365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 09

365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 09 – The Missing Person File

Nothing was taken.

That’s what made it terrifying.

Flora’s team swept every room. No forced entry. Nothing moved, nothing stolen, no cash gone, no weapons

gone.

“They weren’t robbing us,” Faith said. “They were looking for something.”

“For what?”

I already knew. I just didn’t want to say it out loud.

I put us on rotating watch, told them nobody leaves the wing alone, and went to report it – and ran directly into Jaylen Marek in the stairwell at six in the morning, in a t-shirt, holding two coffees.

“One of these is for you,” he said. “I was going to leave it at your door like a coward.”

“Somebody’s been in my wing.”

He put the coffees down on the step.

“Since when?”

“Ten days, maybe two weeks. No entry damage.”

“Then it’s someone with a key or someone with training,” he said. “I’ll pull my own people’s movement logs. All

of them, including mine.”

That surprised me. “You’ll flag yourself?”

“I’ll flag myself.” He met my eyes. “You had a corridor full of my unit thinking garbage about your women and I hadn’t noticed. I’d rather be embarrassed than useless.”

“Marry him,” Echo said.

“Shut up.”

“Sorry?” said Marek.

“Nothing. Internal management issue.”

He handed me the coffee. Our fingers touched for about a second and a half, and I thought about the oath,

and about how the oath very specifically permits one exception, and then I thought about how I was a girt who’d been thrown away by seven people and had absolutely no business wanting anything from anyone.

been here four years,” he said. “Nobody’s ever solved a case in ninety minutes. Nobody’s ever knocked out a Commander in front of the King. Who are you, Rowan Vale?”

“Nobody,” I said. “Ask my parents.”

I meant it as a joke. It came out flat and ugly, and he heard it.

He didn’t push. That’s the thing about Jaylen Marek I keep failing to get over. He just picked up his coffee walked me to the top of the stairs, and said, quietly, “For the record, Commander. Whoever taught you that you were nobody was lying to you.”

Then Monday came, and the King’s meeting, and everything cracked open.

The King opened the session with the Redmont-Silvercrest resolution. Six Commanders got to hear, in detail, how the girl they’d been calling “he” for a year had closed the file they’d failed twice.

Then Director Larsen slid a thin blue folder down the table to me.

“New intake. Missing person, filed by a founding House. High priority. They’ve offered the Crown a great deal

of money.”

“How long missing?”

“Thirteen months,” Larsen said. “Reported eleven days ago.”

Something in my chest went very still.

“Thirteen months missing,” I repeated. “Reported eleven days ago.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Why the delay?”

Larsen shifted. “The filing House claims she was living on their estate and they, ah. Failed to observe her departure.”

Every Commander at the table laughed.

I did not.

I opened the folder.

There’s a specific sound a room makes when everyone in it realizes something at once and nobody wants to be the first to speak.

Photograph, clipped to the corner. A girl in a green dress with hair down to her waist, not smiling, taken at a Maritime board dinner thirteen months ago.

VALE, ROWAN ELEANOR. Age 17 at time of disappeararice. Sole daughter of Marcus and Giselle Vale, House

Vale.

Reward for information: eight figures.

Attached: personal statement from the family.

I turned the page.

My mother’s handwriting. I’d know it anywhere. She writes her R’s like little hooks.

To whoever finds her –

Her name is Rowan. She is eighteen years old on the eleventh, not the fourth, and I have let her celebrate the wrong day her entire life because I was too proud to admit a mistake.

She takes her coffee with too much sugar. She hates pink. She sleeps on her left side. She has answered my questions for seventeen years and I stopped answering hers for one, and I did it on purpose, and it was the worst decision of my life, and I cannot tell you why in this letter because the reason is the same thing that will

get her killed.

Please. If she is alive, do not tell anyone you have found her.

Tell me. Only me.

– G. Vale

My hands were completely steady. I have no idea how.

Seven Commanders were watching my face. The King was watching my face. Jaylen Marek had gone

absolutely rigid across the table.

“Commander Vale,” the King said gently. “Is there something you’d like to tell this room?”

I closed the folder.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” I said. “This one’s mine.”