Without A Trace Book Novels & Stories

And I’d kill every single person in this godforsaken city if that’s what it took to get her back. We had scoured every exit of the mall, hacked into every security feed within a ten-block radius. I had men running digital forensics around the clock—traffic cams, license plate readers, even drones in the skies. Nothing. No trace. She had disappeared like smoke. My fingers hovered over the keyboard as I stared at the blank results from the last traffic scan. Another dead end. I slammed my fist down. Marcus rushed in. “Still nothing?” “Nothing,” I growled. “It’s like they planned every goddamn angle.”

But my hand moved, gripping the back of her blouse, pulling her just a little closer. ::: I woke up with a heavy head, like the night before had been a war between consciousness and helplessness. My body still carried a kind of exhaustion that clung like mist. The laptop screen on the little table beside the bed was still lit, frozen on a blank search page. All the hours I’d spent tracing signals, tracking metadata, following every digital thread with trembling fingers had led to nothing. Nothing left behind. No trace. It was like she’d evaporated. And Pascha… hadn’t come home last night. That made my chest feel even heavier.

Both look… unsettled. Zeta runs a hand through his hair. “We searched the body. The forest. Tracked the route in and out.” Ryan folds his arms. “Nothing. No scent trail that leads anywhere meaningful. No pack markers. No signatures we could tie back to anyone.” “Clean,” Damon mutters. “Professional,” Zeta corrects. “Someone paid a lot to make sure he could not be traced.” Damon knuckles whiten. I nod slowly. “Which means we can’t accuse,” I say. “Not yet.”

That I could go outside without feeling like a target. Still, I forced a nod. “That would be… nice. I just want my life back.” The silence that followed was thick, broken only by the soft clink of his spoon stirring his own cup. Neither of us said another word. I excused myself after a few minutes, carrying the coffee back upstairs like a shield. My laptop still waited on the bed, its dark screen daring me to try again. I reopened the trace file I’d saved the night before, fingers moving faster than my brain. The data hadn’t vanished. Not yet.

“Exactly my problem, the only thing I could understand is that the old man is into a lot of shit but then what’s confusing is that there is no usable information about them, no name of receiver, no trace, nothing. All my years of being a secret investigator I haven’t seen a thing like this, the old man is sure good at hiding his dirt” Milana looked through the information and Zanab was right. These papers contain receipts that had no name of sender, no name of receiver, no location, no signature, no tracking number or serial number, it only had the name of the product or amount of money that was brought or taken out of the country illegally. Without a single trace, this information seems use

“I’m a cocky shit that’s right.” Trace nodded, and his whole demeanor shifted. I knew this look. He was moving into the mulling phase, where he was pulling up all the information he had taken in from our interaction, and he was sifting through it. He was a computer, bringing everything up on the screen so it could get studied and grouped in the right category. “This ceasefire doesn’t make sense.” I grunted. Now he was getting it. “He wasn’t worried about Kelly. He forgot about Kelly. He was only worried about who killed Justin . . . or was he? I couldn’t read him when he mentioned Justin. But it’s like he’s more worried about the ceasefire than anything else.”

CHAPTER 154 THE WOLF THAT I AM “Or we could take pictures.” Trisha suggested. “That is better. Nobody would know we were ever here.” Selena and Jade shook their heads. “We won’t be able to get all of the information. This book is too big. Besides, nobody would notice we were here. We are not going to be caught.” Selena closed the book and carried it with her as the girls dashed out of the room, turning off the lights. Selena paused on the way out to inspect the fountain.

I asked slowly, “you can actually find them?” Asher’s eyes came back to me, and for once, his voice did not carry any teasing. “If someone touched anything tied to you, your room, communication access, the healer reports, Dax’s private wing or the route your friend’s files passed through, then yes, we can find traces. Maybe not their name immediately, but traces are enough. People think deleting records means the past disappears. It doesn’t. Not here.” Inara nodded slowly, her mind clearly moving through possibilities.

Autumn stood alone at the center. Frost ghosted from her mouth when she exhaled, though the chamber wasn’t cold in any mortal sense. Thirteen seats loomed around her, occupied by figures whose gazes carried weight: witches wrapped in ancestral wards, revenants bound to unfinished oaths, one thing that was no longer alive and never truly dead. She hadn’t brought the Book. It was gone—sealed, silent, or hiding from her in whatever way ancient grimoires chose to sulk. She hadn’t brought Tristan.

Waiting for a trace that wasn’t coming. Because she was gone. Vanished after the drop. I stared down at the flash drive in my hand, the one she’d handed over to my driver like a good little soldier, then poof off-grid. No phone signal. No appearance on any of the external traffic cams we had on sweep. She had made one mistake, though, paying for that Inn with a transfer. The document was clean. Devastating. Sunny was mine now; all I needed was a forensic accountant to dumb it down for boardroom rats in case Sunny tried to lie his way out of it. But that victory felt stale.