Chapter 2

"What are you looking at?" Lucas had sharply picked up on my sudden rigidity.

"The glass." I pointed at the coffee table. "It's been moved."

Lucas drew his sidearm in a flash, motioning for me to step back.

He cleared the apartment with swift, practiced movements, pushing past the closet that still had my nerves frayed, and even inspecting the grates on the air vents.

"No signs of forced entry." Ten minutes later, he holstered his weapon, shooting me a scrutinizing look. "Are you sure you aren't misremembering? Maybe you moved it yourself and just forgot?"

"There's no way I'd forget that!" I snapped back, but the conviction in my voice faltered for a split second.

Because the terrifying realization hit me: I genuinely couldn't recall actually setting the glass down.

Worse than that, as I tried to retrace my steps during the hour leading up to the broadcast, I found nothing but a suffocating blank space in my memory.

"Evelyn. Evelyn."

Lucas gave my shoulder a firm shake.

"What?" I finally snapped back to reality.

"You with me? Pack a change of clothes. You can't stay here," Lucas ordered, leaving no room for argument.

Right at that moment, the metallic scrape of a key turning in the front door lock echoed through the room.

Lucas's gun was up and trained on the entrance in a heartbeat. The door swung open, revealing a man in dark blue coveralls carrying a toolbox. At the sight of the muzzle, he threw his hands up in a panic. The heavy toolbox crashed to the floor.

"Don't shoot! I'm the building handyman, Elijah!" The man's face drained of color, his voice trembling. "Miss Evelyn put in a work order yesterday for the bathroom exhaust fan, said it was making a racket... I have a master key!"

I froze. Had I put in a work order?

I racked my brain, dredging up a vague, foggy recollection that maybe I had, but the actual details were completely missing.

"You show up at midnight to fix an exhaust fan?" Lucas scoffed, keeping his weapon steady.

"I... I just finished dealing with a massive leak down on the fourth floor, figured I'd swing by while I was on the clock." Elijah rubbed his hands together nervously. "If this is a bad time, I can come back tomorrow."

"Let him fix it," I said, taking a deep breath and looking at Lucas. "I did put in the request. Besides, I need to go to the bathroom and splash some water on my face."

Lucas frowned and finally lowered his gun, though his eyes never left Elijah. "Make it quick."

In the bathroom, the faucet was running. I gripped the edges of the porcelain sink, staring at my pale, haggard reflection in the mirror. The lapses in my memory felt like a black hole, slowly devouring my sanity. Was I really under so much stress that I was starting to hallucinate?

Elijah stood on a small stepladder behind me, focused on unscrewing the exhaust fan's vent cover.

"Have you been having trouble sleeping lately, Miss Evelyn?" he asked conversationally over the grating sound of the screwdriver. "You don't look so good. I know a pretty decent shrink, if you ever need..."

"Thanks, but I'm fine," I cut him off coldly.

"Take it easy, I'm just concerned. After all, it's never really safe for a pretty girl like you to live all alone." He glanced over his shoulder and flashed me a smile.

Under the harsh glare of the vanity lights, his smile looked unnervingly stiff.

My gaze involuntarily dropped to his left hand, which was gripping the screwdriver.

He was wearing an insulated work glove on his right hand, but his left hand was bare. And there, wrapping around his left ring finger, was a distinct burn scar.

A sudden, violent stab of pain shot through my temples. A wildly distorted fragment of a memory flashed through my mind: dim lighting, the acrid stench of hospital-grade antiseptic, and a hand bearing that exact same spiraled scar, plunging a syringe toward my neck.

"What's wrong?" Elijah had caught me staring. He followed my line of sight to his own hand and shrugged dismissively. "Was a dumb kid, accidentally touched a hot soldering iron. Pretty ugly, huh?"

"No... it's nothing." I quickly averted my eyes, my stomach violently dropping all over again.

Once the fan was fixed, Elijah packed up his tools and left.

Lucas took a phone call in the living room, his expression darkening into a grim scowl.

"The precinct just ran down a lead. Right before she vanished, the third victim visited a private clinic called 'Sacred Heart'." Lucas stared straight at me. "And we found traces of a rare memory-blocking drug in her stomach contents."

Memory-blocking?

Those words hit my chest like a sledgehammer. An icy chill swept through my entire body as I whipped my head back toward the spot where Elijah had just been standing.

There, resting quietly in the shadows next to the stepladder, was a matte black button that definitely didn't belong to me.

Along its edges were the unmistakable flakes of dried blood.