What You Don’t See Still Burns
When you wake up in the dark, the first thing you notice is your heartbeat.
Too loud. Too fast. Like it’s trying to punch its way out.
My head rang with a deep, ugly throb. Metallic taste on my tongue. Rope burn at my wrists. A smell—salt, oil, damp wood. The creak and groan of old beams shifting with wind. Water slapping something hollow.
Not a basement. Not a van.
A pier building.
Pier 19.
I opened my eyes and got a wash of black-on-black. Then a slit of sodium light bleeding through boards. I could make out the edges: a long room, raw timbers, a low ceiling laced with rusted pipes. My chair was bolted to the floor. Zip ties kept my wrists married to the arms, my ankles locked to the legs. Someone had been rehearsing this.
“Grace.”
The voice came from a cheap speaker somewhere behind me, distorted just enough to crawl.
I didn’t move. “You picked the wrong girl for a quiet night in.”
A soft chuckle. “We’re past small talk.”
“Good,” I said. “I was never good at it.”
Silence. I aimed my breathing back down into my ribs where it belonged and cataloged: My shoulder holster was empty. Backup ankle gun gone. Phone gone. Knife—nope, they’d found the sheath. But they’d missed the thin sliver blade taped under the left arm of the chair. Because men who think they’re smarter than you never check for the thing that looks like a flaw in the wood.
I flexed my fingers to test sensation. Numb at the tips, pins and needles boiling back to life. Every detective I’ve ever respected said the same thing: the body remembers how to survive even when your head wants to lie down.
The speaker scratched. “Turn your head to your right.”
“Buy me dinner first.”
Another pause. Then a click, and a square of light snapped on. A projector. The beam hit the wall to my right. A photo bloomed out of the grain like a bruise coming up under skin.
My sister. Not sixteen this time. Older. Close to my age. A streak of gray in the hair. The same mouth. The same eyes. That tilt of chin like she’d dare the world to blink first.
“You’ve been waiting for her,” the voice said. “She’s been waiting for you.”
I swallowed once, hard enough to hurt. “Where is she?”
“You already know this answer,” he said softly. “Where you left her.”
My vision tunneled for a breath. The alley. The wet summer heat. Sirens farther than they should have been. Me running, my lungs tearing themselves open. A shadow with a limp. A door that wouldn’t give. A key I didn’t have.
I ground the memories to powder. “If you wanted me to cry, you should’ve brought a better soundtrack.”
A new image clicked up. Close-up. A charm bracelet on a wrist. My bracelet. My sister’s wrist. Fresh bruising around it. Not old. Not staged. A timestamp in the bottom corner: TODAY. A time four hours before Pier 19.
“Proof,” the voice said.
“Or Photoshop.”
“You’re good at pretending not to hope,” he said. “That’s what I like about you.”
He let the words settle like ash. Then a new sound: metal against metal. The whine of something mechanical spinning up. The floor vibrated beneath me, faint as a tremor.
“You hear that?” he asked.
“Your ego warming up?”
“The winch,” he said. “This building was a cargo slip. The room you’re in is a cradle. If I flip one switch, the cradle tilts and you slide into the water. Chair and all.”
A cold finger ran down my spine. Not fear. Calculus. The distance to the floor drain. The friction on rope. How fast zip ties soften in salt water.
He let it hum long enough for me to picture lungs filling. Then he killed it. The sudden quiet felt louder.
“Not yet,” he said. “You still have a part to play.”
“I don’t do community theater.”
“You do family,” he said, and the word hit me under the ribs. “You’re going to prove it.”
A different projector snapped on across from me. Another square of light: not a photo this time. Live video. Grainy, jittering.
It was my apartment. My kitchen. My cheap plant dying in the corner because I forget to water anything that doesn’t bleed. The camera panned: the hall, my bedroom, the nightstand where my off-duty Glock used to sit. Empty.
The feed moved again.
To my front door.
It opened.
Max stepped in.
I stopped breathing.
She wore her black leather jacket, hair shoved under a beanie, eyes sweeping like razors. She had one hand inside her coat, already going for her recorder out of habit. She pressed the door shut with the toe of her boot and stood still, like she could hear what the camera heard—the tiny mechanical whirr behind the artifice of quiet.
“Max,” I said. Useless. She couldn’t hear me. But I said it anyway, because the bones want what the bones want.
“You’re going to choose,” the voice said. “Your sister or your friend.”
He let that hang. The kind of silence that eats.
“How?” I said.
“Two addresses,” he said, and a cheap phone on the floor buzzed to life by my right boot. I couldn’t reach it. He knew that. “I texted you pins. One is real. One is bait. You tell Liam where to send units. You tell Evelyn where to send herself. You split the board. Maybe you save one.”
I stared at the phone until my eyes stung. “Or I get them both killed.”
“Mmm,” he said. “Art demands sacrifice.”
The Max-cam juddered. She stepped into my living room and froze. The lens widened and I saw why. A mannequin stood dead center on my rug, dressed in a thrift-store approximation of my sister’s last outfit. On its face, a mask of meat. Fresh. The bracelet glinted on its plastic wrist.
My chest crawled. “Stop,” I said to the air. “Turn her around. Let her out.”
“You keep forgetting what game this is,” he said. “You don’t get to give orders.”
“Then what do you want?”
“To see what kind of woman you are.”
I rolled my shoulders like a boxer between rounds. “The kind who walks through you.”
“Prove it.”