บททั้งหมดของ Pucking Hate You, My Bully Captain : บทที่ 91 - บทที่ 100

Zach’s POVI sat with the article open on my laptop for a long time after the initial shock wore off, forcing myself to breathe through the panic instead of letting it swallow me whole. Panic wasn’t useful right now. Panic wouldn’t get me answers. What I needed was information, and information, I reminded myself, was something I actually knew how to find.I closed the article and opened a blank document instead, the old, familiar habit of organizing chaos into something manageable settling my racing pulse just slightly. If Ryder’s number wasn’t picking up, genuinely wasn’t picking up, not just slow to respond, then I needed another way in. Matthew’s number existed in a place I had saved in a memory I’d never actually needed to use until now, tucked away the night Ryder had given it to me almost as an afterthought, insurance against exactly this kind of situationI dug through my phone first, scrolling back through the message thread from that night at the warehouse, the one where he’d

Zach’s POVThe call came on the fourth day, late afternoon, my phone lighting up with Matthew’s name while I sat hunched over coursework I hadn’t managed to absorb a single word of. I answered before the second ring finished, heart already climbing into my throat.“Matthew. Did you find anything?”“Not as much as I wanted to.” His voice carried an edge I hadn’t heard from him before; frustration, tightly controlled, the particular strain of someone accustomed to solving problems suddenly running into walls he couldn’t fully explain. “I called dad directly. Twice. Both times he gave me some version of ‘it’s being handled, don’t worry about it,’ which, coming from him, usually means the exact opposite.”“What does that mean? Handled how?”“I don’t know, Zach. That’s the problem.” A frustrated exhale carried down the line. “Every time I push for specifics, he deflects. Changes the subject, tells me he’s got a call coming in, promises we’ll talk properly later and then somehow never actua

Zach's POVTwo days after the movie night, the fragile calm I'd borrowed from Gigi's fairy lights and bad rom-coms had already worn thin, replaced by the same restless energy that had driven me to Matthew's number in the first place. A month felt like an eternity to simply sit still inside, and I'd never been built for sitting still when there was information to be found. That had always been the thing that steadied me, even back in high school — the sense that if I just looked hard enough, organized the pieces carefully enough, the picture would eventually resolve into something I could actually understand.So I opened my laptop on a Tuesday evening, coursework abandoned entirely, and decided I was done waiting for someone else to hand me answers.I started with the obvious — the Whitmore Holdings public site, scrolling back through every press release from the last two months, cataloguing dates methodically in a spreadsheet I built out of old habit, the same instinct that used to hav

Zach's POVThe gala photo stayed open in a separate tab long after I'd stopped actively looking at it, Ryder's hollow expression burning itself into the back of my mind even when I wasn't directly staring at the screen. I closed my laptop briefly, pressed my palms against my eyes, and made a decision that had been building steadily for weeks now, finally solidifying into something concrete.I wasn't waiting a month.I opened a new tab and typed the address of the Summers estate into a search bar. The general region matched what little he'd told me about growing up.If Matthew couldn't act fast enough, I would have to go myself.Without giving myself too much time to think about it, I pulled up a bus schedule, methodically working through routes and transfer points as I built the same kind of careful spreadsheet I'd used to track the timeline of his disappearance from public view.The plan was meticulous; departure dates against estimated arrivals. A rough plan for what I'd even say on

Zach's POVThe next exam sat two days later, financial modeling with Professor Saks. I remembered, distantly, a version of myself from earlier in the semester who'd stayed late in office hours just to ask follow up questions about sensitivity analysis, hungry for the kind of clarity that came from truly understanding a system down to its bones.That version of myself felt impossibly far away as I settled into my seat in the smaller seminar room, morning light slanting thin and pale through blinds someone had only half opened, dust motes drifting visible in the narrow beams like slow, indifferent snow.Professor Saks distributed the exam packets himself, moving methodically down each row, the heel of his shoes clicking soft against linoleum in a rhythm that under normal circumstances I would have found almost soothing. Today it only sharpened the tension already coiled tight behind my sternum, every sound in the room registering slightly too loud, slightly too close, my nerves stretched