Chapter 1

The cold slipped past Inna’s coat anyway, settling deep enough that her bones protested.

Winter's kiss. Right. Some tourist-brochure bullshit.

Fitting, she thought. Tonight deserved that kind of honesty. She'd told herself tonight was about the case. That was true. It just wasn't the whole truth.

She should have done this days ago. The Ray file was marked cold last Tuesday. She'd been putting it off - paperwork, follow-ups that went nowhere. The real reason sat two blocks away in a bar. And the excuse was the evidence bag under her arm.

She'd been secondary on Elara Ray's disappearance for eight months. Which meant eight months of watching Vikram Sen. Usually the families blurred together. Grief looked the same on everyone. Not this time.

He brought maps, logs, timelines. His analytical breakdowns were cleaner than the department's own files. A data scientist. Facts over feelings.

But she saw the cracks. The way he gripped the coffee cup hard enough for his knuckles to blanch. The manner in which he would take a slow breath, and ask for an update anyway. Like he already knew how this would end.

He stayed controlled. Stayed loyal when most people would've given up. And somewhere along the way, she'd started caring. And now she liked him more than she should.

Valentine's night was her last excuse. She should tell him the truth about his girlfriend's case. That's why she was here. Mostly. She also wanted to see if those eyes could look at her as something other than Detective Whoever.

The Anchor was warm and dim.

The bar was busier than she’d expected for Valentine’s night. It was loud enough to hide how alone everyone looked. She spotted him in the back corner - shoulders hunched, hands around a glass.

He looked tired. He looked good. He didn't hear her come in over the door chime.

But she didn't get to him first.

"Hello beautiful. Can we buy you a drink?"

Two men. Looking eagerly at her for an positive response. A few years ago she would have smiled, said no thank you. Now she had no softness left.

“Really? Do I look like I’m interested in having a drink with you?”

The guys shuffled away, muttering apologies.

Nice. Great job you idiot. Do that all night and you’ll scare him off too.

She was twenty-six, living alone, and she wanted someone. Men noticed her. She wasn’t clueless. The problem was she kept talking them out of it.

She forced her shoulders down, took a deep breath to center herself, and turned toward Vikram.

Don’t do it again. Not tonight.

She crossed the room.

Vikram watched her approach. That hope in his eyes hurt to see.

"Vikram."

"Detective Sokolov." His voice was calm. His eyes were not. "Did you find something?"

Her throat went tight.

"Let me sit first."

She slid into the booth and placed the evidence bag between them.

Vikram's gaze fixed on the bag, then lifted to her face, searching.

Inna didn't soften it. She never knew how. "The file's being archived, Vikram. As of Tuesday, it's a cold case."

For a second, nothing. Then his face hardened. Not with sadness, but with raw outrage. He leaned forward, his voice low and precise. "That's it? We stop? You want me to accept that a woman vanishes with no trace, and the answer is to just… close the case?"

"We have no new leads. No witnesses. No forensic evidence that goes anywhere."

“That’s because you’re not looking at the right data.”

He set his notebook on the table and opened it. A finger tapped neat handwriting, diagrams, timestamps.

“Look at this data Detective. She was last seen at 9:47 p.m on Elm and Fifth. The Bank camera was down from 9:30 to 10:15.” He paused. “That’s forty-five minutes.”

He met their eyes. “The Uber driver saw a grey sedan. Lights off. No plates. It’s in the first report. Missing from the second.”

His jaw tightened. “You really want to stop there?”

Inna kept her eyes on his. She let him finish. She owed him that.

"Vikram," she said. "We've seen the file. All of it. We've read your notes. Twice. The sedan was logged. It belonged to a neighbor who was out of town. His nephew borrowed it. We confirmed it. The camera malfunction was a scheduled maintenance reboot logged by the security company. We verified the work order. All the existing evidence only leads to a dead end. We don’t have anything new. I’m sorry…"

Each fact landed hard. She watched his shoulders slump.

He looked down at his notebook, at his own handwriting. Then his gaze came back up, and this time he wasn't looking for procedural flaws. He was looking at her. At the exhaustion she couldn't quite hide, at the regret in her expression. He saw she wasn't the enemy.

His anger dissolved.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I just… I didn't want it to end like this. In a file cabinet."

"I know," she said. "I'm so sorry."

He nodded slowly. He closed the notebook. When he spoke again, it was to the empty glass between his hands.

"Elara is probably dead. Isn't she?"

Inna took a sharp breath. This is the first time he'd said it aloud to her. Possibly the first time he'd ever conceded it to himself.

The professional barrier cracked. What was left was just two people in a bar on the worst night of the year, sharing a loss.

Inna signaled the bartender for two glasses of the good Scotch. When they came, she raised hers. "To Elara."

Vikram's eyes glistened. He clinked his glass softly against hers. "To Elara."

The first drink was a burn that settled into warmth. The second drink loosened the quiet. He began to talk. Not in the frantic, evidentiary way of before, but softer.

"She hated that I waited," he said, staring into the amber liquid. From his jacket pocket, he produced a small, velvet box. He didn't open it. He just set it on the table between them.

"Is that?" breathed Inna.

Vikram opened the box. The ring gleamed in the low light. "For her," he said.

Inna gasped. It was beautiful. And yet, here it was, belonging to another woman.

"I had this. For two months before she… went missing. I was terrified. What if I got the words wrong? What if the moment wasn't perfect?" He gave a broken laugh. "I was a data scientist trying to optimize a proposal. She'd have hated that, too."

Inna's heart ached. She was watching a love so complete it was cutting the man who carried it.

"Tell me about her," Inna said.

And he did. He described an accountant with the soul of a puzzle-master. She left coded notes in his lunch and planned scavenger hunts planned months in advance.

“I met her at a pub quiz,” he said, smiling for the first time. “My team thought we had it. She was alone at the bar and still wiped the floor with us.”

He laughed softly. “In the final round, she gave an answer so obscure the quizmaster had to look it up. Beat us by three points. I bought her a drink.”

The smile faded, just a little. “She said I lost because I kept staring at her. Said she found me cute. I was lucky she didn’t have me thrown out.”

Silence followed. Then his hands started moving as he talked, like he couldn’t keep it contained anymore.

Inna listened. Really listened.

And somewhere along the way, she understood: she wasn’t competing with a memory. She was standing in the shadow of a woman who had already been everything to him.

His finger brushed the evidence bag. "Thank you for this. For bringing her back to me tonight, even just like this."

"It's the least I could do," Inna said. Her hand rested on the table near his.

He drew a lovely oak frame from the bag. He touched the corner, his thumb lingering on the interlocking wood.

"I made this," he said, his voice thick. "See? These are bridle joints. They're supposed to be permanent. Stronger than the wood itself."

Inna looked at the way the pieces were notched into one another. Completely overkill for a simple photo frame. But she could see it now. It wasn't just a frame; it was an obsession.

"It's beautiful, Vikram," she said softly.

He didn't look up. "It was supposed to last a lifetime. Everything I built for her was."

He was quiet for a moment. "Woodworking is… it's what I do to stop my brain from buzzing. It's the only time everything gets quiet."

Inna felt the air leave her lungs. Of course. Of course he built beautiful things with his hands. She bit her lip, looked away for a second to compose herself.

<i>Great. Perfect. He has another skill that makes him even more desirable. God hates me.</i>

When she looked back, her hand was still near his. Her pinky finger shifted - just a millimeter - and brushed against his.

The contact was electric. Vikram went very still. His eyes snapped to hers. For one second, he leaned into it, his finger curling slightly against hers. She saw the want in his gaze.

Then he flinched. He pulled his hand back, clasping it with his other.

"Detective," he said with a sigh. "You're… and stunning and... and... intelligent and you've been kinder to me than anyone had to be."

He swallowed. "But I can't. Not like this. Not when she's still… in my head."

Inna blinked. No one had ever turned her down before. The shock was a cold splash, followed immediately by a surge of attraction. She didn't get angry. Instead, she straightened her spine. "Okay," she said.

He looked pained. "Detective…"

"I said it's okay. And it's Inna to you now. I'm not on the case anymore." She offered a small smile. "But hear this, Vikram Sen," she said quietly. "I'm patient." She nodded toward the frame. "Take the time you need."

She stood, leaving the rest of her Scotch unfinished. She had to leave now, while her composure held. "Goodnight, Vikram."

He stood out of instinct. "Goodnight… Inna."

Inna walked out of the bar into the biting cold. The rejection stung. But beneath it was something else: hope. She'd seen the crack in his armor. She'd felt the current between them.

And she would wait.

Chapter 2

The walk back from the Anchor Bar was a path his body knew by heart. City lights bled around Vikram as he moved, a ghost in a frozen February night. The scotch sat in his chest, a useless little furnace against the chill. Archived. Cold case as of Tuesday. Inna’s verdict played on a loop, a nasty earworm he couldn’t shake.

Keys. His fingers were thick, stupid with drink and a deep, bone-tired exhaustion. The metal screeched against the lock before it finally went in. Somehow he remembered how to open the door and and stepped into the flat.

The quiet swallowed him. It had weight, that silence. It had settled over his life like a layer of grime the night Elara disappeared. He didn’t flip the light switch. What was the point? He knew the shape of the darkness here.

He sagged against the shut door. The latch clicked. A sound absurdly loud in the silence. Back at the bar, surrounded by strangers and the steady, solid fact of Inna across the table, he’d managed to keep the walls up. Here, alone in the hallway that still smelled faintly of her shampoo, the performance was over. His legs gave out. He slid down the wood until he was just a heap on the floorboards, the heels of his hands digging into his eye sockets.

A sound leaked out of him. More air than word. "Elara."

For a second, he swore he caught the ghost of her lavender laundry soap on the coat hanging by the door. A stupid trick of memory. He knew the truth. If he dragged himself over there now and buried his face in that wool, he’d find nothing. Just dust and the hollow, empty scent of a life halted.

His thoughts, treacherous, slithered to Inna. Kind. Kinder than the situation required. She’d been the one to bring him the frame. She’d sat there and let his angry, shattered monologue about the system wash over her, never flinching, never offering him that damp look of pity he’d come to expect from everyone. Then her pinky had brushed his. A spark, tiny and vicious. It had felt like a threat. The first sensation in six months that wasn’t just… a numb, endless cold.

That was the real betrayal. That spark. It didn’t warm him; it just carved the cold inside him into something deeper, more profound. How could his own stupid body react to anyone when Elara was still out there in the dark, lost?

He hauled himself up, legs jittering under him. He needed light. The small lamp on the side table clicked on, its yellow glow pooling over the couch where she’d always curled up with a book. This whole room was a minefield now.

There it sat. The evidence bag, a stark, ugly blot on the coffee table. He reached for it, his hands doing that betraying little dance. He drew out the oak frame. Christ, he’d made this. Three weeks in his workshop. The memory hit him like a gut-punch: the green scent of fresh oak shavings, the whisper of grain under his thumb as he sanded, the lamplight catching the honeyed wood. A bridle joint. Strong. Meant to last. Built to hold their picture for a hundred years. He’d even caved and built her that silly “spy” compartment - a shallow channel hidden inside the rail, sealed with nothing but a friction-fit lock.

He’d forgotten. In the grinding nightmare of the investigation, the joke had been buried.

The photo inside was from the botanical gardens. She was caught mid-laugh, hair a wild halo, her eyes screwed up against the sun.

"Why didn’t you just stay?" The scream tore out of him, raw, directed at the blank, indifferent walls.

The sound of his own broken voice did it. Rage, sudden and total, flooded the hollows. He hated the bank and its useless, blind cameras. He hated the neighbor, so obliviously asleep. He hated the police, their filing cabinets, their cold case stamps. He hated, most of all, the world for its relentless, indifferent spin.

He didn’t think. Drunk and furious, he just swung. He didn’t care about the wood, the labor, the love he’d carved into it. He needed to see something break. He needed the outside world to finally match the ruins inside. He hurled the frame at the brick fireplace.

The crack was a sick, gut-twisting sound. It echoed, chased by the awful, high music of glass shattering on the hardwood.

The rage vanished. Snuffed out. What flooded in was a horror so cold it stole the air from his lungs. What had he done? He’d destroyed it. The last piece of her. He was on his hands and knees, scrambling across the floor like a animal.

"No, no, no, no…"

His hands found the wreckage. The main carcass of the frame. One side rail had come completely off. Not shattered, the joint had given way cleanly. The rail lay cocked at an angle, and there it was: a shallow channel, carved right into the wood.

And nestled inside, a small, black USB drive.

Vikram stopped breathing. His hands locked in place.

The secret compartment. The spy frame. Her joke. He’d forgotten it even existed.

The alcoholic fog in his head vanished, scorched away in an instant. His heart was a frantic thing slamming against his ribs. He plucked the drive out with fingers that refused to be still.

When? When did she put this here? Why didn’t she tell me?

He stood. His legs were steady now, wired with a new current. He crossed to his desk, the laptop still glowing from earlier. He didn't let himself think. He just plugged the drive in.

A soft, mundane chime. An icon popped up on the screen. He clicked.

Two things. An audio file named `V_START_HERE.mp3`. A folder labeled `Gallery`.

He clicked the audio.

Static. A soft intake of breath. Then her voice.

"Vikram."

It was a physical blow, a sucker-punch to the center of his chest. Eight months. Eight months since he’d heard her say his name.

"If you're hearing this, you found it. I knew you would. You always were better at finding things than I was." A pause, the silence itself thick with her. "I can’t say much. It's not safe for me to come back yet. I don't know who else might find this. But you need to look at the photos. Look at them like we used to look at puzzles. The focus is everything, Vik. Follow the path."

Another beat. Her voice softened, dropping to something private.

"I love you."

The file ended.

Chapter 3

Vikram didn't move. She was alive. This wasn't an ending. It was a trail. She’d left him a trail because she knew, she knew, he was the only one who’d know how to pick it up.

With unsteady hands, he opened the `Gallery` folder.

Three pictures. The old stone bridge from their first real date. The bookstore they’d wasted a hundred Sundays in. The fountain in the park, her favorite.

He stared. Something was… off. The composition felt wrong. In the bridge photo, their smiles were slightly soft, but the carved stone marker behind them was razor-sharp. In the bookstore, he was a pleasant blur, but one specific shelf in the background was in perfect, clinical focus. The fountain shot was the same. They were smudges of color in the foreground, but the brass plaque on the fountain’s base was painfully, meticulously detailed.

She’d messed with the depth of field. On purpose. She wasn’t pointing him at their faces. She was pointing him at the background.

But why?

He needed a clear head. He went to the kitchen, ran the tap cold, filled a glass. Drank it down in one long, desperate pull. Poured another. He stabbed the button on the coffee maker. While it gurgled and spat, he cupped icy water in his palms and splashed it on his face. The adrenaline and the shock were scouring the last of the scotch haze away.

By the time he slumped back into his chair with a mug of black coffee, his mind felt like a blade.

He opened his image analysis software and pulled up the fountain photo. First step: the metadata. EXIF data. It’s the hidden tag every digital photo carries around: timestamps, camera model, sometimes even where it was taken if the GPS was on. It’s just baked into the file.

He called up the EXIF panel.

Empty. Wiped clean. The timestamp field was blank. GPS data, gone. Even the camera’s make and model had been stripped out.

That doesn’t happen by accident. Someone has to make that happen. Elara had cleaned these files. To anyone else, they’d just be happy snaps from a day out.

He took a sip of coffee. What else? What else can you hide in a picture?

The most basic trick is LSB steganography (Least Significant Bit encoding). Pictures are made of pixels. Each pixel’s color is defined by numbers. For each color (red, green, blue) that’s a number between 0 and 255. The "least significant bit" is the very last digit in the binary version of that number. Changing it tweaks the color the tiniest, invisible amount. A red value of 237 looks the same as 236 to your eye. But if you change those last bits across thousands of pixels in a specific pattern, you can hide a message. The picture looks normal, but it’s carrying a secret in the noise.

He ran a standard LSB detection tool. It scoured the pixels, hunting for non-random patterns in those least significant bits.

Thirty seconds later, the result flashed: `NO SIGNIFICANT PATTERNS DETECTED`.

Vikram sat back. Too obvious. Elara would know LSB is the first thing you check.

What next? He tried a frequency domain analysis. More complex. It transforms the image into a map of color frequencies. Hidden data can leave a subtle signature in the patterns.

Nothing.

He ran a color histogram analysis, checking for weird spikes in the red, green, or blue channels.

Zero.

He rubbed his eyes hard. Think. What would she do?

Their anniversary. Two years back. She’d set up a whole digital escape room weekend. They’d spent two days solving puzzles, and she’d gone deep on steganography techniques, making him swear to remember them. "You never know when you’ll need to send a secret message," she’d teased.

And she’d made him promise to remember the date. Their first anniversary. "It’s our cipher key, Vik. April 17th, 2021. Don’t you dare forget."

He’d thought it was just a game.

His pulse kicked up a notch. He opened his command terminal, navigated to an old, dusty directory. There it was. A steganography tool he’d coded for a university project. The one that used a custom key for encryption.

The principle is straightforward. Don’t just hide the data. Encrypt it first with a password. Without the key, any hidden payload just looks like random static. Even if it’s found, it’s gibberish.

He loaded the tool, pointed it at the fountain photo. In the password field, he typed: `04172021`

The program ran. Extraction algorithms churned. Pattern matching. Decryption routines.

Text scrolled. Then it halted.

A few lines glowed green on the screen:

`DECRYPTION SUCCESSFUL`

`PAYLOAD: DATUM=WGS84; GRID=LOCAL_METERS`

`ORIGIN_TAG: HOME_ENTRY`

`OFFSET_1: +812m E, +146m N`

He didn’t trust it. He ran it again. Twice. Hashed the output. The same bytes came back every time. It was real.

He ran the bookstore photo through. Same key.

`OFFSET_2: +1,935m E, -402m N`

The bridge photo gave him the third.

`OFFSET_3: -604m E, +1,121m N`

He fired up a GIS viewer. Pinned a single origin point.`HOME_ENTRY`. Plugged in Elara’s offsets in meters. Three markers snapped onto the digital map of the city. The fountain. The bookstore. The old bridge. They formed a tight, deliberate cluster. Walkable.

These weren’t rough areas. They were precise coordinates. Stand-on-this-exact-spot precise.

He zoomed in on the fountain marker. It landed dead center on that brass dedication plate. The one in perfect focus.

He zoomed on the bookstore. The coordinates pointed inside, to a specific aisle. He checked the photo, zoomed the background. That shelf. Poetry section. Top shelf, third book from the left. That was the focal point.

The bridge coordinates targeted the stone marker itself. The historical plaque.

Three locations. Three specific objects at those locations. Why?

He enhanced the fountain photo, zooming until the pixels blurred, then sharpened the contrast on the brass plate. The engraving read "In Memory of…" with a date and some numbers. But something was… uneven.

She’d done this before. Tiny typographic emphasis. Letters or numbers with the faintest extra weight, invisible unless you were hunting.

He tweaked the contrast, the brightness.

There. Three numbers on the plate had a slightly heavier stroke: 7, 3, 15.

He did the same to the bookstore photo, zooming on the spine of that third book. The title was a blur, but individual letters stood out from the noise. He scribbled in his notebook: T-H-E-R-E.

The bridge plaque was next. On the bronze text, specific words held that subtle emphasis: "BENEATH THE STONE"

He looked at his notes:

Fountain: 7, 3, 15

Bookstore: THERE

Bridge: BENEATH THE STONE

His blood roared in his ears. Two layers. Coordinates told him where. These clues told him what to look for when he got there.

A glance at the clock: 2:47 AM.

He couldn’t go now. Not in the dead of night. And he couldn’t go alone. If Elara was in hiding, if it was "too dangerous," then someone was looking. Someone who made her disappear.

Inna. She’d brought him the frame. She’d sat with him. She’d looked at him in a way that… No. More than that. She was a detective. She had access. Databases. Cameras. The right to ask questions without setting off alarms.

He needed her.

He checked the time again. Too early to call. He needed to get this all in order first. Make it make sense for someone else.

The next four hours were a blur of focused work. Screenshots of the coordinate extractions. Printouts of the photos with the clues circled. Neat notes explaining the steganography, the key, the process. A clean timeline of discovery.

Dawn was a grey smear at the window when he finished. He had a dossier. Everything Inna would need to see.

His eyes fell to the broken frame on the floor. He hadn’t destroyed it. He’d cracked it open. He’d found the way forward.

"I'm coming, Elara," he whispered into the quiet room. "I have the key."

He picked up his phone, found her number. His thumb hovered. 6:58 AM. It was too early. It didn’t matter.

He tapped the call button.

She’d drawn him a map. He wasn’t going to waste a second of it.

 

Chapter 4

Morning light hit Inna's face through the blinds. She groaned and pulled the pillow over her head.

She wasn't a heavy drinker. One glass of wine after work was her limit. That expensive Scotch last night had gone down easy and was now beating the hell out of her.

She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. But underneath the hangover, she felt warm when last night came back in pieces.

The Anchor Bar. Amber light on Vikram's face. The moment her pinky brushed his.

It had been brief. Barely a second. But he felt it. He leaned into it. For that one heartbeat, the grief moved aside and he looked at her like a woman, not a detective.

She smiled at the ceiling. He'd turned her down. Been honest about it. Said he couldn't move forward while Elara was still in his head. But the way he looked at her...

Inna had spent years perfecting the cold shoulder. She'd never been on the receiving end.

It should have stung. Instead it made her want him more.

His loyalty was rare. In a city where people treated relationships like disposable data, Vikram Sen held onto a memory with a death grip. That made him exactly the kind of man she wanted. Intelligent. Capable. The kind of loyal that ran bone-deep. If a man like that decided you were worth his time, he wouldn't just be a boyfriend. He'd be a partner.

She threw the covers back and sat up. Winced. She needed water and about a gallon of coffee.

Her apartment was sparse. A few half-dead plants, a stack of true crime books, one photo from her academy graduation. The home of someone who spent more time in other people's tragedies than her own.

She was filling the kettle when her phone buzzed on the counter. The vibration rattled against a ceramic plate.

Inna wiped her hands on her leggings and picked it up. Probably her sergeant about a shift. Or someone asking about a file.

Then she saw the name.

Vikram Sen.

Her heart did something stupid.

She glanced at the clock. 6:58 AM. Hours ago he'd been walking home drunk. Reeling from the news that the search was over.

For one wild second, she let herself believe he'd reconsidered. That he'd woken up thinking about her finger against his and decided grief could wait. That maybe...

She swiped to answer. Tried to keep the smile out of her voice.

"Vikram?"

A wall of noise erupted. Vikram wasn't talking. He was shouting. His voice a ragged edge that cut through her hangover. The volume was loud enough his phone was distorting.

"Inna! Inna, are you there? You have to listen. It's not what we thought. None of it is!"

She pulled the phone away from her ear. Her smile died. "Vikram? Slow down. I can barely understand you. What's going on? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I'm more than fine." He was yelling. She could hear him pacing. Rapid footsteps on hardwood. He sounded breathless. Like he'd been running. "I found it. I found the path. She left it for me. She left it in the wood, Inna!"

"Vikram, stop." She used the tone she reserved for panicked witnesses. "Take a breath. You're yelling. Calm down and tell me what happened."

Sudden silence. Then a long exhale. Shaky.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry for waking you. I haven't slept. I couldn't. Inna, I need your help. I need you to come to the apartment. Right now."

Cold dread knotted in her stomach. This didn't sound like a man who'd found a lead. The jump from crushing defeat at the bar to this manic state was too fast. She'd seen it before with families of the missing. The mind creating its own reality when the truth became too heavy.

"Vikram, it's seven in the morning. Why don't you try to get some rest and I'll come by after my shift?"

"No! It has to be now." He insisted. "It's about the case. About Elara. I was wrong. You were wrong. Everyone was wrong. She didn't just disappear. She hid. She left me something in the frame you gave me last night. I've decoded the first layer but I need a detective. I need someone who knows the city."

The mention of the case made her jaw tighten. If he'd destroyed that frame in a drunken rage and was now imagining messages in the debris, she'd accidentally caused his breakdown.

"Is this about the frame, Vikram?"

"Just come. Please, Inna. If I'm right... she's still out there. I have coordinates. I have her voice. I'm not crazy. Just come and look at the screen. If you look at it and tell me I'm wrong, I'll go to the hospital. I'll do whatever you want. Just look at the data."

The desperation in his voice was real. Heavy. Inna looked at her cold coffee. Then at her shield on the dresser. She was a cop. A man she cared about was either onto something impossible or having a crisis. Either way she couldn't stay in her kitchen.