Page 168 of Fractured Allegiance

He'd test her first. Lock her down, and watch her, break her if he had to.

Figure out if she's loyal or if she needs to be eliminated.

Option three: This is about me.

Maybe Drazen is finally reacting to our relationship.

Maybe Drazen's moving her to see what I do. To see if I follow. To see if I'm compromised too.

I exhale slowly.

I don't know which option is true.

But I know one thing: she's not home, and wherever they took her, they didn't want anyone to know where.

I wait in the car until the street forgets how to move. Until even the stray cats stop threading their way between the dumpsters behind her building. Her window stays dark. The buffer doesn’t blip back online.

Something’s wrong.

I don’t go charging off into the night. That would be reckless. That would be emotional. I can’t afford that.

So I drive.

Nowhere special. Just long enough for the streetlights to smear into streaks and the pavement to lose meaning. I loop the city’s gut twice. Pass Dom’s club once, slow. No sign of her car. No sign of his.

At a gas station two blocks off the pier, I get out and buy black coffee I won’t drink. It burns my hand through the paper cup, a necessary distraction.

Back at the apartment, I sit on the edge of the bed for thirty-three minutes. I count them, because I can’t stop hearing the echo of her voice from the last time we touched. The last time she looked at me, like she still didn’t know what I was hiding, but already sensed it was something that would cost her.

I don’t sleep.

Instead, I pull out the same blueprint I’ve memorized a hundred times, the one with every potential safehouse in the area marked and annotated by hand. Drazen doesn’t move women around like trophies. He moves them like leverage. And Lydia is a threat to every edge he hasn’t refined properly.

I circle five locations. Cross out three. Add two more based on the last shipment he had rerouted through the waterfront.

When that doesn’t calm the chaos in my chest, I take the burner phone apart and rebuild it. Twice. No messages. No signs. No trace of her, not even a breadcrumb left behind in the dust of the city.

Around four-thirty, I open the feed from her loft again. Still nothing.

I lean back in my chair, throat dry and eyes burning.

If I stay still another minute, I’ll snap.

So I don’t.

By the time the sky begins to shift from its dead pre-dawn grey to something with teeth, I’ve been awake for twenty-two hours. Maybe more. It’s hard to tell time in between panic and denial.

The apartment is cold again.

Not physically. The heating’s on a timer. But there's a kind of emptiness that no thermostat can fix. It’s the kind of stillness that only exists when someone who should’ve come back… didn’t.

I’m seated on the edge of the couch, eyes fixed on the surveillance loop from her loft. I’ve watched the feed at least forty times. Nothing useful. She never returned.

I replay the final few frames with her from the day before. Lydia looking at me with those damn eyes, shoulders stiff. Face unreadable. Determined. I thought she just needed space. Time.

"I can't," she'd said.

And I'd walked away. Waited in my car, for her to make her choice.