— MIA —
Danny was supposed to be here at eleven.
We had a system. He would text when he left his apartment, twenty minutes away, and I would tell Elena so she could have coffee ready and we would sit in the library for two hours going through whatever new information he had found and then he would leave and I would think about what we had learned until dinner. It was not a complicated system. It had worked every time for two weeks.
At eleven fifteen I checked my phone.
Nothing.
I told myself he was late. Danny was sometimes late — not often, he was more punctual than most people I had known, but sometimes traffic or a slow morning or a conversation that ran long. Eleven fifteen was not alarming. Eleven fifteen was within the normal range of human variation.
At eleven thirty I texted him.
"Running late?"
The message delivered. Did not show as read.
I put the phone face down on the table and picked up my book and read the same paragraph four times without retaining a single word of it.
By noon I had called twice.
Both calls went to voicemail after two rings, which meant either his phone was off or he was declining the calls, and Danny did not decline my calls, we had established that early on without discussing it, the same way we had established a lot of things without discussing them. His voicemail message was his voice saying his name and leave a message in the slightly uncertain tone of someone who had recorded it in a hurry and never gotten around to redoing it.
I left a message the first time.
The second time I hung up without speaking.
I sat with the phone in my hands and thought about all the things that could make a person's phone go to voicemail after two rings on a Tuesday morning when they were supposed to be somewhere.
Most of them were fine.
Some of them were not.
I lasted until twelve thirty.
Then I got up and walked down the corridor to Damien's office and knocked once and opened the door without waiting for an answer, which was something I had never done before, and which he registered immediately — I could see it in the slight shift of his attention when he looked up from his desk, the recalibration of a man noting that something was different about this particular entrance.
"Danny was supposed to be here at eleven," I said. "It is twelve thirty. He is not answering his phone."
Damien looked at me for one second.
Then he picked up his own phone.
I stood in the doorway of his office and watched him make three calls in quick succession — short, quiet, the clipped efficiency of someone activating a system that already existed and knew exactly what to do.
He did not tell me to sit down. He did not tell me it was probably nothing. He did not manage my reaction or soften the situation or do any of the things that people did when they thought you needed protecting from the truth of something.
He just made the calls.
I had asked him once, early on, why he never told me things were going to be fine. He had looked at me with that particular expression — the one that meant he was deciding how honest to be — and said: "Because I do not know that they will be, and you would know I was lying, and that would be worse than the uncertainty."
Standing in his doorway watching him make calls about Danny, I was grateful for that.
Uncertain was survivable.
Lied to was not.
He finished the third call and set the phone down.
"Viktor is checking his apartment," he said. "I have two people tracking his last known location from this morning. We will know something within the hour."
"Within the hour," I repeated.
"Yes."
I nodded.
I turned to go back to the library because standing still was worse than moving and the library was the place I went when I needed to think.
"Mia."
I stopped.
His voice when he said my name had a quality I was still learning to read — not soft exactly, Damien did not do soft, but something adjacent to it. Something that meant: I am saying this because it is true and not because it will make you feel better, which from him was its own kind of care.
"He is careful," Damien said. "He has been careful since the beginning. If something happened it is because something found him, not because he was careless. That matters."
I looked at him over my shoulder.
"Does it change anything?"
A pause.
"No," he said. "But it tells us something about what we are dealing with."
* * *
The hour was the longest hour I had spent in this house.
I sat in the library and did not read and did not look at my phone and looked at it every four minutes anyway and thought about Danny the way you think about people when you are afraid for them — in pieces, in details, in the specific texture of who they are. The way he held his coffee cup with both hands even when it was not cold. The way he laughed at his own stories half a second before the punchline. The way he had handed me that envelope with my name on it and looked at me like he had been carrying something heavy for a year and was finally putting it down.
He was Ryan's friend before he was mine.
That meant something.
It meant he was one of the last living connections to my brother that I had, and the thought of something happening to him sat in my chest like something physical, like a weight with edges.
I thought about Ryan.
I thought about the warehouse on the east docks.
I thought about three shots close together.
I put the phone face down on the table and pressed my hands flat on my knees and breathed.
Viktor called at one forty-seven.
I heard Damien's voice in the corridor — low, even, asking questions I could not make out through the door. A pause. More questions. Then footsteps, and the library door opened, and Damien came in and I looked at his face before he said anything because his face always said something before his mouth did if you knew how to look.
What his face said was: not the worst.
I breathed.
"He was followed this morning," Damien said. "Ferrante's men. He spotted them six blocks from his apartment and went dark — turned off his phone, changed his route, lost them in the market district. Viktor found him at a secondary location he had set up for exactly this situation."
"He is safe?"
"He is safe."
The thing that happened in my chest when he said it was embarrassingly large for a person who prided herself on composure.
I did not try to hide it.
I had stopped performing composure for Damien somewhere around the second week and I was not going back.
"Thank you," I said.
He looked at me.
"I did not do anything yet."
"You made the calls," I said. "You did not tell me it was probably nothing. You took it seriously immediately and you made the calls. Thank you."
Something moved through his expression — the thing that happened when I said something he had not prepared a response for, when the careful architecture of his composure encountered something it had not accounted for. It was very fast. He controlled it immediately.
But I saw it.
"Ferrante knows about Danny," Damien said, moving back to the practical, which was where he was most comfortable and which I did not hold against him. "Which means Marco told him. Which means Marco is further along than I thought."
"How much further?"
He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that meant he was deciding how much to give me.
I waited.
"Far enough that we need to move faster," he said finally. "The timeline I had is no longer the timeline we have."
I looked at him.
"Then tell me what the new timeline is," I said. "All of it. Not the version you think I can handle. The actual version."
A long pause.
He sat down.
That was the first time he had ever sat down when I asked him something difficult instead of standing.
I filed it in the folder with everything else.
The folder was almost full.