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I sit up, casting around for any shred of hope she’s still here. Her red dress is gone from the hallway floor. Her clutch is gone from the counter where she set it when we came in. The torn scrap of her thong is still on the floor by the wall where I pinned her, and the sight of it tightens my jaw until my molars ache. The condom wrapper on the nightstand catches the early light. Proof she was here. Proof she wasn’t a figment of my imagination.
She slipped out while I slept, and the fact that I slept deeply enough for her to dress and walk through this apartment without waking me says more about what she did to me than anything else could.
I haven’t slept that peacefully in decades.
I press my face into the pillow on her side and breathe in. Vanilla. Warm apples. Brown sugar. The scent clings to the cotton and floods my lungs, mixing with the lingering trace of my sandalwood. My hands still smell like her. My mouth still carries the taste of her on my tongue. The dull ache that settles under my ribs spreads slowly and deeply, filling the exact space where the warmth of her body eased the constant pain I live with.
I let her go. I let her fucking go.
Gray morning light pushes through the floor-to-ceiling windows, painting the bedroom in pale silver. Rain still streaks the glass. Chicago's skyline is washed out and colorless beyond it, and for the first time in twenty years this apartment looks exactly like what it is. Empty.
I stare at the ceiling and run my thumb across the knuckles of my right hand. A slow pass over old scars. Old habits. My chest is heavy with a weight I didn’t have this time yesterday morning. The sheets are tangled around my waist and they smell like her, like us, and I can't bring myself to move.
I will find her. I don't know how. I don't know when. But a man who has spent twenty years tracking people who don't want to be found knows how to hunt.
And she left me the only trail that matters.
The memory of green eyes looking up at me like I was the only good thing she has experienced in a long time. I need to be that for her again.
I will find her.
CHAPTER 4
NEVE
Four a.m. and the timer buzzes.
I pull the first tray of apple tarts from the oven and the smell hits me in a warm rush. Cinnamon, caramelized brown sugar, butter browning at the edges where the filling bubbled over during the bake. The golden crusts are puffed and cracked in all the right places. I set the tray on the cooling rack with the careful hands of a woman who has burned herself too many times to count and will probably do it again before sunrise.
The bakery is mine at this hour. No customers, no noise from the street, just the low hum of the industrial oven and the tick of the wall clock above the kitchen door and the soft creak of old hardwood floors under my sneakers. The space is small. It has a galley kitchen in the back with counters on both sides, stainless equipment I bought secondhand, and a walk-in cooler I nursed back to life with YouTube tutorials and a prayer. Up front, there are several glass display cases, six mismatched stools lining a narrow counter, and a window that faces the sidewalk where Chicago will start moving in a couple hours.
I love this time. The quiet before the bustling rush of a city. When it's just me and flour and butter and the faint memory of learning all the recipes I know from time spent in my father's kitchen growing up. Oh, how he loved his sweet treats.
I dust the marble board with flour and roll out the next batch of dough, pressing the heel of my hand into the cold slab with a rhythm my body knows better than my brain.
Fold, press, turn. Fold, press, turn.
Flour coats my wrists and forearms. A smudge of it clings to my cheekbone where I swiped at a loose strand of hair ten minutes ago. My braid has already started to unravel the way it does every morning with dark strands falling across my face until I give up and shove the whole mess under a bandana just as the sun comes up around six.
It happens like clockwork every day.
My hands keep moving but my brain refuses to stay in the kitchen with the rest of me, preferring to drift to the memory of him.
It’s been one week. Seven full days since I walked out of a stranger's apartment in the gray light before dawn with my dress wrinkled and his fingerprints still burning on my hips. Seven mornings of standing at this counter swearing the ovens and the flour and the rhythm would drown it out.
They haven't drowned out a damn thing. If anything, I want to go back and see if he’s sitting on the same stool tonight. Is he a man who follows patterns? Or was that a one-off?
The way he gripped my waist and pinned me against that wall in his hallway plays on repeat in my head. The way he fisted my hair and tilted my head back until he bared my throat and I surrendered it willingly lives in my head, too.
Fold, press, turn.
His voice. Low, controlled, a voice that delivers commands as quiet statements and expects the world to comply. The roughness to his tone when he called me sweet girl. The broken sound he made when I called him Daddy. Low, rough, wrecked. Like I'd said something he didn't know he needed to hear.
Fold, press, turn.
And then there was his scent. Spicy sandalwood and something sharp and clean underneath, like sun-dried linen. I scrubbed my skin raw those first two days, stood under scalding water until my fingers pruned, and yet I still catch traces of him. It hits me out of nowhere and makes me crave to touch him again.
The watch on his wrist that costs more than three months of my rent. The way he closed out that bar tab without a single glance at the total. Those details don't read as wealth in the world I come from. They are signs of danger. Power. A world built on secrets, silence, and a discipline that keeps a man alive in places where most men don't last a year. My father moved through the world with that same quiet confidence, scanning every room without turning his head, cataloging exits he would never need because he was always the most dangerous person in any space he occupied.
