Page 24 of Iced Up Love: Part Two
A sound cuts through the room.
It’s small enough that I might have missed it if everything else wasn’t already stretched thin, but something about it lands wrong immediately, cutting through everything else and pulling my attention sideways.
I turn.
Zach is at the table, Lia’s phone still in his hand, but he’s gone completely still in a way that doesn’t look controlled, like something inside him has locked all at once and left him there, mid-breath.
The color drains from his face so quickly it hits something in my chest before I can even process it properly.
And then he makes a sound under his breath that doesn’t belong in the room.
“What is it?” I ask, already moving toward him, something tightening sharply in my chest, something that feels too close to dread.
He doesn’t answer straight away. His throat works, his eyes still fixed on the screen like he hasn’t fully processed what he’s seeing yet.
“It’s her.”
Everything in me drops.
“What?”
I don’t wait for anything else. I close the distance between us and take the phone from his hand, my fingers tightening around it before I even fully look at the screen, because some part of me already knows this isn’t going to be good.
The message is already open.
Unknown number.
A video.
My thumb presses into it before I can think about it, before I can prepare for whatever is about to come through.
It loads.
Lia is on the screen.
She’s lying on something hard, concrete from the look of it, her body still, her head turned slightly to the side, her hair spread out around her in a way that makes something in my chest twist hard and fast, because she’s not moving, she’s not reacting, and for a split second something darker tries to take hold, before I see her chest move, barely, just enough to tell me she’s breathing.
The breath I pull in after that is sharp and uneven, relief and something else colliding too fast to separate cleanly.
Then a hand moves into frame.
A man’s hand.
Slow.
Deliberate.
It brushes through her hair like he has the right to touch her, like he can take his time with it, like she’s something he can handle however he wants, and something in my stomach turns violently enough that I have to lock my jaw just to stop the reaction from showing.
My grip tightens around the phone hard enough that my fingers ache.
The message sits just beneath the video.
She’s in good hands now.
The words hit harder than anything else, because they’re wrong in a way that feels intentional, like he knows exactly what he’s doing, exactly what he’s saying, and that he expects us to see it.
“Elijah.”
