Chapter 7

Reid's POV

The photograph wouldn't stay still in my hand. I kept setting it down and picking it back up, like putting enough distance between us would make the figure in the frame come into focus, make the blur behind Audrey's shoulder resolve into something I could act on instead of something I could only fear.

I opened my phone and scrolled back through eleven months of messages I'd never answered properly.

Reid, please just listen to me.

I know how this looks. I need you to trust me anyway.

I'm not lying to you. I've never lied to you.

Not one reply from me that wasn't some version of not now or we'll talk later or silence dressed up as patience. I set the phone face-down on the desk next to the photograph, next to the surveillance stills, next to a note that said goodbye in handwriting that hadn't shaken once.

She was the only person in three years who had never once lied to me. And I'd spent three years deciding she had.

I stood, walked to the cabinet by the window, and pulled out the honeymoon photograph I'd set aside earlier, glass still cracked, her blood still dried into the corner of the frame where I'd cut my hand. I wrapped it in a shirt from my closet, the way you wrap something you're afraid of breaking further, and set it inside my desk drawer instead of throwing it away.

Cam watched me do all of it without saying a word.

"Find my wife," I said, when I finally looked up. "I don't care what it costs."

My security chief answered on the first ring.

"Marcus. I need every resource we have, starting now."

"Sir?"

"Every private investigator on our payroll and every one we can hire by the hour. Every airport contact who owes us a favor. Every bank we do business with, I want eyes on any account with her name attached to it, even accounts she closed. Every business lead, every hotel chain, every rental agency in every city she has any reason to have flown to."

A pause on the line, brief enough that most people wouldn't have caught it. "That's a significant deployment, sir. Scope?"

"The scope is I don't care what it costs. Find her."

"Understood. I'll have a team assembled within the hour."

Nobody on the other end of that call asked why the man who'd spent three years methodically dismantling the Whitmore family was now emptying his own resources to find the last Whitmore standing. Nobody questioned it at all. I hung up before I had to explain something I didn't have words for yet, that this wasn't strategy anymore, wasn't revenge, wasn't anything I recognized from the last three years of my life. It was just fear, plain and total, the kind that doesn't stop to count what it costs.

"The investigator should see this," Cam said, nodding at the photograph still sitting on my desk. "If someone's been watching Audrey, he needs to know before he keeps digging blind."

We drove in silence. Daniels met us at the door of his office before I'd even reached for the buzzer, like he'd been watching the street.

"I recovered the backup," he said, leading us inside. "But that's not what you need to hear first."

"Then what do I need to hear."

"The original drive Audrey brought you, the one that came up empty when you plugged it in." He sat down heavily behind his desk. "It wasn't corrupted. I told your friend that already. What I didn't tell him is that three days after Audrey left that footage with me, someone broke into this office."

"Broke in," I repeated.

"Cash in the drawer, untouched. Equipment worth more than my car, still sitting exactly where it was." Daniels' jaw worked. "They went through one filing cabinet. Took every physical document connected to the Sterling Calloway case. Left everything else alone."

The room tilted slightly, the way a room does when a piece finally fits somewhere you didn't want it to fit.

"They didn't want money," I said slowly. "They wanted the case to disappear."

"They wanted her to look like a liar," Cam said. "That's not theft. That's sabotage."

Daniels stood and led us down a short hallway to a back room I hadn't known was there, a storage space, metal shelving along both walls, one section of it stripped bare while the shelves around it sat undisturbed, thick with dust that hadn't been touched in years.

"Cameras were disabled for exactly forty minutes," he said. "Long enough to do this and nothing else." He gestured at the empty shelf, at a lock on the door frame that had been forced clean through instead of picked. "Whoever did it knew exactly what they were looking for, and exactly how long they had before anyone would notice the feed had dropped."

I stared at the gap on the shelf where a case file that could have saved my marriage had sat for who knew how long before someone erased it out of existence.

"Someone has been rewriting history," I said.

Nobody answered that, because there wasn't anything to add to it.

We were halfway back down the hallway when Daniels' phone rang. He glanced at the screen, frowned, and answered anyway.

"Daniels."

Silence. I watched his face change before he'd said a word, the stillness of a man listening to something he wished he could hang up on.

Then, low enough that I almost missed it, a voice came through the speaker, distorted into something barely human.

"You should have left the past buried."

The line went dead in his hand.

Daniels lowered the phone slowly, like it had gotten heavier while he held it. His face had turned to the color of the dust on those empty shelves.

"They know," he said quietly. "They know we're here."