Page 62 of Iced Up Love: Part Two
And I don’t know how much is already gone.
fourteen
Jackson
The apartment feels different now.
Not loud, not chaotic, not like it did when everything first hit and no one knew where to put the anger or the fear or the fact that she was just… gone.
Now it’s quieter.
Controlled.
And somehow worse for it.
Zach is in her bed.
That’s the thing that keeps dragging my attention back every few minutes whether I want it to or not. The door is half open, and every time I look down the hallway I can see enough to know he hasn’t moved much since we got him in there. He’s sprawled across the mattress like he dropped and never got back up, one arm across the sheets, his breathing slow and uneven in a way that still makes something in my chest tighten every time I register it.
He nearly didn’t wake up.
That thought lands harder than I expect every time it comes back around.
I get it.
I do.
I understand exactly why he did it.
That doesn’t mean I’m not still pissed off about it.
Not when she’s still out there.
Not when we’re running out of time and he just… checked out.
My jaw tightens as I drag my focus back to the table, to the laptop sitting open in front of me, to the video paused on the screen.
I’ve watched it too many times.
I know exactly how it plays out.
Exactly how long it takes for her to lift her head, for the fear to settle into her expression, for his hand to come into frame and touch her like he owns her.
It still makes me feel sick every time.
I zoom in again, adjusting the frame, trying to pull something new out of it, anything that I might have missed the first ten times I went through it.
There has to be something here.
There has to be.
“Anything?”
Christian’s voice pulls me just enough out of it to answer without looking away from the screen.
“Not yet,” I say. “There’s something in this, I just haven’t found it.”
Lucian is standing beside him at the counter, both of them going through Zach’s phone, scrolling through messages, call logs, anything that might connect back to the dealer, to Vargas, to something we can actually use.
