Chapter Thirteen: The Journal

Lena’s apartment lighting was dull and she looked stressed by the time we got there, papers spread across her kitchen table, a leather bound journal sitting in the middle of it like something radioactive.

“Don’t touch it yet,” she said, when I reached for it. “Read my sticky notes first. There’s a lot in here and most of it isn’t going to make sense out of order.”

Cole stood close behind me, not touching, but near enough that I could feel the tension coming off him in waves as Lena flipped the journal open to the first marked page.

“She’s been keeping records since before you signed with the label,” Lena said. “Every showcase you did as a teenager. Every review. There’s a whole section just tracking Cole’s career too, going back further than I expected.”

“How much further,” Cole asked, voice tight.

“Further than makes sense for someone who was just a source for one article.” Lena flipped ahead several pages, tapping one entry. “This is the part you need to see.”

I leaned over the table. Evelyn’s handwriting was small, slanted, obsessively neat, like someone who needed every letter under control. My name appeared again and again, circled in places, underlined in others, notes in the margins that read less like observations and more like instructions to herself.

She belongs to me.

My stomach turned. “She wrote that.”

“She wrote a lot worse than that,” Lena said. “Keep going.”

I turned the page with hands that weren’t as steady as I wanted them to be. There, dated only two weeks out, was an entry about the awards ceremony, the one Gerald’s assistant had already flagged on my calendar. Evelyn had written out the guest list from memory, circled my name, and beside it, in handwriting pressed so hard into the page it had nearly torn through, three words.

This ends there.

“What does that mean,” I said, though some part of me already knew I didn’t want the answer.

“I don’t know,” Lena said. “But given everything else in here, I don’t think it means anything good.”

Cole reached for my hand without saying anything first, and I let him take it, needing something solid to hold onto while the floor kept shifting under everything I thought I understood about my own career.

“This is us against her,” I said quietly. “Isn’t it.”

“Us.” Something eased slightly in his voice, like the word itself was doing work he needed done. “I like that.”

“Don’t get used to it. I still have questions you haven’t answered.”

“I know. I’m working through the list.”

Lena cleared her throat, unwilling to let the moment stretch. “There’s more. She’s been in contact with someone at the venue. Security clearance requests under a different name. I couldn’t trace who’s actually behind it yet, but it wasn’t Evelyn’s name on the paperwork.”

“So she’s planning something for the ceremony.”

“That’s what it looks like. I need more time to confirm what, exactly.”

“Two weeks,” Cole said. “That’s not much time.”

“It’s what we’ve got.” Lena closed the journal carefully, like it might bite her if she handled it wrong. “I want to keep digging through this tonight while it’s fresh. You two should go home, get some rest. I’ll call the second I find anything else.”

We didn’t argue. There wasn’t much use arguing with Lena once she’d made a decision, and honestly, I didn’t have anything left in me to fight with. Cole drove us back to the penthouse in near silence, both of us turning over everything we’d just read, the journal’s contents looping through my head like a song stuck on the wrong note.

“You should try to sleep,” he said, once we were back inside, standing in the doorway of my room like he wasn’t sure whether he was still welcome there after tonight.

“I don’t think I can.”

“Try anyway. Tomorrow’s going to need you rested.”

He was right, and I hated that he was right, and I told him so, which got the smallest, most exhausted laugh out of him that I’d heard all week.

“Goodnight, Rhea.”

“Goodnight.”

I didn’t sleep, not really, not for a long time. I lay there running through everything Lena had shown us, every circled name, every underlined threat dressed up as an observation, and somewhere around three in the morning I finally drifted into something thin and restless that didn’t feel like real rest at all.

My phone woke me a few hours later. Lena’s name on the screen, and something in the tone of the single word she said when I picked up told me the ground had shifted again before I’d even had coffee.

“Rhea.” Her voice was different now, flatter, scared in a way I hadn’t heard from her the night before. “The journal’s gone.”

I sat up fast. “What do you mean gone.”

“I mean I locked it in my desk last night, and this morning the drawer was open and it wasn’t there. Nobody broke in. No forced entry, nothing on the cameras.” A pause, heavy with everything she wasn’t saying. “Whoever took it either had a key, or they didn’t need one.”