Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 97537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
“Ah, Arrow.” I’m so close, and one more push and it tips me over. Next thing I know my body’s tumbling toward its release. My orgasm greets me with an explosion. “Ahh,” is all I can get out as my body wracks with jerks and tremors.
“You’re so fucking amazing. I’m about to come. Fuck, Juno. Don’t ever leave me.” His own body jerks and jolts as his orgasm takes over. “Fuck,” he groans out long and hard. “I fucking love you.”
I smile, my body completely spent. “I love you too.”
I tell myself I’m just “tidying,” but the living room looks like a yard sale for ghosts—old shoeboxes open, tissue paper breathed on, Polaroids curling at the corners like they’re tired of holding their smiles.
Arrow ran off to Maddox an hour ago with a “bagels at eight, op later,” and I’ve been pacing ever since. The closer we get, the sharper the fear gets—like walking toward a cliff with your eyes on the view and your toes feeling for the edge. I want Arby’s murderer. I also want my heart rate to stop doing cartwheels. Both things are true.
I sit cross-legged on the rug and pry the lid off a box labeled ARBY / BACKUP JOY in my handwriting. Receipts. A cracked compact. A keychain shaped like a tiny microphone. Photo strips from a booth we once crammed into after too much pie. Under that, a stack of 4x6 prints she must’ve ordered in a wave of nostalgia—glossy, too saturated, the kind of color that turns skin to peach and nights to amber.
Halfway down the stack, I freeze.
Arby stands under string lights—the warm, restaurant kind that make even cheap patios look romantic. She’s turned three-quarters toward the camera, that old Renegade jacket slouched off one shoulder. Her hair is blonde. Not the cotton-candy pink she wore for years; the original icy blonde she switched back to a few weeks before she died. The timing slaps me in the chest.
She doesn’t look happy. Her smile is there, technically, but her jaw is tight, eyes not meeting the lens. Her hand is curled, not quite a fist, at her side.
Next to her: a man. Broad shoulders in a dark jacket. He’s facing away, head turned toward something out of frame. All I get is the sweep of short dark hair, a watchband, a sliver of jawline. No face. No easy answers.
The background is a smear of clues: a menu with only the tail of a word visible—“…reed”—and a matchbook on the table catching a glint of gold foil. The image isn’t sharp enough to read it. It could be nothing. It could be everything.
I press my thumb to Arby’s mouth on the photo, like I can smooth the tension out of paper. “Who were you with,” I whisper. “And why does your smile look like a held breath?”
My phone is already in my hand before I’ve decided. I snap a clean shot of the print on the floor, then another close-up of the menu corner and the man’s watch. I flip the photo, check the back—she actually dated it. Three weeks before. My stomach dips.
I text Arrow.
Found this in an old box. Blonde hair… a few weeks before. She doesn’t look happy. Can you pull anything?
I attach the pictures and hover my finger over the send button. A tiny voice in my head says you’re close, and I hit it.
Bubbles pop up almost immediately—working is so much his native language that I can hear his brain booting.
I set the original print beside the others. The room goes quiet the way rooms do when possibility enters. I’m scared, yes. Scared of what this means, scared of who that back-of-head might belong to, scared of how close the ground is getting under my feet.
But I also feel the smallest click of the puzzle shifting. A photo is proof that a moment happened. Arrow will say metadata and compare menu fonts and ask if the wristwatch is a clue or a coincidence. I will color another mandala when the panic spikes.
And between those two things, maybe we’ll drag one more truth into the light.
28
Arrow
Maddox Security looks like it always does at 9:30 a.m.—steel, glass, coffee, and an air of competent paranoia. Dean’s in his office with the door half-open, running a pen down a checklist in the crisp, tidy handwriting of a man who files cables by zodiac sign. I’m elbow-deep in a lab rack, chasing a misbehaving PoE injector, when my phone buzzes in the Juno pattern.
I wipe a hand on my jeans and check the screen.
Juno: Found this in an old box. Blonde hair… a few weeks before. She doesn’t look happy. Can you pull anything?
Three images follow: a glossy print of Arby under string lights, blonde again—jaw tight, smile not touching her eyes; a tight crop of a menu corner with “...reed” in gold font; a zoom on a man’s wrist—all I get is a watchband and a sliver of jaw, turned away.