Page 18 of Iced Up Love: Part Two
I shove once against him, the urge to keep going still there, still pushing.
“She’s out there.”
The words come out rough. Lower.
And that’s what cuts through it.
Christian exhales once.
“Give me the plates.”
Jackson pulls out his phone, scrolling quickly before he hands it over.
Lucian steps forward smoothly.
“Then we go to her apartment,” he says. “We don’t waste time.”
No one argues.
We move.
Back out into the early morning light. Back into the car.
And this time, the thought doesn’t break.
When I find him, whoever put their hands on her, I’m not going to stop. I’m going to make him suffer for it.
And when I’m done, the Vargas family goes with him.
five
Zach
The apartment doesn’t feel right in a way that isn’t obvious at first, not empty, not quiet in any way that should stand out, but wrong somewhere underneath it, like something essential has been pulled out of the space and everything else is still trying to exist around the absence it left behind.
The light only makes it worse.
It’s late afternoon, the same heavy stretch of gold coming through the windows at the exact angle it did yesterday, catching across the floor, along the edge of the table, across the back of the couch in a way that feels too familiar, too precise, like the day has circled back to the same point and refused to move past it.
It’s almost the same time.
And she’s still gone.
Jackson has taken over the table completely, Lia’s laptop open in front of him, replaying footage, cross-checking timestamps, dragging windows across the screen and opening new ones likethe answer is buried somewhere inside the repetition if he just doesn’t stop long enough for it to disappear.
He hasn’t looked up in a while.
Across the room, Elijah stands with Christian and Lucian, the three of them speaking in low, controlled tones that don’t match the weight of what they’re saying, names and locations and pressure points being laid out like something methodical is being built out of all of this.
“…Vegas is still their main base,” Christian is saying, voice even. “But they’ve got enough presence here to move something like this without pulling attention.”
Lucian shifts slightly, arms folded loosely, posture relaxed in a way that feels deliberate rather than natural.
“They wouldn’t do this without structure,” he says. “Not with who she’s connected to.”
Sanctioned. Contained. Keep it quiet.
The rules sit in the space whether anyone repeats them or not.
