His Chubby Obsession

Chapter Twenty-Three: Sofia

(Enzo's POV)

I've felt fear before. Plenty of it. Fear the night my mother didn't wake up. Fear the first time I put on the patch and understood exactly what kind of life I was choosing to be responsible for. Fear on that dark road, three cars width apart from a woman I'd never met, watching her almost put a Honda Civic through my chest.

None of it compared to standing on that porch, staring at my sister's shattered phone, understanding that whatever had happened here had happened while I was forty minutes away at a party I hadn't even been welcome to attend.

"Call everyone," I told Emma, my voice coming out steadier than I felt, years of learning to sound calm in front of people who needed you to be calm even when you weren't. "Tell them to meet at the clubhouse. Tell them it's Sofia."

I called the club myself, my hands nowhere near as steady as my voice had managed to be, and within twenty minutes we had six bikes and two trucks fanning out along every road within a ten-mile radius, searching ditches, side streets, anywhere a struggle might have ended somewhere out of sight.

Emma stayed behind with Charlotte, at my insistence, though I could see in her face exactly how much that insistence cost her, how much every part of her wanted to be out searching too instead of waiting, helpless, in a house that had already proven itself not as safe as we'd promised her it would be.

"I have to be useful," she said, the words coming out tight, frustrated.

"You are being useful. You're keeping her safe." I nodded toward Charlotte, curled small and frightened on the couch, Mr. Hoppy pressed hard against her chest. "That's not nothing, Emma. That's the most important job in this house right now."

She didn't argue further, though I could tell it cost her not to.

—

We found Sofia forty minutes later, a mile and a half down a service road that ran along the back edge of the property, half-hidden in the tree line, sitting upright against a fence post with her knees pulled to her chest.

Alive. Conscious. Furious, in the particular way Sofia got furious when she was actually scared and refused to admit it.

I was off the bike before it had fully stopped, on my knees in front of her before I'd even registered moving.

"I'm fine," she said immediately, which from Sofia meant almost certainly not entirely fine. "Stop looking at me like that."

"You're bleeding." A cut above her eyebrow, already dried at the edges, a bruise forming dark along her jaw.

"I've had worse falling off my own bike." She waved off the hand I'd extended, pushing herself upright on her own, wincing only slightly. "I'm fine, Enzo. I promise."

"What happened."

Her jaw tightened, the fury finally cracking through the composure she'd been holding onto by sheer force of will. "I got back from town early. Somebody was already at the house when I pulled up — I saw the car pull out fast down the side road before I even made it up the driveway, so I doubled back to check the tree line instead of driving straight in blind." She touched the cut above her eyebrow, gingerly. "Good thing I did. There was a second one still on foot near the porch. Vincent, I'm almost positive — matched the photo from the article. He grabbed for me before I could get back to the truck."

"He hit you."

"I hit him harder." A flicker of something almost like satisfaction crossed her face, quickly suppressed. "He wasn't expecting me to fight back. Big mistake on his part. I got a knee into him hard enough that he dropped his phone in the scuffle, and then he ran for it before his friend could double back and help him finish whatever he thought he was starting."

"His phone?"

Sofia reached into her jacket and produced it, cracked screen but functional, held it out to me like evidence in a trial she'd already half-won on her own.

"I didn't have time to go through all of it before you got here," she said. "But Enzo. What's on there — it's not just today. There's photos going back over a week. The house. Emma. Charlotte, at the club, at the garage. Even you, more than once." Her voice had gone hard, controlled, the fury settling into something colder, more useful. "He's been watching us this whole time. Long before Bruce's little threat at the party today. This wasn't an escalation. This was the plan, and today was just when they finally decided to move on it."

I took the phone from her, scrolling through what I could see on the cracked screen — timestamped photographs, dates going back further than I wanted to think about, images of Emma on the porch that same first week, images of Charlotte playing in the yard, images of me leaving the garage at hours I hadn't told anyone I'd be working, patterns mapped and logged with a patience that made something cold settle low in my stomach.

They hadn't just found us. They'd been studying us, cataloging our routines, waiting for exactly the right moment to move — and today, with Papa Niel's toast blindsiding Bruce in front of forty witnesses, that moment had apparently arrived faster than either of us had expected.

"We need to get you back to the house," I said. "Emma's going to want to see you're okay with her own eyes."

"I'm fine, Enzo."

"I know you keep saying that." I helped her to her feet anyway, my hand steady under her arm despite everything churning underneath my own composure. "Doesn't mean I'm going to stop checking."

She let me help her, which told me more about how frightened she'd actually been than anything she'd said out loud, and we walked back toward the bikes together, the cracked phone heavy in my jacket pocket, evidence of exactly how long and how carefully we'd already been hunted without ever fully realizing it.

"Enzo," Sofia said quietly, as we reached the road. "This isn't going to stop with a smashed phone and a bruised jaw. You know that, right? Whatever Bruce is planning, this was just the opening move."

"I know."

"So what happens next?"

I thought about Emma, waiting back at the house with Charlotte curled against her, thinking she'd finally found somewhere safe enough to stop bracing for the next disaster. I thought about my mother, and every moment someone could have stepped in sooner and hadn't, and made myself a promise, standing there on that dark service road with my sister's blood still drying above her eyebrow, that I was not going to be one more person who waited too long to act.

"Next," I said, "we stop playing defense."