It had been two days.

Two days since you disappeared.

JJ was losing his mind. He hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten—he was running purely on adrenaline and rage at this point. He blamed himself. Of course he did. He was supposed to walk you home that night. If he hadn’t gotten caught up in some dumb argument with John B, you wouldn’t have been alone. You wouldn’t have been taken.

And now? Now he was standing in the last place he ever thought he’d be—teaming up with Rafe Cameron.

Rafe had shown up out of nowhere, demanding answers. The moment he heard you were missing, something in him snapped. He wasn’t about to sit back and do nothing while you—the only person who ever made him feel like he wasn’t completely rotten inside—were out there, alone and scared. So now, here they were—JJ Maybank and Rafe Cameron, two boys who could barely be in the same room without throwing punches, forced to work together.

“We need to be smart about this,” Rafe said, voice tense as he loaded a gun.

JJ scoffed, shaking his head. “Oh yeah? And what, you think you’re the brains here? You’re probably the reason this happened in the first place.”

Rafe’s jaw clenched. “You think I’d let someone take her? You think I don’t care?”

“I think all you do is destroy everything you touch,” JJ shot back. “And I’ll be damned if I let you be the reason she doesn’t come home.”

Tension crackled between them like a live wire. But in the end, it didn’t matter how much they hated each other. The only thing that mattered?

Finding you.