Chapter Text
It was 1:15 in the morning when Zora finally slipped out of the frat party on Bay State Road.
She'd only meant to stay for an hour, two tops, but the music and the cheap vodka cranberries and the easy unearned laughter of people who hadn't checked their bank accounts in weeks had done what they always did: stretched time. Made the night feel bigger than it was. Three weeks earlier she'd turned twenty-one, and with winter break officially starting, some part of her had decided the semester was over and she was allowed to stop being responsible for one single night.
Mara was still in the kitchen when she left. Head thrown back in that loud laugh of hers, the one that filled whatever room it was in, while some guy with a full sleeve of tattoos leaned into her space and gestured wildly about something Zora couldn't make out over the bass. She stood in the doorway for a moment just watching. Thought about interrupting to say a proper goodbye. Decided against it.
Mara was happy. That didn't happen as often as it should.
She texted her instead: heading out see u tomorrow. Got a thumbs-up before she'd made it down the porch steps.
The cold hit her the second she cleared the door and she wasn't ready for it. Boston in December had a specific quality to its cold, not just the temperature but something almost personal about it, like the city was reminding you it didn't owe you anything. She tugged the hem of her dress down her thighs, which did nothing, the thing barely covered her even at full length, and started walking.
Sixteen minutes to her building on the quiet end of Commonwealth. She'd done it a hundred times. Told herself each time that it was fine, that the area was safe, that she wasn't the kind of girl things happened to. She was starting to understand that last part was something everyone believed about themselves right up until they were wrong after all the true-crime podcasts she’d began listening to.
One AirPod in, Lana Del Rey murmuring something about being young and sad and in love. Phone at 42%, loose in her hand out of habit. The streetlights turned the puddles on the sidewalk into something almost pretty, gold-tinted and still. Commonwealth was quiet the way it always got after midnight, most of the brownstones dark, a few windows glowing with someone's late Netflix binge or the blue-white light of a laptop screen.
She noticed a navy Mercedes, deep as a bruise, sitting at the curb a full block ahead. Engine barely audible. Tinted windows. Out of habit, her mother's voice playing in her head on a loop that never fully went quiet, she crossed to the other side of the street and kept the row of parked cars between herself and it. Better paranoid than sorry. Her mother said that constantly. Her mother also said never walk alone at night and look how well that one had stuck.
She turned down her side street.
Two blocks from home.
She heard him before she registered what she was hearing. Slow, unhurried footsteps followed behind her. She glanced back without breaking stride.
Tall. Dark suit, tie still knotted like it was two in the afternoon. Hands in his pockets, posture easy. Maybe thirty feet back, moving with the kind of loose purposeful stride that belonged to men who always knew exactly where they were going. He looked like he fit here more than she did. That was almost the worst part.
She told herself she was being ridiculous. This was her neighborhood. She knew these streets.
Then his pace changed.
Just a quiet lengthening of his stride, a subtle closing of distance, and her body figured out what it meant before her brain did. Her stomach dropped the way it does when you miss a step walking down stairs.
She ran.
Her heels hit the pavement hard, the sound embarrassingly loud in the quiet street. Thick platforms but still heels. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She'd known better her entire adult life and worn them anyway because they made her legs look good, and now she was running in them at 1 a.m. on a side street.
She made it maybe fifteen steps.
His arm hooked around her waist from behind and lifted her off the ground like she was nothing. Like the effort wasn't worth registering. She got one real scream out before his hand covered her mouth.
She kicked back hard and caught his shin with her heel, felt the impact all the way up to her knee, and he made a sound low in his throat but didn't slow down. She drove her elbow into his ribs. Threw her weight sideways. Clawed at the arm around her waist with her free hand and felt his jacket bunch under her nails but her fingers couldn't find purchase on the fabric. None of it mattered.
"Easy." His voice was quiet against her ear. Almost gentle, which was somehow the most frightening thing she'd heard in her life. "You're okay."
She was not okay.
She kept fighting because what else was there, and when he shifted his grip just slightly to adjust for her weight she turned her head as far as it would go and bit down on his palm with everything she had.
She felt the skin split under her teeth.
He made a sharp sound, not a grunt this time but something more involuntary than that, something that came from a real place, and his grip broke for one full second. She tasted blood, copper flooding her mouth, warm and immediate, and she had just enough air to start screaming again before his forearm came across her throat.
She felt her voice disappear.
"Christ." Quieter now, an exhale more than a word. She couldn't see his face but she could hear him breathing a little harder than before. Good. "No more of that."
She stomped toward his instep and missed. Kicked out blindly and missed again. Her left AirPod popped loose and skittered across the pavement, still murmuring Lana into the empty street, and she watched it bounce and thought with some delirious back corner of her brain that she'd paid ninety dollars for those.
He was walking her backward and she'd barely noticed, too focused on fighting, and now she could see the alley she hadn't clocked before, dark and narrow between two brownstones, and the Mercedes at the far end of it, repositioned, passenger door already standing open. Interior light off.
Her vision started going soft at the edges, not unconsciousness exactly but her body making quiet executive decisions without her, routing blood somewhere more essential and leaving her arms heavy. She felt herself go slack.
He shifted her weight against his chest immediately, like he'd been waiting for it. Then, he buckled her in. Actually buckled her in, leaned across her to click the seatbelt into place, and she had just enough awareness left to find that completely, horribly strange. His hand rested at her shoulder for a moment after.
"There you go," he said quietly.
Then the world went black.