Chapter 10: Someone Is Looking
The secure rental was a short-term apartment above a quiet office row, anonymous from the street, coded entry, curtains already drawn when they arrived. Mara met them there with groceries, toddler supplies, and a face that said celebration would be unprofessional.
She confirmed the bracelet with one look and went pale anyway.
While Mia bathed Leo in the bathroom sink with suspicious thoroughness, Mara pulled Adrian into the kitchenette.
“Two things,” she said under her breath. “First, facial age-progression on Niko matches this child close enough that I’d stake my license in camera. Second, the father’s family isn’t only probing records. They retained a recovery team three days ago—‘family extraction specialists’ if you’re feeling generous, soft-abduction muscle if you’re not. They got a tip about a girl carrying a toddler around the south retail corridor.”
Adrian’s blood went cold. “The grocery store.”
“Could be coincidence. I don’t believe in those this week.” Mara slid him a phone image from a street camera still: grainy, angled, but clear enough to show a too-big blue hoodie and a baby on a girl’s hip outside a pharmacy two streets from where Adrian had found them. Timestamped yesterday.
Someone else was already inside their radius.
In the bathroom, Mia was singing under her breath—an off-key scrap of lullaby that made the apartment feel suddenly too fragile. Adrian watched the hallway light cut across the floor and understood that the miracle of recognition had also started a clock. He had not only found his nephew.
He had stepped into an active hunt.
When Mia came out with Leo wrapped in a towel the size of a blanket, she read their expressions instantly.
“What?” she demanded.
Adrian did not lie. “People connected to Leo’s father have been looking in this area. They may have already seen you once.”
Mia’s arms locked around the baby. All the fragile calm of warm water and soap vanished.
“Then this place isn’t safe,” she said.
“It’s safer than the street,” Mara replied. “For tonight. Tomorrow we move if we have to. But child, listen to me: random running is how they catch you. Patterned protection is how we keep him.”
Mia looked from Mara to Adrian, eyes bright with fury and fear. “If they come, you don’t hand him over to make things legal and neat.”
“I won’t,” Adrian said, and the vow tasted like iron.
Outside, somewhere in the same city, a recovery team was feeding on tips and camera stills and the assumption that a little girl could not hold a line forever. Inside the quiet apartment, Leo reached one damp hand toward Adrian’s sleeve and missed, grasping air.
Mia shifted him away by instinct, then stopped halfway, caught between old rules and new necessity.
Someone was looking.
May you like
And for the first time since Elena vanished, Adrian was no longer searching in the abstract.
He was guarding a room that might not remain hidden until morning.
