ALAN POV
Thirty minutes. That’s all it took for my entire world to spiral out of control. Thirty minutes of security footage that should’ve shown Amber and Vic browsing shelves, laughing at whatever ridiculous thing they found—but instead, I got a shadow. Just a shadow, a flicker across the screen that disappeared before I could even make sense of it.
Then blackness.
Fuck
The system had been shut down while they were inside the boutique. Deliberately. Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing.
My fists slammed against the desk as I stared at the frozen screen for the hundredth time, willing it to give me more. A glitch, a frame I missed, *something.* But no matter how many times I rewound the footage, it always ended the same way: thirty minutes of darkness.
“f**k!”
