Page 77 of Carrick
Last Tuesday.
Not yesterday. Not last night. Not even recently. Seven days ago. A full week of nothing.
The words hung in the room like fog, thick and clinging. I didn’t feel relief. Didn’t feel grief either. It was something in between. Something worse, somehow.
It was nothing.
The breath I’d been holding turned to ash in my lungs.
“Where?” I asked. My voice scraped out low, brittle. But sharp.
My hand was clenched on my knee, fingers digging hard into the denim, as if anchoring myself there could keep me from floating away.
Quinn answered without hesitation. “Corner of 18th and Baltimore. Right off Power & Light. Southbound. He was walking. Hood up, head down. Alone. No visible injuries. Gait was steady. Didn’t appear to be in distress.”
Kansas City. Downtown. The footage placed him a block from his favorite coffee shop, not far from the old used bookstore we used to sneak away to as kids, A place layered in memory, in ghosts, and now maybe carrying one more.
I could see him in my mind’s eye, unbidden and too vividly; Rayden in a worn hoodie, head down, slipping through the city like a shadow trying not to be noticed. Moving fast. Not running, but not wandering, either. A kind of urgency in retreat. Like he wasn’t just trying to disappear—he already had.
“And since then?” Carrick asked, his voice quiet but firm, controlled in that way he got when he was holding back too much to say.
My heart stuttered. I didn’t realize I’d stopped breathing until Quinn answered, his tone unchanged.
“Nothing.”
Just that. One word. Final. Clean. Devastating.
Jax let out a long exhale and leaned back, his hand slipping from the keyboard like the screen in front of him no longer mattered. Maddy went still, her fingers frozen mid-motion in her lap. Even Deacon, who rarely moved unless he had to, didn’t so much as blink. The room felt like it took a breath and held it.
I leaned forward slightly, the twist in my stomach sharp enough to make my throat ache. “You’ve looked?” I managed. It wasn’t a challenge. It wasn’t doubt. Just a desperate, brittle question from someone who needed to believe there was nothing left unchecked.
Quinn’s reply was steady, clinical almost. “We scrubbed every feed for ten blocks in every direction—traffic cams, alleyway footage, ATM monitors. Started with five blocks, then widened to ten. Nothing. I even drove down myself in an unmarked car, stayed over an hour. He wasn’t there.”
Jax spoke up next, voice low and analytic. “Financials? Bank hits?”
“Nothing on record,” Quinn said. “We don’t have much of a digital footprint for him in that area, but we checked what we could. No flagged Wi-Fi connections. No communications. No activity.”
The breath in my lungs turned to ice. Each word was colder than the last.
“So he’s not a prisoner,” Quinn continued, “or at least, he wasn’t a week ago. Instead, he’s gone dark. Completely off the grid.”
The thought came before I could stop it—too loud to ignore, too heavy to swallow. “Or someone made him disappear.”
The words landed with weight, not volume. Carrick’s jaw tightened. He didn’t respond. Didn’t argue. Didn’t offer reassurance or contradict the idea.
He didn’t have to.
“There’s another option we haven’t considered,” Jax said softly, like he was trying to find the gentlest edge of truth. “Maybe he found a way to bail himself out. At least temporarily. Maybe he made promises to the Dom Krovi. Or maybe he just escaped, and is on the run..”
I shook my head. “Without checking in? Without eventryingto contact me?”
Even I heard the desperation in my voice.
“If either of Jax’s options are true, he might be too scared to reach out,” Quinn said. “If he’s being watched, he couldn’t risk doing anything the Dom Krovi might see as a betrayal. And if he’s on the run, isolating would be the best way to protect himself—and you.”
That landed hard.
Because that’s what Rayden did. He would disappear, suffer, survive—whatever it took to keep me safe. We’d been watching each other’s backs our whole lives. That was who he was.
