"Perimeter, now." The lead officer's voice cut across the chaos of the loading dock, radios crackling to life around them. "Nobody leaves this property until we've swept every exit."
"That's not good enough," Fendrik said, stepping toward him. "Whoever did this had a window of maybe sixty seconds. They could already be past your perimeter."
"Sir, I need you to stay back and let us do our job."
"Your job just let a kidnapping happen twenty feet from three officers."
"Fendrik." Lia caught his arm, aware of how quickly the officer's expression was hardening. "This isn't helping. Let them work."
He exhaled hard, some of the fury draining into something closer to controlled panic. "Fine. But I'm not standing here doing nothing while they search a perimeter that's already useless."
Lia was already moving, following the smear of blood past the ambulance toward a service alley that ran along the side of the building, Fendrik half a step behind her.
"Lia, wait for the officers."
"Isaiah could be bleeding out somewhere right now. I'm not waiting for anyone."
He didn't argue further, just matched her pace, both of them scanning the dark alley for any sign of movement. The blood trail thinned near a dumpster, smeared and scattered like something had been dragged, then dropped, then dragged again.
"Here." Fendrik crouched near a shape slumped against the brick wall, barely visible in the shadow. "Isaiah."
Lia dropped to her knees beside him, hands hovering over a gash along his temple, blood matting his hair dark. His eyes fluttered at her touch, unfocused, struggling to find her face.
"Isaiah, stay with me. Can you hear me?"
"Lia." His voice came out cracked, barely a whisper. "They took her. Right out of the ambulance. I tried to stop them, I swear I tried."
"Who took her? Did you see a face?"
"It was fast. Too fast." His eyes drifted, then snapped back with effort. "A van. Dark, no plates I could see. Someone grabbed me from behind before I could even shout."
"You're going to be okay," Lia said, pressing her palm against the wound on his head, though she had no idea if that was true. "Help is coming. Just stay awake."
"There was something else." Isaiah's hand closed weakly around her wrist. "The person who grabbed me. They said something. Right before everything went dark."
"What did they say?"
"They said, tell Lia the understudy always finishes the show."
Ice ran through her veins despite the warmth of his blood on her hands. Fendrik's jaw tightened beside her, already scanning the alley in both directions.
"That's a message meant for you specifically," he said quietly. "Not a random attack."
"I know."
Footsteps approached fast from behind them, and Lia spun, half expecting another attacker, relief washing through her when she recognized two of the responding officers rounding the corner with flashlights raised.
"Over here!" Fendrik called out. "We need medical, now."
The officers converged quickly, one dropping beside Isaiah to assess the wound while the other spoke rapidly into his radio, calling for a second ambulance and reinforcements to canvas the surrounding streets.
Lia stepped back to give them room, her hands shaking, blood drying tacky on her palms.
"They're going to find her," Fendrik said, though it sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as her. "The perimeter's locked down. A van can't have gotten far."
"They got Aria out of a moving scene with police everywhere. I don't think a locked perimeter is going to stop whoever this is."
A flash of headlights swept across the mouth of the alley, briefly illuminating everything in white light before vanishing around the corner of the building, engine noise fading fast toward the street.
"That's them." Lia was moving before she finished the thought, sprinting toward the alley's mouth with Fendrik close behind her.
They rounded the corner in time to see taillights disappearing at the far end of the block, a dark van weaving hard around a parked car before straightening out and accelerating away from the theater.
Too far to catch on foot, too fast to read the plate clearly, but not too far for Lia to catch one detail burned into her memory as it passed beneath a streetlight.
A faded decal on the back door. A theater mask, half peeled, half visible.
The same mask from the note in her dressing room.
Fendrik went rigid beside her, staring after the van long after it had turned out of sight.
"Lia." His voice had gone strange, flat with something that sounded almost like recognition. "I know that decal."
"What? How?"
"Because it's not just a symbol. It's a specific one, custom made. There are only a handful of vehicles in this city with that exact design on them."
He turned to face her, and for the first time all night, Lia watched real fear settle into his expression, not for himself, but for what he was about to say. "It belongs to the company that handles set transport for every production at this theater."
"Meaning what, exactly?"
"That decal only goes on vehicles under a service contract with this theater specifically." He turned to face her fully, jaw tight. "Whoever's driving that van isn't a stranger who wandered in tonight."
"How many vehicles are we talking about? How many people would have access to one?"
"Not many. Maybe four, five drivers total, all under contract with the same transport company we've used for years." Fendrik's mind was clearly racing, cataloguing faces, names, shifts. "I can get a list. I know who runs that account."
"Then we need to call it in right now, before whoever's driving that van gets wherever they're going."
"The officers will want a name, not a guess. I need to be certain before I hand them one."
"We don't have time to be certain."
"We don't have time to be wrong either. If I point them at the wrong driver, whoever actually has Aria gets warned that we're closing in, and we lose whatever advantage that decal just gave us."
Lia hated that he was right. Hated it more than she'd hated almost anything else tonight.
"Meaning what, exactly?" she said again, quieter this time. "Say the part you're not saying."
Fendrik's hands closed around her shoulders, urgent, grounding. "Meaning whoever just drove away with Aria didn't steal that van. They work here. They've always worked here."