Chapter 107 Maybe That's The Problem

Chapter 107 Maybe That's The Problem
My father locks the door from the outside that morning, and I hear it happen, the specific mechanical click that tells me exactly what he’s just done before he even bothers explaining himself through the wood.
“This isn’t a punishment,” he says through the wood, his voice muffled but clear enough. “Until we know how deep Ghost’s reach into this household actually goes, I can’t have you unaccounted for right now.”
I don’t answer him. I lie there listening to his footsteps retreat down the hallway, and something hot and useless flares up in my chest, the specific fury of being managed, contained, decided for, and for a while I let it have me completely.
I get up and test the handle anyway, on principle, twisting it back and forth several times like the lock might somehow reconsider its position if I’m sufficiently annoyed about it. It doesn’t. I press my forehead against the door and stand there for a long moment, breathing hard, furious at a piece of wood that has done nothing except exist between me and a hallway I probably don’t even have anywhere useful to go in right now.
The anger burns down eventually, the way it always does, leaving something rawer underneath it.
I find myself on the closet floor sometime later, not entirely sure how I got there, with a box sitting open in my lap that Marcus must have left outside my door at some point without my noticing. Inside it, folded with a precision that feels deeply, painfully like him, sits Zeke’s backup jacket, still smelling faintly of the soap he always used. Then I see pair of spare training gloves with the leather worn soft at the knuckles from months of use. My eyes finally land on a folded piece of paper at the bottom, and when I open it I recognize the handwriting instantly, the same handwriting from every drill sheet Zeke ever handed me during training.
Elbow up. Hip rotation before contact, not after. You’re getting better.
I come apart completely.
There’s no sound to it, no sobbing loud enough to carry through a locked door, just my whole body curling around a stranger’s jacket that isn’t a stranger’s jacket at all, my face pressed into fabric that still holds some ghost of him in it, and I stay like that for what feels like a very long time, the grief moving through me in waves that have no rhythm to them at all.
I stay like that for God knows how long, trying to get my sobs to quiet long enough for me to catch my breath, when a quiet, almost hesitant knock sounds at the door.
I assume it’s Eli, so I don’t answer, don’t have it in me to perform composure for anyone right now.
The door opens anyway, apparently unlocked from the other side. I look up, already forming the “leave me the hell alone” words and find Chloe instead, standing in the doorway with an expression I haven’t seen on her face in months.
I go rigid immediately, some old instinct rearing up, bracing for whatever cruelty she’s arrived to deliver on top of everything else currently sitting on my chest.
She doesn’t start an argument.
She crosses the room instead and sits down on the floor beside me, close enough that our shoulders nearly touch, and for a moment neither of us says anything at all.
“Garvin told me,” she says finally. “When you stopped showing up. I didn’t know what to say. Every version of I’m sorry I tried out in my head sounded stupid, so I just kept not saying anything, which was probably worse.”
I don’t answer. I stare down at the jacket still bundled in my lap, my fingers picking absently at a loose thread near the cuff.
“I heard you might not graduate,” Chloe says eventually, gentler than I expect. “With everything you’ve missed this semester.”
I let out a short, wet laugh despite myself. “You and I both know nobody is stupid enough to actually stop a Reid from graduating.”
The words come out exactly the way they always used to, arrogant and certain, but this time I hear how hollow they sound the second they leave my mouth, the old confidence missing from underneath them entirely.
Chloe notices too.
“Maybe that’s the problem,” she says quietly. “Maybe you’re finally figuring out that the Reid name doesn’t just open doors. Sometimes it paints a target on your back instead.”
It lands harder than I think she means it to. I clench my teeth and breathe through my nose, waiting for the sting to pass.
“I hate that he died because of this family,” I whisper, my voice cracking on the last word. “Because of my last name. Because of who my father used to be and everything that’s still apparently attached to it.”
“He didn’t die because of your family,” Chloe tells me. “He died because he loved you. He’d have done absolutely anything for you, Luce, and you know that better than anyone.”
I can’t hold back anymore. The tears break out of me all at once, and Chloe wraps her arms around me before I’ve even fully registered the sound I’m making. She pulls me into her the way she used to when we were fourteen and every crisis felt enormous and temporary at the same time.
It’s the first time we’ve touched since everything fell apart between us.
I bury my face against her shoulder and let myself cry properly, the sound finally loud enough to actually exist in the room. A few minutes later the door creaks again and I hear two more sets of footsteps, hesitant at first and then quick. I glance up through wet lashes and watch as Emma and Priya cross the room, fall to the floor where Chloe and I are sat and fold into the hug without a word.
For a few minutes I’m not a Reid at all. I’m not a target, not an heiress, not the reason a good man is lying somewhere cold right now.
I’m just Lucia. Surrounded by three girls who knew me before any of this happened, before Eli, before the warehouse, before any of the last several months rearranged everything I thought I understood about my own life.
When they finally leave, promising to check on me again soon, I sit alone in the settling quiet of my room and look over at Zeke’s empty training bag still propped against my wardrobe where he left it weeks ago.
I think about what he would have done if it had been me with my brains all over that warehouse floor instead of him. I think about the immovable devotion I watched him carry for months, quiet and steady and never once asking for anything in return, and I know with absolute certainty that he would have torn the entire world apart looking for whoever did it.
Something inside me shifts totally, settling into place with finality.
I get up. I wipe my face with the back of my hand, twice, until it feels less like evidence of what just happened here.
Then I walk toward my father’s war room.