Page 46 of Iced Up Love: Part Two
Like this is normal. Like this is a night in.
He turns and walks out. The music starts again.
Soft.
Wrong.
I sit there, frozen, the chain heavy against my ankle, my heart still racing as everything catches up all at once.
He isn’t right. That part is clear now. There’s no reasoning with him. No fixing this.
I don’t know where we are.
I don’t know how far from anything.
I don’t know how long I have.
But he’s sending them videos.
That thought cuts through everything else.
If he’s sending them something...then I can too.
I just have to figure out how.
eleven
Elijah
The longer this goes on, the worse it gets.
It doesn’t burn out the way anger is supposed to. It doesn’t peak and drop. It just sits there, constant, tightening under my skin, pressing in on everything else until there’s no space left for anything that isn’t her.
We still don’t have her.
That thought doesn’t come and go anymore. It’s just there. Under everything.
Christian ends a call and I know from the way he doesn’t look at me straight away that whatever he’s about to say is going to make this worse.
“They hit one of ours,” he says. “Bellandi docks.”
My jaw tightens before I can stop it. “How bad.”
“They killed him.”
It lands flat. Heavy.
“They dumped him where we’d find him.”
A message.
My hands curl slightly at my sides, tension pulling through my fingers as something darker settles in my chest, something colder than the rage that’s been sitting there since this started.
“They’ve tightened security across their territory,” Christian continues. “We’re not getting near anything easily now.”
Lucian shifts beside him, quiet but present. “They’re forcing escalation.”
Christian nods once. “This is war now. There’s no way around it.”
