novelraw Chapter 506: Who Would Break First
Chapter 506: Who Would Break First
The thing Lachlan hated the most was the quiet.
Not silence...there was still movement, still noise, still the low churn of a place that never fully slept...but the sound had thinned.
Conversations didn’t linger the way they used to. Footsteps passed without the usual rhythm of recognition. Even the air felt less occupied, as if something essential had stepped out and taken the warmth with it.
It had been four days.
Four days since Sera hadn’t come back.
At first, it hadn’t seemed wrong. She wandered. Everyone knew that.
She slipped through cracks, vanished into corners of the place like she’d always known how to move between moments. She’d done it before—gone quiet for a few hours, half a day at most—and then reappeared with that faint smile and a look in her eyes that said you worried for nothing.
But this wasn’t that.
This was absence with weight.
Lachlan stood in the doorway of the room that still felt like hers, even though she hadn’t stepped into it in days. Nothing had been disturbed. Nothing taken. Her things sat exactly as she’d left them, careless and familiar in a way that hurt to look at. A sleeve draped over the edge of the bunk. A cup left near the corner of the table. The faint impression of her weight still pressed into the mattress.
He hadn’t let anyone touch it.
Not because he thought it mattered. Not because he believed she’d come back and need it exactly the same.
But because it felt wrong to let it change.
He stayed there longer than he meant to, staring at the empty space beside the bed. It struck him, suddenly and painfully, that he couldn’t remember the last thing she’d said to him. Not clearly. Only the feeling of it—light, offhand, something meant to smooth over a moment he hadn’t realized mattered.
That bothered him more than the silence.
When he finally stepped back into the corridor, the place felt different again. Not hostile. Just... misaligned. Like walking into a room where the furniture had been moved an inch to the left and your body kept expecting it to be where it used to be.
Zubair was leaning against the far wall, arms folded, gaze unfocused. He looked like he’d been standing there for a while.
"You’ve been pacing," Zubair said without looking at him.
Lachlan stopped. "So have you."
Zubair’s mouth twitched, but there was no humor in it. "Have I?"
"Yeah. You just do it standing still."
That earned him a glance. A brief one, sharp and assessing, before Zubair looked away again.
"She still hasn’t come back," Lachlan said.
"No."
"Anyone see her?"
"No."
A beat passed.
"She say anything to you?" Lachlan asked.
Zubair shook his head once. "Nothing that I recognized as a goodbye."
Lachlan let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. "She wouldn’t just... disappear."
"No. We think they’ve taken her somewhere. Psycho thinks that there is tunnels and buildings under the Sanctuary that no one knows about."
Lachlan hummed and nodded his head, not surprised by that. But if they couldn’t find the entrance to the tunnels and buildings, then there was no way to rescue her.
He had been in the military too long to rush into a situation without at least five exit strategies... let alone an entrance one.
They stood there in the corridor while people moved around them, careful not to look too closely. It had started like that yesterday—eyes sliding away, conversations cutting short. Not fear exactly. More like avoidance. Like everyone sensed something was wrong and didn’t want to be the one to name it.
Lachlan hated that feeling.
He hated not knowing where to put his hands, or what to do with the restless energy building under his skin. Normally, he’d talk. He’d joke. He’d poke at the edges of things until someone laughed and the tension broke.
But the humor had nowhere to land now.
"She’d say something," he muttered. "She always does. Even if it’s just to tell us not to worry."
Zubair’s jaw tightened. "She didn’t want us to worry."
"That’s not the same thing."
They moved through the lower levels together, not searching so much as confirming what they already knew. The places she liked to linger. The corners she’d claimed as her own. The quiet routes she took when she didn’t want to be seen.
All empty.
The people they asked gave the same answers in different words. No, hadn’t seen her. No, didn’t know where she’d gone. Maybe reassigned. Maybe moved. Maybe she’d volunteered for something better.
Maybe.
By the third day, even those answers thinned out. People stopped pretending they had information at all.
By the fourth, they stopped meeting Lachlan’s eyes.
He felt it then—the shift from absence to erasure.
It wasn’t that she was gone. It was that the place had started behaving as if she’d never been there.
That scared him more than anything else.
Psycho appeared late that afternoon, emerging from one of the outer corridors with dust on his boots and an expression that told Lachlan everything and nothing at the same time.
"Anything?" Lachlan asked.
Psycho shook his head once. "Nothing that fits."
"That’s not an answer."
"It’s the only one I have."
Zubair joined them, arms crossed. "We’re not looking in the right places."
Lachlan laughed without humor. "We’ve looked everywhere."
Zubair’s gaze sharpened. "Everywhere we’re allowed to."
That shut him up.
They stood in a loose triangle, the space between them wider than it used to be. No one stepped closer. No one filled the silence. It sat between them like a question none of them wanted to ask out loud.
"She wouldn’t leave us like this," Lachlan said finally. "She wouldn’t just... stop."
Psycho didn’t respond. His eyes were distant, focused on something internal and cold.
Zubair spoke instead. "She wouldn’t."
Lachlan nodded, grateful for the agreement. "Then we wait. We watch. We don’t fall apart."
Zubair studied him. "You’re afraid."
"Yeah," Lachlan said simply. "I am."
There was no shame in it. Not here.
"I’m afraid that when she comes back," he continued, "we won’t be the same. That we’ll have drifted too far apart to recognize each other."
Psycho’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
Zubair looked away.
That was answer enough.
Later, when the lights shifted to their evening cycle and the compound quieted into something almost peaceful, Lachlan returned to the room again. He sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, hands laced together.
He tried to imagine what she’d say if she saw him like this—brooding, restless, worrying holes into the floor.
Probably something sharp. Something kind. Something that made him feel seen without making him feel small.
He exhaled slowly.
"Don’t take too long," he murmured to the empty space. "We’re not good at this without you."
The room didn’t answer.
And somewhere, far beyond the walls he could see, the distance between them continued to stretch—quietly, patiently—waiting to see which of them would break first.