Chapter 234

#101

The warehouse looks exactly the way it did the last time I fled from it, half swallowed by weeds, the metal siding gone the same rusted orange it was the night everything here nearly cost me my brother, and standing at the edge of that overgrown lot again sends a specific kind of vertigo through me as my body remembers things my mind would rather not.

“You okay,” Zeke murmurs beside me, not looking at me, eyes already scanning the perimeter with the flat, professional focus he brings to everything.

“Fine,” I say, which is a lie, but not one I have time to unpack right now.

“I’m taking point,” he says. “The whole approach. I don’t want an argument about it.”

“I wasn’t going to argue.”

He glances at me, briefly surprised, and I shrug.