Page 59 of The Last Dance

He did not protest. “I suspected.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You would not have listened,” he said. Not an accusation, just a fact.

He was right.

I watched the cameras cycle, every angle of the estate bathed in harsh night vision green. There was nothing to see but the empty drive, the stillness of the trees, the unbroken lines of fence and wall and gate.

“I want him back,” I said.

Lin nodded. “We will get him.”

It was the first time he had used the word “we” in a year.

Yuri brought up a new window on the screen. “London contact confirms Sasha is not yet on any outbound manifests. She’s still in-country.”

“Then she’s waiting for something,” I said. “Find out what.”

Yuri made the next call. The only sound in the room was the faint, metallic click of the relays in the server rack.

I stood there, every cell in my body vibrating with the need to move, to destroy, to hunt. Instead, I waited. That was the lesson: sometimes, the only thing you can do is wait and let the rage become steel.

I looked at the board one more time. I traced the red string with my finger, then snapped it off at the pin. It curled back on itself, recoiling like a live thing. I did not pace, but I was ready.

The next move would be mine.

I stood in front of the case board, a wall of panels and printouts and satellite overlays, and tried to make the world smaller by staring it into submission.

Parsons’s thread ran left to right, a blue line cut by red markers at every documented obsession point: the mailbox, the storage unit, the shell trust, the second property on Teasdale, the overheads of the house itself. The line didn’t just track a man. It tracked an intention.

My eyes went to the annotation I’d added last week, after we drove past the address: basement room: confirmed. purpose: known.

The words were mine, but they felt like someone else’s handwriting. The note was pinned to a photo, a drone shot of the house, the lawn manicured with the kind of precision you could only buy with either money or madness.

On the north side of the foundation, a patch of new concrete: the color difference so slight you had to zoom in to see it, but when you did, there was no mistaking the intent. A fresh door. Poured recently, maybe a month back. Set horizontal, half-buried, the sort of entrance you used if you needed to bring something in and out without ever letting it see daylight.

I looked at it, and all the logic in me said: this is just what men like Parsons do. They plan, they build, they set the stage for a fantasy that has to be perfect or it won’t scratch the itch. But the part of me that had spent the last two hours thinking about a glass of water and a missing book was not interested in logic.

I thought about the night in the car, Iren’s body pressed to my side, his hand flat against my chest. That was not a man seeking comfort. That was a man confirming reality, confirming that he was still here, that the world could still be touched even if it was about to break in half.

I remembered the question he asked, have you ever been afraid of losing something? I said, once. It was the truth, but I didn’t elaborate. I didn’t say the answer because it was in the seat beside me, because I knew the act of saying it would make it a target, and the only way to protect a thing is to make it invisible.

But I had made him visible. I had brought him into the house. I had drawn every line of the target myself.

I thought about the silence in the car that night, the way he’d gone quiet when we circled the house, the way his mouth, normally so ready with a joke or a defense, had just… stopped.

I wondered if he’d recognized himself in the new concrete, in the room with no way out. I wondered if that was why he pressed his hand to my sternum, as if to say: this is the only thing that matters. I wondered if, in that moment, I’d known I was already too late.

Yuri came to stand beside me, arms folded, not looking at the board but at the floor. He didn’t say anything for a while. We just stood, two men breathing in the refrigeration of a room that could only exist because the world needed monsters to hunt other monsters.

When he spoke, his voice was low. “Surveillance team will have eyes on the house in fifteen. No movement yet.”

I nodded. “She won’t go there first. She’ll double back, drop the boy, then vanish herself.”

“We have her on the plate reader south of the estate,” he said. “Her car. They switched vehicles at the market on Cross. There is a third party involved.”

I absorbed it. “Keep eyes on both.”