POV: Mia
She sees her own face at seven in the morning.
She has not slept. She gave up trying around four, made herself coffee in the small kitchen on her floor, and ended up in the main living room because it has the biggest windows and she needed to see the sky. Needed to remember the world outside these glass walls still exists.
The television is on low. A night guard had it running in the background, some early morning news program, the kind with two anchors who smile too much and talk too fast. Mia was not really watching it. She was sitting with her coffee and her thoughts and the slow, exhausting work of figuring out what to do next.
And then she heard her name.
She looks up.
There she is. Her college ID photo — the one where her hair is pulled back and she is smiling slightly because the photographer told her to, not because she felt like it. Blown up on the screen behind the two anchors who are now wearing their serious faces.
"Mia Cole, twenty-two, was reported missing late yesterday evening by concerned friends and faculty at Hargrove University. Cole recently lost her father, Victor Cole, in a tragic car accident, and sources close to the family say she had been struggling deeply with grief in the weeks since his passing."
Mia sets her coffee down very carefully.
"Friends describe her as emotionally fragile following the loss and say her sudden disappearance is consistent with someone who may have become overwhelmed."
Emotionally fragile.
The words land like a slap.
"Anyone with information on Mia Cole's whereabouts is urged to contact—"
And then her roommate is on camera. Jana. Sweet, well-meaning, dramatic Jana, who cries at commercials and means every single tear. She is crying now. Real tears, running down her face, clutching a tissue.
"She just lost her dad," Jana says, voice breaking. "She wasn't okay. We should have checked on her more. I just — I hope she's safe. I hope she's somewhere safe."
Then a professor. Then a girl from her study group who Mia has spoken to maybe twelve times total. All of them painting the same picture. Grieving girl. Fragile girl. Girl who cracked under the weight of loss and simply wandered away from her own life.
Mia sits perfectly still and watches all of it.
She does not move when Dante comes into the room behind her. She heard him before she saw him — quiet as he is, the air in a room changes slightly when he enters it, like pressure shifting before a storm. He stops a few feet away and watches the screen.
Neither of them speaks.
Her college roommate is still crying. A ticker at the bottom of the screen reads: MISSING: MIA COLE, 22. LAST SEEN THREE DAYS AGO.
Mia picks up her coffee again. Her hand is steady. She takes a slow sip and watches the anchor move on to the next story.
"They think I fell apart," she says. Not to Dante specifically. Just out loud. To the room. To the version of herself on that screen who apparently could not handle one hard thing without disappearing.
Dante says nothing.
"My whole department thinks I had a breakdown." She puts the cup down again. "My professors. My roommate. Everyone who knows me is watching the news right now thinking Mia Cole finally broke." She pauses. "I have a 3.9 GPA. I worked twenty hours a week while carrying a full course load. I planned my father's entire funeral by myself at twenty-two years old and I did not cry once in front of anyone because I knew if I started I would not stop." Her voice is completely even. "And the story they are telling about me is that I am fragile."
Dante sits down on the far end of the couch. Not close. Not crowding her. Just present.
"They are not telling a story about you," he says quietly. "They are telling a story Sable needs people to believe. There is a difference."
She looks at him. "Sable did this."
"Sable has the Commissioner in her pocket. The missing persons report was filed within six hours of the auction. That is not grief-stricken friends reaching out to police. That is a machine being activated."
"She wants people looking for me."
"She wants people looking for a fragile, broken girl who wandered off after her father died. Not a woman who was taken. Not a witness. Not a threat." He meets her eyes. "If you are found by the wrong people, the story is already written. Poor Mia Cole, clearly unstable, found in a dangerous situation, probably needs psychiatric care. Anything you say becomes the words of a girl who already broke down once."
Mia stares at the blank television screen.
She understands the elegance of it, even as it makes her stomach turn. Sable did not just hide her. She pre-discredited her. Built the narrative before Mia even had a chance to speak.
It is, she thinks grimly, almost impressive.
"My father," she says. "What was he actually trying to expose? Not the general version you gave me last night. The real version. All of it."
Dante is quiet for a moment.
She turns to look at him fully. "I have been very patient. I sat in that folder for three hours last night and I read everything you gave me and there are pieces missing and we both know it. So tell me what my father was actually trying to bring down. Who runs the auction house. Who is above Sable. What is the full picture."
He looks at her for a long moment. Something moves behind his eyes — the same quick calculation she has seen him do twice before, the one where he decides how much to give her.
This time, something in his face settles differently. Like he has made a decision he cannot take back.
"The auction house is one piece," he says. "There are seventeen others like it across six cities. All of them connected. All of them feeding money into the same set of accounts at the top." He pauses. "Your father found the accounts. He found the names attached to them. Politicians. Law enforcement. Judges. People who have spent years making sure this operation stays invisible."
Mia's chest is tight. "And the person at the top of all of it."
"One person runs it all. One person gave the order to have your father killed." He holds her gaze. "Her name is Sable Voss."
The name hits the air between them.
And something happens to Mia that she does not expect.
Her body goes cold. Not with fear. With recognition.
Because she has heard that name before.
Not from a file. Not from Dante. From her father's own voice, low and careful, late at night when he thought she was already asleep on the couch.
She had come home for a weekend visit. She had drifted off watching television and woken up to her father on the phone in the kitchen, his back to her, speaking very quietly.
It has to be soon. Sable knows I've been asking questions. If she finds out what I have—
Mia had shifted on the couch and he had stopped talking immediately. Turned around. Seen her watching. Smiled that tired smile.
Sorry, baby. Work stuff. Go back to sleep.
She had.
She had gone back to sleep and she had not thought about it again until right now, sitting in this glass tower above a city that already thinks she is broken, staring at the man who bought her out of an auction room.
That was three weeks before her father died.
She looks at Dante. Her voice, when it comes, is barely above a whisper.
"He knew she was coming for him."
Dante does not look away. "Yes."
"He called me the night before the accident." Her throat tightens. "He said he loved me. He said he was proud of me. He said—" She stops. Forces herself to breathe. "He said to trust my memory."
The room is absolutely silent.
Dante's eyes are fixed on her face and they are not cold anymore. They are something else entirely, something careful and weighted and almost —
She looks away before she can name it.
Because if she names it she will have to feel it.
And she is not ready to feel anything yet.
What she does not say out loud — what she will not say until she is alone tonight, until she can press her face into a pillow and finally let herself — is that she remembers the rest of what her father said on that last phone call.
He said: if anything ever happens to me, the answer is already inside you.
She thought it was just something fathers say.
She is beginning to understand it was not.