The city outside had gone quiet, but my head hadn't.
The night air tasted metallic — like something had been cut open somewhere and left to rust in the dark. I sat on the couch, staring at the glass window where my name — DENNY — still faintly shimmered in red. The police had left hours ago. The silence they left behind felt heavier than anything they'd asked me.
My heart had been doing strange things since that evening. It wasn't just beating it was arguing. Fear against hope. Love against anger. I wanted to believe Lucy and Diana were out there somewhere, safe, caught up in some ridiculous misunderstanding that would explain itself by morning. I wanted to believe that so badly it almost worked.
Almost.
I kept pacing. Kept calling every number I could think of friends, neighbors, anyone whose phone might pick up at this hour.
Then I called Abel.
He picked up after one ring, voice rough with sleep. "Denny? What's wrong?"
I didn't explain. Couldn't find the shape of it in words. I just said, "They're gone."
Within half an hour, both Abel and Oliver were at my door.
Behind them, Christopher shuffled in a man in his late sixties, wrapped in a grey shawl, holding a flashlight like it was a weapon he'd decided to trust. He lived next door. Retired principal of Rove Hill School, known in the neighborhood as the man who still believed that discipline, applied with enough patience, could fix most things. He had the calm eyes of someone who had seen enough of life to stop being surprised by it and enough heart left to still be affected by it.
He looked at me and asked simply, "What happened, son?"
"My wife and daughter," I said. "Gone. No struggle. No sign of anything. Just — gone."
He didn't speak for a moment. Then he nodded slowly, the way certain older men do when they understand something that hasn't been said aloud yet.
"Fear likes empty houses," he murmured. "Let's not leave this one empty tonight."
The four of us searched every room, every street corner, every possible thread that might lead somewhere. Abel and Oliver worked the tech side: traffic cameras, location pings, internal RedTie databases pulled up on their phones in the low light of the kitchen. I moved through physical spaces — drawers, closets, corners of the house where no logic could exist but where grief sends you anyway. Christopher walked the perimeter outside, his flashlight sweeping slow, steady arcs through the rain.
Hours passed. Nothing.
At midnight, the rain thickened, turning the road outside into trembling sheets of reflected light. We decided to split Christopher heading home to check his own CCTV feed. "My wife worries when I stay out late," he said with a weary half-smile that carried the weight of someone who had learned not to take small comforts for granted. The three of us took the car and drove, circling the city without a plan beyond movement.
The city looked different at this hour. Like it was holding its breath. Streetlights flickered in long corridors of fog and the rain smeared every reflection into something uncertain, like the world itself couldn't decide what it wanted to look like tonight.
Oliver tried to break the silence somewhere around the second hour. "You know what I think?" His voice reached for lightness and didn't quite get there. "Diana's teaching your Alexa to make pancakes again and just forgot to text."
I didn't answer.
Abel glanced at me from the passenger seat. "She'll come back, Denny. They both will." His voice was softer than usual. Careful.
I wanted to believe him. But belief has weight — and tonight mine was too heavy to lift off the ground.
We circled half the city before turning back. The clock on the dashboard read 2:17 a.m. That's when I noticed it a faint glow in the direction of my apartment, visible even from down the street. Faint but unmistakable. Red.
"Is that…" Abel leaned forward. "Is that someone standing there?"
Oliver squinted through the rain-streaked windshield. "That's your place, right?"
"Yeah."
We parked fast. Rain slammed into us the second the doors opened, cold and relentless, our shoes slapping through puddles as we ran toward the building. By the time we reached the entrance, the glow had intensified red, deep and pulsing like something alive, like heat pressing outward from inside the wall itself.
DENNY.
But this time it wasn't faint. It breathed. It pulsed like a heartbeat, each flare slow and deliberate, as if something behind it was measuring its own patience.
And standing directly in front of it perfectly still, silhouetted against the red was a man.
He didn't move. Didn't react to the rain, to the noise of our approach, to any of it. Just stood there, facing the street as if he had been waiting and had all the time in the world to keep doing so.
"Who the hell.." Oliver started. But I was already moving.
I grabbed the nearest thing from the umbrella stand a metal rod and stepped forward. Abel and Oliver fell in close behind me.
"Hey!" I shouted. The man didn't turn. "Who are you?!"
Nothing.
I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder.
Cold. Far too cold for a man who had been standing upright.
He turned.
And the world tilted on its axis.
"Lucas…?" I whispered.
My brother's face stared back at me pale, rain-slicked, eyes distant and wrong in a way I couldn't name. The same face I hadn't seen in six years. The same face I last saw in a wooden box going into the ground while rain soaked through my suit.
Abel's voice cracked beside me. "Lucas? You're wait, what—"
I couldn't form words. My mind had gotten stuck somewhere between relief and horror, unable to move in either direction. "Lucas," I tried again, stepping closer. "How are you here…?"
He blinked once.
Then his mouth twisted open and he screamed.
"REDTIE! REDTIE! REDTIE! REDTIE! REDTIE!"
Over and over. Each shout felt like it cracked something in the air itself not just sound but pressure, vibration, something that moved through the glass and the walls and the bones of my chest. The red glow behind him flared brighter with every syllable, pulsing in rhythm with his voice like they were wired together.
"Lucas, stop!" I grabbed him by the shoulders. His eyes rolled back, veins darkening against his temples like ink spreading under pale skin. Then sudden, absolute silence.
He collapsed.
I caught him before he hit the ground. His pulse faint. Barely there. But there. Oliver dropped beside me, reaching for his phone. But before any of us could move or speak
The lights flickered.
And died.
Darkness swallowed everything whole.
I woke with a gasp.
My shirt was soaked through with cold sweat, clinging to my skin. The room was dark except for the weak amber line of streetlight cutting through the blinds in thin strips across the floor. My throat was dry. My pulse was still running like I'd been sprinting somewhere I couldn't remember.
For a second I didn't know where I was. The ceiling felt too close. The smell was damp leather.
Then it settled. The couch. The living room. My apartment.
Abel was slumped to my right, half-asleep, one hand still loosely gripping his phone. Oliver was to my left, breathing slow and even, one leg hanging off the edge of the cushion. The red digits of the wall clock read 3:49 a.m.
Dream. It was a dream.
But the images wouldn't release. Lucas at the window. His eyes. The word pulsing in red. The scream that had moved through my ribs like sound had weight.
I pushed myself upright, joints stiff and protesting. The rain had stopped outside. The air in the apartment felt heavy in the particular way it does when something has happened in it that it hasn't finished processing yet.
Why Lucas? Why now?
Six years. Gone not missing. Dead. I had stood at his grave. I had heard the dirt. I remembered the way his name sounded over the microphone, like it had been borrowed from someone else. And yet in the dream he had looked exactly as I remembered him same jacket, same crooked angle to his jaw but his eyes had been hollow in a way the living don't get. Frightened in a way that goes deeper than fear. Like he had seen something that had no business being seen.
I looked toward the window. Dark glass. Normal. No red glow.
I walked toward it anyway. Hesitated. Then pressed my palm flat against the surface.
Cold. But not the ordinary cold of glass at night. Something underneath it. Something that had no temperature you could measure.
"Denny…?" Abel's voice, rough and half-formed. "You good?"
"Yeah." The lie came out smoothly. "Just a bad dream."
He nodded, rubbed his face, and sank back into the cushions.
I couldn't go back to sleep.
I moved to the kitchen, filled a glass of water, leaned against the counter in the dark. The refrigerator hummed. The oven clock blinked 3:58 a.m. I drank slowly, trying to wash the taste of metal from my mouth. That taste again — the same one that had been in the dream like a signature.
That's when I noticed it.
On the kitchen window glass. A faint mark. Not a reflection on the surface itself. Three small smudges. Fingerprints. Positioned too high to belong to any of us. Too deliberate to be random. And faintly luminous, like the residue of something that had briefly been present and hadn't fully left.
My hand reached toward them instinctively. Stopped halfway.
Something inside me said don't.
I listened to it.
I turned back to the room. The apartment felt smaller than it had an hour ago, the shadows having claimed more of the corners. Something in the air had shifted while we slept the silence wasn't empty anymore. It was occupied. Attentive. The kind of silence that has been listening to you rather than waiting for you to fill it.
I checked the front door. Locked. Checked the windows. Closed. Everything exactly where it should be.
But the feeling didn't leave.
I sat back on the couch and stared at the fingerprints from across the room, faintly visible under the yellow thread of streetlight coming through the blinds.
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe my mind, saturated in grief and exhaustion and whatever the dream had been, was manufacturing patterns in ordinary smudges.
Then from the window.
Tap.
I froze.
Another. Slow. Measured. The precise rhythm of fingers that know exactly what they're doing.
And through the glass faint, deliberate, unmistakably real — a voice:
"Don't go yet."
I stood. Crossed the room. Pulled the curtains aside.
The city was empty. Streets slick and silent, glinting like broken mirrors under the orange lights. Nothing. Nobody.
"Lucy?" I whispered. "Diana?"
Silence answered.
Then from somewhere out there, faint and thin and unmistakable —
A lullaby.
Humming. Distant.
Diana's voice.
The realization arrived slowly, then all at once, pressing down through my chest until I had to sit.
I stayed there long after the sound faded, watching the city dissolve into the grey-blue of early dawn.
Why Lucas? Why now, after six years?
His memory had been fading not gone, never gone, but softening at the edges the way grief does when it finally accepts that it has to share space with the rest of living. Six years since the rain soaked through my suit at his grave. Six years since I stood there after everyone else had left, listening to the night settle around the freshly turned earth. The guilt had been colder than the rain. If I'd arrived ten minutes earlier.
But you can't rewrite time.
Or at least that's what I used to believe.
I told Abel and Oliver everything that morning. The fingerprints. The tapping. The voice. Diana's lullaby. They listened without interrupting, their faces doing the quiet work of people trying to hold themselves steady in a current that kept shifting.
When I said Lucas's name, they exchanged a look.
Abel was first. "Six years, Denny. He's been gone six years."
"I know," I said quietly. "I was there."
Oliver leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Then what you saw what you heard — you think it was actually him?"
I met his eyes. "I don't know what I think anymore. But whatever it was it's connected. To Lucy and Diana. To RedTie. To everything."
Abel exhaled slowly, pressing his fingers against his temples. "Maybe it's time we stop circling and go straight at it." He looked at me, then at Oliver. "We should go back to RedTie."
The name landed in the room like a current switching on. If there were answers anywhere, they were buried inside those forty floors. In the cold corridors. In the hum of servers that had always felt like they were keeping something from the rest of us.
"I'll go," I said. Steadier than I expected. "I'll find out what happened to Lucas. To Lucy. To Diana." I looked at both of them tired, uncertain, but present. "If RedTie did this, I will take it apart piece by piece until I find them."
Abel placed his hand on my shoulder. "Then we go together."
Oliver nodded. "Always."
Something shifted inside me not peace, not relief. Something quieter than both. Direction. The first direction I'd felt since the night the house went silent.
I turned back to the window.
"I'm coming," I whispered. "I'm going to find you, Lucy. I'm going to bring you home, Diana."
I was ready.
The quiet that followed was the kind that has texture thick with everything nobody had said yet.
Oliver was the one who finally broke it, his voice careful in the way voices get when they're approaching something they know might detonate. "Denny… you said Lucas has been gone six years. But you've never actually told us what happened. Not really."
Something tightened in my throat.
Abel glanced at him a quick, sharp look. But Oliver didn't pull back. "You change the subject every time it comes up. If this started with him if RedTie connects back to him we need to know."
The words I'd kept buried for six years pressed against the inside of my chest like something that had finally decided it was tired of waiting.
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, staring at a fixed point on the floor.
"Back then…" I started.
BANG.
All three of us jolted.
BANG — harder this time, the door shuddering in its frame.
A voice from the other side, muffled but urgent:
"DENNY! Hurry up! Open the door!"
Abel shot me a look that held equal parts fear and confusion. Oliver was already on his feet.
The banging came again. Faster. More desperate.