Chapter 149 A Desperate Plea

Chapter 149 A Desperate Plea
The detective's words still hung in the air like smoke from a doused fire. Sylvia had one arm around Sierra's waist, the other pressing firmly against her shoulder, guiding her away from the door as though steering a ship through fog.

"Come on," Sylvia murmured. "Come sit down."

Sierra's legs moved, but she wasn't directing them. The apartment swam around her, the towers of cardboard boxes, the bare walls where photographs had hung, the stripped shelves that used to hold books and awards and the small tokens of a life she'd already decided to leave behind. All of it packed. All of it ready for a future that was dissolving by the hour.

Sylvia eased her onto the sofa, and the cushions received her like water closing over a stone. Sierra didn't resist. She couldn't. The adrenaline that had carried her through the last forty-eight hours, the phone calls, the highway, the gas station clerk's stuttered account of the dark SUV, had finally burned through its last reserves. What remained was something hollow and trembling, a body running on nothing but dread.

Sylvia sank down beside her, pulling Sierra into her arms without a word. Sierra's head found the curve of Sylvia's shoulder, and Sylvia's hand came up to cradle the back of her neck, fingers threading gently into her hair. The gesture was so maternal, so instinctive, that something in Sierra cracked open. A sound escaped her, a small, broken noise that Sylvia absorbed without flinching.

"I've got you, Si," Sylvia whispered. "I'm right here."

Sierra wanted to speak. She wanted to say the word the detective almost said: deceased, but the words wouldn't form. Her eyelids grew unbearably heavy, the exhaustion of two sleepless nights pressing down on her like the desert sky before a storm, vast, inevitable and impossible to hold back any longer. Sylvia's heartbeat was steady against her ear, a metronome counting down the seconds until her body simply surrendered.

She was asleep before she knew it was happening.

Sylvia held her for a long time, listening to the rhythm of Sierra's breathing as it deepened and slowed. When she was certain Sierra wouldn't wake, Sylvia shifted carefully, lowering Sierra's head onto the sofa cushion with the tenderness of someone handling something irreplaceable. She stood, wincing at the stiffness in her lower back, and moved through the apartment on quiet feet.

She found a pillow on the bedroom chair, one of the few things not yet boxed, and a folded blanket draped over the foot of the bed. She carried both back to the living room. She lifted Sierra's head gently, slid the pillow beneath it, and spread the blanket over her, tucking the edge around her shoulders the way her abuela used to do when Sylvia was small and frightened of thunder.

Sierra didn't stir.

Sylvia looked at the sofa. There was no room for her there, and the bedroom felt too far away, too separated by walls and doors and the terrible possibility that Sierra might wake and find herself alone. So Sylvia sank to the floor beside the sofa, her back against its base, and reached up to place her hand over Sierra's where it hung just past the cushion's edge. Sierra's fingers were cold. Sylvia folded her own around them and held on.

She let her head rest against the arm of the sofa, and the city hummed its distant, indifferent lullaby through the window glass, and Sylvia slept.

Sierra opened her eyes to the amber wash of a Manhattan evening filtering through the curtains. For a disoriented moment, she didn't know where she was or what time it was or why her neck ached so profoundly. Then she felt the weight on her hand, warm, steady, deliberately placed, and she turned her head.

Sylvia was on the floor beside her. Her long black hair had spilled across the arm of the sofa like dark water, and her face was turned slightly upward, her lips parted, her breathing slow and even. Her hand still clasped Sierra's.

Sierra stared at her for a long moment, and something in her chest shifted, not the jagged, panicked thing that had lived there for days, but something softer. Something bordering on reverence. This woman who ought to think of her as a rival, had dropped everything. Had flown across the country. Had held Sierra through a collapse and slept on a hardwood floor rather than leave her side.

"Hey, Syl," Sierra said softly.

Sylvia stirred, her dark eyes blinking open, confusion swimming in them before recognition settled. "Mmm?"

"How about we sleep in that big king-sized bed instead of like this?"

Sylvia's lips curved into something approximating a smile, though her eyes were already drifting closed again. "Yeah," she murmured. "Yeah, okay."

Sierra rose from the sofa, steadying herself against a momentary head rush, and reached down. Sierra pulled her to her feet and guided her down the hallway and into the bedroom, one arm around Sylvia's waist, their steps slow and shuffling.

Sylvia melted into the mattress the moment she reached it, curling onto her side with a long, grateful exhale. She was asleep again within seconds, her body surrendering completely to the bed's embrace.

Sierra lay down beside her, molding herself into the back of her best friend, feeling her warmth and comfort. Sylvia's breathing was deep and rhythmic, and Sierra matched hers to it until the tension eased just enough to let sleep find her again.

Sierra woke refreshed.

Not healed. Not whole. But the fog had lifted enough that her thoughts moved in straight lines instead of spirals. In the clarity of that first waking moment, before the grief and the fear could reassemble themselves, a name surfaced in her mind with the force of a struck bell.

The Scotsman.

She had put him out of her mind. With Pistol Warren and Julian Rossi dead and buried, the connection had seemed severed, a chapter closed, an uncomfortable task finished. She had wanted nothing more to do with that cryptic world.

But the Scotsman had ways. Ways of finding things. Ways of knowing things that existed in no database, no public record, no police report. She wasn't sure she wanted to know how he did it. She had never been sure. But he was, without question, her best shot.

Sierra slipped from the bed, pausing to ensure Sylvia hadn't stirred. Sylvia's breathing remained steady, undisturbed. Sierra padded down the hallway, past the towers of boxes, to the window to find her phone where it had fallen from her hand, its screen dark.

She picked it up, scrolling through her contacts until she found the number. No name attached. Just a string of digits she had memorized but never deleted.

She pressed Call.

It rang once. Twice. Three times. Sierra's jaw tightened. Four times. She closed her eyes, and in the darkness behind her lids, she saw Ryder's face, the way he'd looked at her across the wedding reception, the way he'd dropped to one knee, the ring that had been her mother's catching the light.

The line connected.

"Aye?"

The thick brogue of the Scotsman filled her ear, unhurried and unsurprised, as though he had been expecting her call.

"It's Sierra," she said. "I have a problem."

There was a pause. Then a sigh, long, measured, carrying the weight of a man who had heard those words before and knew they never preceded anything simple.

"Tell me 'bout your problem, lassy."

The dam broke. The words poured out of her in a torrent she couldn't control… Ryder's disappearance, the waitress at Rosie's diner who remembered his smile, the gas station clerk who had seen him arguing with someone and watched that someone in a dark SUV follow him onto the highway. The rental car abandoned in Newark. She told him everything, her voice cracking only once, when she said the word fiancé and realized it might already be a word that had no meaning.

When she finished, the line was quiet for several seconds.

"You want me to find 'im, then," the Scotsman concluded.

"Yes." The word came out small and fractured. "Please. I know I shouldn't be asking. I know it's none of your business. I know…"

"Lassy!" The Scotsman cut her off. The word not nearly as endearing when spoken in a sharp tone. "I'll turn over some stones… But I can't promise you anythin'."