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But the words stay burned behind my eyes. Goodnight Sadie.

I climb back onto the bed and pull the comforter up to my chest; my eyes are fixed on the closed laptop like it might open on its own. The room feels smaller now. The silence is louder. I reach over and switch off the lamp, plunging everything into darkness, and just as quickly I turn it back on.

Because someone knows exactly how to get inside my life, and part of me is terrified. Another part, the stupid, curious part, wonders if they’ve been here the whole time. What do they want?

Ten

Miles

I think this is the first time the house has been so quiet. There’s no TV or music on. The three of us are so focused on what we’re doing.

The only noise in the house is the low hum of laptops and the occasional sound of someone shifting in their chair or setting a drink down on the table. We've been at it since nine. It's nearly one in the morning now, and nobody has suggested stopping.

Mason is on the sofa with his laptop open across his knees, physical copies of three reports spread on the cushion beside him, highlighted in the color system I set up when I first divided the files between us. Yellow for confirmed facts. Green for witness statements. Red for anomalies, the things that don't fit.

Declan has the dining table. He works better with space, always has, he needs to be able to lay things out physically and move between them, his mind mapping things in three dimensions rather than on a screen. He's got a legal pad covered in handwriting I can barely read from here and a cold cup of coffee he keeps picking up and putting back down without drinking.

I'm at my desk in the corner. I have two monitors: the encrypted partition open on the left, my mapping software running on the right. Every note I make goes straight into the system. Tagged, time-stamped, and cross-referenced against the existing data points automatically. It's the setup that took me two years to build properly and which I’ll never fully explain to anyone, including Cain.

There are seven girls on the board. Seven cities. Fourteen months.

"Okay," Mason says without looking up. "Walk me through the Phoenix one again."

"Amber Reyes. Twenty-two. Last seen leaving a bar at eleven forty-seven, confirmed by an external camera. There was a card transaction twenty-six minutes earlier, she paid her tab, which means she wasn't planning to stay. The car was found two blocks away, keys in the console," I say, looking through her notes I made.

"Keys in the console," Mason repeats.

"Yeah."

He's quiet for a moment. "She wasn't running."

"No. The camera has her walking out alone. No one follows her out on the footage." I pull the relevant clip up on my screen, scrub to the timestamp. "She turns left out of the door. The camera loses her twelve seconds later at the edge of the frame."

"Where does the left take you?" Mason asks.

"Toward the car park. Which is where her car was found." I tag the note and add it to the route mapping overlay.

Mason exhales through his nose. He picks up the next file.

Declan looks up from the table. "The Colorado girl had the same thing. She made it to the library, login confirms that but never made it out the front."

"She went in the back," I say. "Staff exit. The camera was down."

"Maintenance," Declan says.

"Scheduled three weeks prior. Logged in the system."

"Someone who knew the schedule."

"Or someone who checked." I make another note. Connect it to the Phoenix route. "Either way, they knew the gap was there before she arrived."

Declan writes something on his legal pad and underlines it twice.

Mason leans back against the sofa cushions and looks at the ceiling briefly, which is his thinking position.

"So, we're looking at pre-surveillance," he says.

"We're looking at pre-surveillance," I confirm. "Whoever is doing this walks the locations first, then finds the gaps and waits."