Page 20 of Give In to Me
Chapter 6
THE FIRST INVESTIGATORcame back empty after nine days.
Julian sat in his office at Gubat with the report open on his desk and the Los Angeles skyline behind him and a cup of coffee he hadn’t touched going cold at his elbow. The report was thorough. Katy Gates had quit Haven Country Club without notice. Her last shift had been a Tuesday. Her mother, Amy, still lived at the same address in Silver Lake, still worked her paralegal job, still attended her Wednesday night meetings. Amy hadn’t filed a missing persons report. Amy hadn’t seemed distressed when the investigator’s associate, posing as a census worker, had spoken to her at the door.
Which meant Amy knew where her daughter was. Which meant Katy had chosen to leave.
He closed the report and opened his laptop. The quarterly projections for Gubat’s Southeast Asian expansion were still on his screen, the same numbers he’d been studying for a week without processing a single digit. The cursor blinked in a cell he’d forgotten the purpose of. He closed the laptop too.
The second investigator, hired a week later, was more expensive and less polite. She specialized in skip traces and had a success rate she’d quoted at ninety-four percent. She came back on day six with the same nothing. Katy Gates had no active credit cards. No social media updates since prom night. No cell phone pings outside a seventy-two-hour window that ended the night she’d disappeared. The phone had gone dark somewhere in Pasadena and never come back on.
“Someone’s helping her,” the investigator told him over the phone. “This isn’t a nineteen-year-old covering her tracks. This is infrastructure. Whoever she’s with has resources.”
Reid Jamieson. Senator’s grandson. Old money, political connections, a family that had been making people vanish into the machinery of American power since before the country had a name for it.
Julian paid the investigator. Hired a third.
The third came back empty too.
He stopped eating on the twelfth day. Not a decision. His body simply stopped requesting food. He stood in his penthouse kitchen at two in the morning with the refrigerator open and the light falling on his face and a container of leftover pad thai in his hand, and he put it back and closed the door and stood in the dark.
Sleep was worse. He was sleeping in fragments, twenty-minute stretches that ended with him jerking awake to the phantom scent of clean cotton and something floral, the scent that had been fading from his memory for three weeks and was now more vivid than when she’d been standing in front of him. His brain, deprived of her, was manufacturing her. Filling his sleep with the copper of her hair and the green of her eyes and the image of her face at three fifteen across the terrace, and then filling his waking hours with the other thing. The face she’d worn in the gymnasium doorway when she’d turned and seen him with Dionne, the grief so total it hadn’t resembled grief. It had resembled the end of everything.
Gubat’s board noticed. His CFO sent a carefully worded email about the Southeast Asian numbers. His assistant rescheduledthree meetings he’d forgotten and one he’d simply not shown up for. The empire he’d built at twenty, the concrete and code and capital he’d poured over the wound of his father’s indifference, the proof that he couldn’t be discarded, hummed along without him, efficient and indifferent, and the indifference of his own creation felt like a mirror he didn’t want to face.
He faced it anyway. Every night. The bathroom mirror. His mother’s eyes in his own face, and the question that had lived in his chest for sixteen years had a new shape now, a shape that fit the contours of a girl in a green dress who’d walked into her prom alone and held her chin up and then recognized him in the doorway and broken.
Was I not worth finding?
The question had followed him for half his life. Now it reversed itself, turned inside out, because he was the one who’d done the discarding and she was the one who’d vanished and the parallel was so exact it felt like a punishment designed specifically for him.
Power. That was the common thread. He’d had the power to keep her. He’d had her in his hands, literally, her ribs under his palm and her pulse under his mouth and her voice saying his name like a prayer, and he’d chosen to believe a lie instead. Not because the lie was convincing. Because the lie was safe. Because Dionne’s version of Katy, the calculating girl who bragged and schemed and used people, was a girl he could walk away from. And the real Katy, the one who ate lunch alone and saidI don’t believe youand touched his face with trembling fingers and askedis this okay, that girl was terrifying, because that girl was honest, and honest people could see you, and being seen was thething he’d been running from since he was thirteen years old and discovered his name wasn’t real.
The math was inescapable. He became his father. That was the truth he couldn’t outrun. El Diablo had the resources to find his stolen son and chose not to. Julian had the girl who loved him standing three feet away and chose to destroy her. The mechanics were different. The math was the same.
Worse. El Diablo had never pretended to care.
HE WENT TO DIONNE’Soffice on a Thursday.
Corner office. Twelfth floor. The desk was glass and chrome and the view was Wilshire, and Dionne was sitting behind it in a navy blazer with her dark hair pinned back and a legal brief open in front of her and a coffee cup from the place on the corner that charged nine dollars for a latte. She glanced up when he walked in and smiled, and the smile was the warm, sisterly one, the one that had been in his life for seven years, and for the first time he saw it for what it was.
“Julian.” She stood. “I didn’t know you were coming by. Sit down. Do you want coffee?”
“No.”
The word was cold enough to make her pause. She sat back down. Folded her hands on the desk. Her eyes moved across his face, and he let her read what was there and calculate.
“What’s wrong?” Careful. Concerned. The good sister.
“Katy never talked to the other servers.”
The calculation behind her eyes went very still.
“She ate lunch alone. Every day. She never bragged about me to anyone, because she never talked to anyone. She was so quiet that a man who barely knew her picked up on it from across the patio.” He kept his voice level. It cost him everything he had. “You made it up. All of it.”
Dionne’s face went through three expressions in two seconds. Surprise, fear, and then iron. He recognized it, because he’d seen the same thing in his own mirror every night for a month: the face of a person deciding which version of themselves to be.
She chose the wrong one.
