Novels by Allison zee

Rowan drove too fast.Not recklessly.Precisely.Every turn cut tighter than necessary, every light calculated rather than obeyed. The city blurred around him in streaks of white and red while Lennox sat tense in the passenger seat, checking Taryn’s last message again.Watching a location. Something’s off.No address after that.No follow-up.Nothing.And thatthat was what Rowan hated.“She should’ve answered by now,” Lennox muttered.Rowan didn’t respond.Because he agreed.Taryn wasn’t careless.If she went silent, something had interrupted it.Or someone.Rowan’s grip tightened slightly on the wheel.“Call again.”Lennox already was.Straight to voicemail.“Nothing.”Rowan accelerated.—Across the street from the safe house, Taryn stayed still.The wind shifted lightly around her, carrying distant traffic and the faint hum of the city farther out, but none of it mattered now.Her focus stayed on the house.The figure had moved once.That was all she got.A shadow crossing the win

Julian didn’t wait this time.The call ended.The decision followed.No space between.He sat still for exactly three seconds after Preston’s voice disappeared from the line long enough to confirm what he already knew.This wasn’t suspicion anymore.This was war.Julian leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, eyes fixed on the floor like he could see the board laid out beneath it.“Then we stop testing,” he said quietly.A guard passed.Ignored.Another inmate spoke somewhere down the hall.Irrelevant.Julian reached for the device again.One call.No hesitation.It connected immediately.“I want it done properly this time,” Julian said.No greeting.No context.The voice on the other end didn’t ask for it.“Location?”“His office won’t work,”

The first sign wasn’t obvious.That’s why it worked.Preston was halfway through a meeting when his phone vibrated once against the table. He didn’t check it immediately. He never did. Not in front of people.Control was maintained in small habits.But something about the timingthe interruptionpulled his attention.He glanced down.One message.No name.No number.Just three words.They’ve started moving.Preston didn’t react.Didn’t pause the meeting.Didn’t shift.But insideeverything sharpened.“Continue,” he said calmly, leaning back in his chair.The man across from him resumed speaking, unaware that the room had just changed.Because Preston already knew what that message meant.Julian.—It didn’t take long.Taryn heard it bef

Julian didn’t react immediately.That was what made it dangerous.He sat with the device in his hand long after the screen had gone dark, long after the last frame of Preston’s voice had stopped echoing in the silence. Most people would’ve responded quickly anger, denial, instinct.Julian did none of that.He watched.Replayed it in his head.Not the words.The tone.The certainty.“…we move forward.”Not hesitation.Not uncertainty.Forward.Without him.Julian leaned back slightly, fingers tightening almost imperceptibly around the edge of the device before he set it down.Carefully.Controlled.Because this wasn’t about the video.Not really.Videos could be manipulated.Voices could be cut.Moments could be rearranged.But intentionintention was harder to fake.And Prest

Lennox didn’t sleep.Not properly.He lay still long enough for the room to go quiet, long enough for the city to dim into something distant but his mind never followed. It stayed sharp. Awake. Moving.Because nowthere was nothing holding it in place.Julian was gone.And with himthe structure Lennox had been forced to live inside.No instructions.No pressure.No voice telling him what came next.That should’ve felt like freedom.It didn’t.It felt like exposure.Because if Julian could fallthen everything connected to him could fall too.Including Lennox.He sat up, exhaling sharply, dragging a hand over his face.“This doesn’t end clean,” he muttered.It never did.And nowhe wasn’t going to stand in the middle and wait to be pulled under with it.He stood, grabbed his jacket, and lef

The city didn’t settle.It shifted.The noise didn’t fade after Julian’s arrest it changed shape. What had been chaos sharpened into something more focused, more deliberate. Screens still glowed. Voices still carried. But now there was direction behind it.Questions.Names.Connections.And one name, more than any other, kept surfacing.Rowan.He saw it before anyone said it out loud.A passing glance at a screen in a café window. A headline scrolling too fast to fully read but slow enough to catch fragments.“…linked to”“…seen near”“…possible connection”Rowan didn’t stop walking.Didn’t react.But he saw it.And he understood what it meant.This hadn’t just taken Julian down.It had created space.And something had stepped into it.—Taryn caught up to him half a block later.“You’ve seen it,” she said.Not a question.Rowan didn’t slow.“Yes.”Her expression tightened slightly as she fell into step beside him. “It’s spreading faster than it should.”“It was always going to,” Rowa