**ADAM**
The search grinds into its second night without mercy, and the exhaustion settles into my bones with a weight that feels earned and unwelcome, because fatigue is a luxury I cannot afford when every instinct I have is screaming that time is the only thing Jack truly controls right now. The forest stretches endlessly around us, dark and watchful, patrols rotating in tight formation as trackers fan outward again and again, each sweep returning with nothing but broken scents and carefully erased trails.
He planned this too well.
I kneel at the edge of a shallow ravine where the last credible trace dissolved into treated earth, my fingers digging into the soil as if pressure might coax answers out of it, and the bond hums faintly beneath my ribs, distorted but present, a thin line t
