ICE AND ALIBI

chapter 3

Chapter 3: Two Houses, Same Night

Marlowe's POV

Dinner was supposed to be at six. My dad was never late for dinner — that was one of his rules, the kind he never said out loud because we both just knew it. Six o'clock, table set, no phones.

At 6:40, his phone rang on the counter, and everything changed.

He answered it walking, like his feet already knew he wasn't going to be sitting down for a while. "Yeah," he said. Then nothing. Just listening, jaw tight, eyes somewhere far away from our kitchen.

"Where," he said. Not a question. A demand dressed up small.

I stood by the stove with two plates of pasta going cold and watched him grab his coat off the hook before he'd even hung up.

"Dad?"

"Something at the school," he said. "Don't wait up."

I ate alone. I did my homework alone. I lay in bed with the lamp on, telling myself I was waiting up for nothing, that he'd walk in any minute smelling like coffee and apologies, same as always.

I woke up at 2:14 to the sound of the front door.

I don't know what made me get up. I just did, quiet, barefoot, easing my door open enough to see down the stairs without being seen myself.

He was in the kitchen, still in his coat, phone pressed to his ear, one hand braced flat on the counter like it was the only thing holding him up.

"It's clean," he said. Low. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. "Nobody's going to ask questions, because there's nothing left to find. Same as always."

A pause. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.

"I know what I agreed to," he said. "I said I'd handle it, and I handled it. That's the whole job, isn't it. Making sure nobody ever has to ask."

He hung up. He stood there a long moment, just breathing, shoulders curled forward like something heavy had been sitting on them all night and hadn't fully come off yet.

Then he went to the sink and washed his hands, slow, both of them, all the way to the wrists.

I went back to bed before he could catch me watching. I lay there in the dark turning his words over and over — *nothing left to find, same as always* — and somewhere underneath the fear, a worse thought was already forming.

*Same as always* meant this wasn't new.

Tally's text came in before my alarm even went off.

*Weird thing,* it said. *Mrs. Castillo said the security footage from the cafeteria is gone. Glitched or something. Brody's mom is FURIOUS. No suspension letter went out either. It's like the whole thing just didn't happen.*

I sat up in bed and read it twice, my stomach dropping the same slow, cold way it had at 2:14 that morning.

*Didn't happen.*

I told myself it was a coincidence. I almost believed myself the whole walk to school.

Almost.

---

Eli's POV

My cousin was on the phone in the hallway outside my room, voice low but not low enough, relaxed for the first time since the slap that had left a bruise still yellowing under my eye.

"It's handled," he said. "Guy's fast. Clean. No questions, no paper trail, like the whole thing never happened. We're good."

I sat on the edge of my bed and listened through the wall, the way I'd learned to listen to everything in that house, because nobody ever told me anything directly.

"Who'd they even use," he said, half-laughing now, easy in a way he hadn't been in days. "Of course they used Voss. Should've known they'd go to him”

I sat with that for a second, the name settling somewhere behind my ribs, and for the first time all day something in my chest loosened. Handled. Clean. Maybe tonight wasn't going to end with anyone else getting hurt.

I reached into the lining of my jacket where I kept a single cigarette folded into an old gum wrapper, just for nights like this — nights where surviving felt like something worth marking, even quietly, even alone. I put it between my lips and flicked the lighter once.

The door opened before the flame caught.

"Don't," my cousin said, already crossing the room, already grabbing a fistful of my collar and hauling me half off the bed before I could even drop the lighter. "You think you earned something tonight?"

"It's just a cigarette—"

"It's *never* just anything with you." His grip tightened, knuckles pale against my shirt. "One mistake gets cleaned up and you're already lighting up like you did something worth celebrating instead of something that cost this family thirty grand and a favor we're going to be paying off for months."

He ripped the cigarette out of my fingers before I could answer, dropped it to the floor, and ground it out hard under his heel, twisting until there was nothing left but a smear of ash.

"You don't get to feel good about tonight," he said, quieter now, which was somehow worse than the shouting would've been. "You get to learn from it."

He let go of my collar like he'd suddenly remembered he didn't want to be touching me at all.

"Get some sleep," he said, already turning for the door. "Early start tomorrow. You're carrying triple the regular supply to make up for what you flushed — every pill of it, every drop you cost us. Hope that cigarette was worth it."

The door clicked shut behind him.

I sat there a long time in the dark, ash still smeared into the carpet, my collar still warm where his fist had been.

*Voss.*

Like the detective's daughter. Like the girl who'd said her name across a lunch table like it was nothing, like it was just a name her mom liked from an old movie.

It wasn't nothing. My family already knew exactly who her father was.

And now, somehow, so did I — along with everything else I was apparently expected to carry, starting tomorrow morning, whether I'd earned a single quiet minute to myself or not.