's bear. They took it."

"I'll find it."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

I went back inside. Found the bear in a storage room, thrown in a corner, dusty and forgotten. I brushed it off and held it carefully, the way you hold something that weighs nothing and means everything.

I brought it back to her.

She clutched it to her chest and closed her eyes and cried — silent, shaking, the tears of a person who had been holding it together through sheer force of will and was finally, in the safety of the car, in the proximity of the bear and the man and the knowledge that it was over, letting go.

I held her while she cried. While Jeremy drove and Malachi sat in the passenger seat and Azrael vanished into the dark to do whatever Azrael did when the mission was complete.

"It's over," I told her. "I've got you."

She didn't respond. Just held the bear. Just cried.

Sirius was waiting at the apartment door when we arrived. She took one look at Emily, jumped into her lap, and began to purr.

The cat knew.

The cat always knew.