Page 40

GRACE

SOMEWHERE OVER THE ATLANTIC

T he cabin lights were dimmed to a dull amber, casting everyone in the same sleepy glow.

The kind that made it feel like time has been suspended somewhere over the Atlantic.

I’m not sure how long we’ve been flying.

Hours, probably. Maybe more. Everyone else is asleep or pretending.

I press my forehead to the window. It’s cold against my skin.

There’s nothing outside—no stars, no clouds. Just black.

I’m not really awake, not really dreaming either. It’s that in-between space, where everything loosens. Time, memory, control.

And then I feel her. Amorette.

She’s not here—not really—but her voice comes so clearly in my head that I don’t even question it.

“You always did get sentimental when you were tired,” she says, teasing me like she always did.

I almost smile. “I’m not sentimental,” I whisper. “I’m just trying not to forget how to talk to you.”

“You’re the one who left.”

I don’t bother arguing with that. I left everything. Her, home, the version of myself who grew up wanting big dreams, wanting fame, and maybe even fortune. I had those things now, but I didn’t have her .

My hands were in my lap. Knuckles bruised, a thin line healing along the side of my thumb.

The scar on my wrist seemed to be permanently etched there.

My nails were still a disaster and I’d forgotten to fix them.

Just like I’d not bothered with my hair, just braided it back and out of the way.

Still, I stared at my hands for a while, trying to figure out when they started looking like someone else’s.

“I think I hurt someone,” I said, barely audible. Was I actually talking out loud? Or was I asleep? I really didn’t know anymore. “Not out of panic. Not because I had no choice. I had the choice, and I still did it.”

Her silence in my head is louder than the engine hum.

“I didn’t feel sick afterward,” I admitted. “No shaking. No hands clenching the sink. Just… quiet. Like it was over and that was enough.”

“So you’re getting good at it.”

“I am,” I said. “I’ve been watching the guys. I sat there while they interrogated someone. Seen just how violent they can get, actually did a raid. Me—on a raid.” I closed my eyes. “I used to cry if I had to kill a spider, remember?”

No answer. Not really. Just the heaviness of her not being there.

“I don’t flinch at blood anymore. Not mine, not theirs. It’s just color. Noise. Sometimes I don’t even see the person, just the angles.”

That scared me more than the blood ever did.

“I keep thinking…” My throat tightened. “What if this is just who I am now? What if the part of me that remembered you in the middle of all that—the part that felt something—what if that’s gone?”

“Then why are you still talking to me?”

I swallowed. “Because I’m scared I’m getting numb to the separation. And if I stop feeling you … then I won’t know who I am anymore.”

Someone behind me coughed, stirred, and then quieted again. I stole a look at Alphabet, he was out, sprawled back in his seat, legs stretched out and Goblin slept on the floor between us.

“What if I never find you?” I glanced at the window, met my reflection’s eyes. “What if I do but I’m no one you recognize anymore?” Am saved people. She was a crusader. I was so much not that at the moment. Would she be able to forgive me? “What if I’ve forgotten how to be me?”

I waited. Just the engines, the occasional beep of a seatbelt sign. The quiet stretched.

Then, softer: “Am, what if I was never who I was and now I’m this? What do I say then?” Did I even know what I was now?

That’s the part I couldn’t stop circling. If we found her, what happens then? What did I say?

Sorry I disappeared? Sorry I became someone you wouldn’t recognize? Someone who doesn’t recognize herself?

Would she look at me and see a sister, or just a stranger wearing her face?

I don’t cry. I hadn’t in weeks. I wasn’t sure if I’d forgotten how, or if I’d just learned not to need it.

The window reflects just enough to show me my own eyes—strange, shadowed, unfamiliar. I don’t look like me. I look like someone waiting for impact.

I pressed my fingers to the glass and whispered, “Please don’t forget me. Even if I forget how to be me.”

And just for a moment, I swear I feel something brush my hand. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s memory. Maybe it’s her.

Or maybe I just really, really need it to be.

SOMEWHERE IN IDAHO

The road was long, flat, and soaked in gold. Sunset stretched everything out—shadows, silence, the distance ahead of us. Alphabet had one hand on the wheel, the other tapping out a rhythm on the console.

We’d indulged in a hotel after our flight landed. Showers. Food. And twenty-four hours of rest. It would be easier on his leg and Goblin definitely needed the break. AB was handling me and I let him.

As much as I’d tried, sleeping on the plane had proved impossible. It wasn’t much better at the hotel. I kept going over everything in my head. I kept replaying the last several days on a loop that I couldn’t turn off.

Bones explained we wouldn’t hear from them until their missions were done. There were reasons for the choices they made. I understood that. I even respected it.

But it was so much harder in practice. If Alphabet wasn’t right here, I might have lost my mind. We weren’t talking, but it wasn’t a foreboding silence. It was almost comfortable, or it would be if my thoughts weren’t so jumbled.

“Gracie…”

“What if I approached Amorette’s boss?” The idea just popped right out of me. The moment I said it, though, was the moment I realized how much I had been thinking about it.

“What?” He shot me a sideways look. “See her boss? The attorney dick who is pretending she quit?”

“Yes. Him. I go as Amorette, ambush him.” The more I thought about this, the more I liked.

“I am so going to regret asking this,” Alphabet said, his attention on the road ahead of us. “Why?”

“Well, I could say ‘why not,’ particularly when we know something is going on there. No one has reported us missing, no one is looking, and they are acting like she quit.” Play devil’s advocate, I told myself. Logic and reason over emotion. Except…

I twisted in the passenger seat, so I could face him. “I would like to preface everything with, I am going a little crazy right now because it’s killing me that we found so much but nothing about Amorette. Does that make sense?”

His expression gentled as he slanted me a look, then he reached over to take my hand. “Yes, that makes sense and you don’t have to explain wanting to find your sister.”

Squeezing his fingers, I blew out a breath.

“Thank you. Okay, so… I keep replaying everything that happened in France the past few weeks. Everything that happened before. The phone calls, the dismissals. What happened to Eleanor. But more than that—I called Rachel to ask her for a favor and she didn’t even react like something had happened. ”

“Your friend the photographer.”

“Yes, my friend with the apartment in Paris. I reached out, asked for that favor and she was all in. But not once did she ask me about Eleanor or being missing or anything. She didn’t even seem to know there had been a problem.”

“Which is a pretty key reason, I know there is some conspiracy behind your disappearances. That we found so much about you in France and nothing about her makes it even more suspect.” His tone had turned grim, but his grip remained comforting. A lifeline.

“Yes. That takes us back to Amorette’s law firm. My manager was killed. Photographers I worked with have been killed. I haven't really dug in to see if any more people connected with me—people who would notice if I was missing and would say something—have been killed.”

Eleanor would have. Without one iota of doubt, she’d have hunted me down herself if only to verify that I was the one who walked away. Not someone else.

Then she might have reamed me a new asshole.

God, I missed her.

I swallowed the lump of tears trying to form. “But you didn’t turn up anyone missing at Amorette’s firm. You didn’t say a partner died or a secretary or a law clerk.”

Alphabet frowned.

“When we were talking to Reznik, he mentioned Amorette. Not by name, but by profession.”

“I remember,” Alphabet said, stroking his thumb against the side of my hand. “In theory, researching you would have turned up information on her.”

“Yes.”

“So, just Reznik knowing about her doesn’t mean he knew she was taken.

It also doesn’t let him off the hook.” What Alphabet didn’t add was Reznik admitting nothing about Amorette.

Even when they broke him and he sobbed out answers in a wretched voice.

She never came up. He didn’t know. “That said, in their efforts to clean up your disappearance, they have eliminated people.”

“So why haven’t they eliminated her boss?

Because you’d think by virtue of having to cover her cases, they’d be pissed that she just disappeared.

Not to mention the story that she just randomly quit and left.

That’s not Am. You’d have to be a complete and utter moron with your head so far up your own ass you could tickle your own tonsils to miss how committed she is to her clients. ”

Is dammit. Is.

“Okay, that is a mental image I did not need to have, thank you.”

Still, my lips twitched at his deadpan.

“But you have a point.” One he didn’t like. “Talk to me about ambushing him?”

“If you were responsible for someone vanishing, and it’s been—” I faltered, time slipping through my fingers like water. “Months. What would you do if they just walked into your restaurant? Your office? Some fundraiser?”

“I punched Reznik in the face,” he said flatly, sparing me a glance. “I thought he was dead. Now I know he is. We’re not letting some asshole just punch you in the face.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “But?—”

“No but .”

“Yes, but ,” I countered, popping the word like a balloon. “His reaction could tell us everything. If he’s hiding something, we’ll see it in that first moment. We only get one shot at shocking him. I can dress like her. Pretend to be her. Walk right up and watch him crack.”

He said nothing as we chewed up the miles. I had no idea where in Montana this so-called base was, only that it wasn’t close enough to fly. That meant road time—lots of it.

When his fingers started drumming faster on the steering wheel, I braced for the coming storm.

“I hate this idea,” he muttered finally. No elaboration needed.

I licked my lips, waited a beat longer. “But?”

“But it could work,” he admitted. “It could give us answers. And if he does know something… he’s an attorney. Not a soldier. He won’t last long once we start asking the right questions.”

No, he wouldn’t. A dark thread of satisfaction coiled in my chest. If he’d had a hand in what happened to her—if he’d hurt her—I might even enjoy watching him squirm.

“I need to know, AB.” My voice was soft, almost swallowed by the engine. Grief painted every syllable.

“I know, Gracie.” His sigh was heavier than his words. “We’ll loop the others in. No way we’re running off half-cocked while they’re on mission. Bones would kill me.”

“He wouldn’t kill you.”

“He’d make me wish I was dead—and he’d be right.” Alphabet threw me a flat look. “That said, we can scout the perfect spot for the ambush, do more recon, and pull some data from his devices. I’ve been a little… distracted.”

“You’ve been doing a hell of a lot,” I reminded him. “This is just the next step.”

“Gracie…” He sighed again, softer this time, covering my hand with his. “We’ll figure it out.”

His phone chimed. He picked it up, glancing at the screen. Several messages flickered by. Then he tapped a button and the car filled with the sterile tones of an automated voice.

“To check your messages: press one.”

He hit the one without looking.

“Please enter your pin and box number followed by the pound sign.”

His fingers danced over the keys. I chewed my bottom lip, nerves twisting. Was it the team? Had something gone wrong?

“You have one new message. Press one to?—”

He didn’t let it finish. Just pressed one again.

A man’s voice filled the car—frayed, worn thin. “I need help. Call me when you get this.” Then he rattled off a number. The message ended.

“Press one to replay the message, two to delete?—”

He hit one again.

“I need help. Call me when you get this.”

Then silence. He hung up.

“A friend?” I asked quietly.

“It’s Doc,” he said, voice gone grim. His expression darkened, and my heart clenched.

“He’s in trouble.” Not a question.

“Yeah. We need to get to base. I need to reach the guys, let them know?—”

“I thought we couldn’t contact them directly.”

“Not directly ,” Alphabet said, a wry smile tugging at his mouth. “Did you really think they’d go so deep into the dark with no way to reach out?”

I made a face. “Another test?”

“Maybe.” He reached over and brushed his fingers against my cheek. “But you’re all A’s in my book.” Then he laced our fingers together.

“We’ll help him,” I promised.

“We don’t even know what’s wrong.” That preyed on him.

Shrugging, I lifted his hand to my lips and kissed his fingers. “Doesn’t matter. You’ll figure it out. That’s kind of your thing. We’ve been focused on my family for a while… I want to help with yours.”

He let out a slow exhale, then pushed the accelerator. The engine responded with a growl.

One step forward, two steps back. But I knew what their team meant to them. To all of them.

Am would understand. I wasn’t giving up. I was never going to give up.

“Gracie?”

“Yeah?”

“You are ours . Don’t forget it.”