chapter 7: A Search That Found Nothing

Scarlett didn't sleep on the couch so much as guard it, phone in hand, eviction notice and photograph laid out side by side on the coffee table like evidence at a trial only she was attending.

By six in the morning she'd stopped waiting for answers from anyone and started doing what she should have done from the beginning. She typed Draven's name into her phone.

Draven Ashcroft.

Nothing useful loaded.No social media. No employment history. No public records, no business registration, no address, nothing that belonged to an ordinary thirty-something man living in the same city as her. She tried variations, Draven Ashcroft business. Draven Ashcroft LinkedIn. Draven Ashcroft real estate, since he clearly had money and men who watched apartments like professionals didn't drive cars like the one that had idled outside her building.

Every search came back empty, like the internet has never heard of him.

A man that large, that striking, that obviously wealthy, should have left some kind of digital footprint. Instead he existed like a hole cut clean out of the internet.

Scarlett set the phone down slowly, a colder fear settling into her chest than anything Malachi's photograph had managed. People who threatened her had names, addresses, patterns. A man who seemed to exist nowhere except the places where she happened to be was something else entirely, and it was one more reason not to trust him blindly, whatever he'd done for her so far.

She was still turning that over when the first sound came from the fire escape.

A scrape. Metal against metal, careful, deliberate, the kind of noise a person made when they were trying very hard not to make noise at all.

Scarlett froze, then moved. She grabbed her phone and dialed 911 with shaking hands, backing toward the front door as the second sound came closer, right outside her bedroom window. She was still giving the dispatcher her address when the window latch gave with a sharp metallic crack.

She didn't wait to see who climbed through. She ran, phone still pressed to her ear, the dispatcher's calm voice telling her officers were on their way, and didn't stop until she was outside on the sidewalk with her back against the brick and her pulse slamming in her throat.

No one followed her down. No black car idled at the curb. No tall shape waited in the lobby. For once, she was entirely, terrifyingly alone, and some small, stubborn part of her almost preferred it that way.

The police arrived six minutes later, two officers who escorted her back up once the building had been cleared. The window hung open, curtain snapping in the morning wind. Drawers had been pulled from her desk, papers scattered across the floor, and the coffee table where she'd left the photograph and the eviction notice side by side sat empty.

"We'll note the break-in in the report," the older officer said, running a gloved hand along the window frame. "But without a witness, usable prints, or anything else that identifies who came through here, there's not a lot more we can do tonight."

"They didn't take anything valuable," Scarlett said. "My laptop's still here. My jewelry's still here. They took two pieces of paper."

The officer's expression shifted, a real attention breaking through the routine. "You're sure that's all that's missing?"

"I'm sure."

He wrote that down without comment, gave her a case number, and told her to keep her doors locked and call if anything else happened. It felt like advice for a different, smaller problem than the one she actually had.

She was still standing in the wreckage of her own living room when Draven knocked.

She let him in mostly because arguing through a door felt more exhausting than facing him directly. He surveyed the room in one long sweep, jaw tightening at the open window, the overturned drawers, the empty coffee table.

"They weren't looking for valuables," he said. "They were looking for those papers."

"Why would anyone want my eviction notice?"

He didn't answer.

"That's twice now you've gone quiet on a question that actually matters," Scarlett said. "How did you know to come here?"

"I check on you."

"You check on me. Meaning you were watching this building, and you still didn't stop someone from climbing through my window."

"I'm not omniscient, Scarlett. I can't be everywhere."

"Then maybe you shouldn't act like you're the solution to everything that's gone wrong since the moment I met you." She crossed her arms, refusing to let the exhaustion in her voice soften anything. "The black car, the bank freeze, the eviction notice, now this. Every single time you show up saying you're protecting me, something worse happens right after. I'm starting to wonder if you're the reason any of it is happening at all."

His expression shuttered, quick and controlled, but she'd hit closer to a nerve than she expected.

"I understand why you'd think that."

"That's not a denial."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

She stared at him, waiting for more, and got nothing but the same steady silence she'd been getting since the bar. Whatever patience she'd been extending him ran out completely in that moment.

"The last person I need right now is a man who knows more about my life than I do and won't tell me why," she said. "I'm going to Nora's. Alone."

"That's not the safest choice you could make."

"It's my choice to make. Not yours."

She expected him to argue. He didn't. He nodded once, jaw tight, and stepped back to let her pass, and the ease of it unsettled her more than a fight would have.

She was three blocks away, phone still in her hand, when it buzzed with a message from the same unknown number as before.

Running won't help. He couldn't save the last one either.

Scarlett stopped walking. Her stomach tightened as the second, worse realization caught up with the first. She hadn't told anyone where she was going. Not Nora. Just Draven and no one else

So how did they already know she was running.

She read the message twice more, and instead of the fear she expected to feel, a colder, more useful resolve took its place.

If Malachi knew about the last woman Draven had failed to protect, then somewhere there was a name, a story, a truth Draven clearly didn't want her to find.

She was done waiting for him to decide when she'd earned it.

She was going to find it herself.