Page 51 of Hidden

That's the word for her right now, peaceful. The tension she carries in her jaw, the slight set of her shoulders even when she thinks she's relaxed. It's gone. All of it, and I did that for her.

I need a cold shower, a very cold shower.

I’ve been looking into her brother a little more. Well, her the whole family actually. Her parents are lowlifes who need to be shot. What fuckers leaves their daughter with a brother like him? Assholes, that’s who. From the medical reports I’ve found, Sadie was in hospital a lot when she was younger. The reports said little and it said she had fallen down the stairs, or at the park and it appeared she hurt herself a lot. But even I know that’s a load of shit. From the scans, and where the bruises are, there is only one answer. They abused her.

Then they walked out on her and her brother, and instead of being the big brother to his little sister, who was six years younger than him. She had to grow up way before she should have had to. She’s never had anyone look after her, never had someone to cook her a dinner, or make her feel loved.

I’m here now. I’m going to look after her.

Walking into the bathroom, I turn the water on cold and without thinking I stand under it with both hands flat against the tiles, my eyes close and I breathe through it. I can’t even remember the last time I was this hard over a girl.

I’ve never had problems around women, fuck I fucked my high school teacher on the last day of school. I’ve had threesomes, I’ve had girls at college fight over me. I know I can get any woman in my bed by only saying a few words to them.

Yet Sadie has put some type of fucked up spell on me, and I can’t talk to her for whatever reason.

I don't know how to talk to her.

I, who can walk into any room and read every person in it in thirty seconds, who can construct a conversation like architecture, have sat across from Sadie twice now and said a combined total of maybe forty words. Half of them were ‘Watch where you're going.’

The cold water runs down my back, and my mind goes to the coffee shop this morning. I could see her glancing over at me, trying very hard to read me. That’s one thing about me; I’m not the easy to read one.

I turn off the shower and hear the laptop beep, and the sound cuts through the quiet again.

I'm across the room, towel still in my hand, and water still on my skin. The screen has already resolved by the time I sit down. The pattern-recognition algorithm I've had running against the database has flagged something, and the flag is red, which means it isn't just a maybe.

A report filed fourteen days ago in Seattle. Nadia Herrera, twenty-three, graduate student, international relations. She was last seen leaving her campus library at nine in the evening. Her roommate filed the report after forty-eight hours, the standard processing timeline explains why it didn't hit my search parameters until tonight, the system takes time to ingest new reports and run them against the existing flags.

Seattle.

New city.

New girl.

I look through the file, pulling all the information I can. Trying to find a connection. What am I missing? I’m missing something, there has to be a link somewhere.

I cross-reference against the others. The age sits within the window, nineteen to twenty-six. She’s from an academic environment. But why these girls?

I load security footage from around campus. There has to be something, one mistake, that's all I need.

The footage loads.

Nine forty-seven. There she is: dark hair, backpack on one shoulder, moving through the ground floor toward the east exit. Alone.

I check the camera coverage.

East exit. Nothing. No camera, no coverage, just a blind spot where a lens used to be before a security upgrade pulled it eleven months ago.

Eleven months.

Eight months later, Nadia Herrera is taken.

It’s the same window, and the same pattern every single time.

I add everything to the system I have, it will find anything, even the smallest little thing that makes a connection, my system will pick it up.

My laptop beeps again. This better not be another girl going missing, because this fucking case is draining me out, because I have no fucking answers to anything.

Clicking the file, my eyebrows narrow. It's a video.