Daniel didn’t speak for a long time. The pendant in his palm felt heavier now, like it carried the weight of an entire world no one had warned him about.
“She was afraid for me?” he finally asked, voice thin.
Isaac gave a slow nod. “Whoever orchestrated her disappearance… they knew she was digging into something dangerous. Not just human trafficking. She discovered something bigger — a network laundering aid money, selling vulnerable women. She started documenting it. Then they set her up.”
Daniel’s breath caught.
“But why the lie?” he asked. “Why go as far as staging a funeral?”
Isaac leaned against the chapel’s wooden doorframe, eyes scanning the mountainside like the enemy might be watching even now. “Because Amelia was a threat. Her silence had to be guaranteed — not just through fear, but erasure. And you were part of that erasure. If you believed she was dead, they thought she’d have nothing left to come back to.”
Daniel shook his head slowly. “They didn’t know her. She wouldn’t stop just because she was alone.”
Isaac gave a bitter smile. “She wasn’t alone. She had Nyah. That girl is braver than most grown men I know.”
Daniel looked at Nyah, who stood quietly by the chapel wall, arms crossed over her small chest. Her eyes didn’t blink.
“Where would Amelia go if she wanted to disappear completely?” Daniel asked.
Isaac frowned. “There’s a woman named Adia. She runs a covert safehouse near the Congolese border. No phones. No GPS. No names. But getting there means passing through militia territory.”
“I don’t care,” Daniel said. “I need to know.”
Isaac looked him up and down. “Then we leave at dawn. Bring nothing with a signal.”
The journey was brutal. Two checkpoints. One broken bridge. A moment when they had to hide under a tarp of fish crates to avoid detection.
But Nyah never flinched. She led with her instincts — taking paths through cassava fields and mango groves, whispering warnings about men with guns who didn’t wear uniforms.
They reached the safehouse on the fourth day. A small compound surrounded by thick jungle.
Adia, a tall woman with dreadlocks and sharp eyes, met them at the gate with a rifle slung over her back.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“Amelia Ashford,” Daniel said, almost begging. “I need to know if she’s here. Or if she ever was.”
Adia studied him. “She was.”
The words made his legs go weak.
“She left two weeks ago,” Adia added. “Said she couldn’t risk staying in one place. Said her husband deserved the truth, but only if he was brave enough to find it.”
She handed him an envelope. Handwritten, sealed with wax. On the back, in Amelia’s writing: Daniel. If you’ve come this far, I know I can trust you.
Inside was a single sentence:
“Look where we first met. Bring no one.”
Daniel stared at it for a long time. The place they first met… was in Istanbul, during a summer internship program when they were both twenty-one.
The game wasn’t over. The chase wasn’t done. But the moment he held that letter, Daniel knew one thing with certainty.
Amelia Grace Ashford was not only alive — she was fighting.
And now, so was he.