Ethan asks me what I want to do today.

Nobody in this loft asks me things. Alex tells me to sit down and eat, and I…sit down and eat. Colt puts a hand somewhere on me, and I go where the hand goes. Ethan lies on his side at eleven in the morning with his head propped on one fist and asks me what I want to do today, like the day is a menu, like I’m the person who gets handed one.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

I don’t. What I have instead is a body keeping notes, and I lie there and read the entries while he waits.

Colt’s grip on my hips, where he meant to get his name into the bone.

Ethan’s fingers on my ribs, counting them like he was looking for the way in.

Alex’s palm at the small of my back, turning me onto my side the way you’d straighten something on a shelf.

The soreness between my legs keeps time, low and insistent, a second pulse. Three pairs of hands and one body that still answers to me.

The room smells like him, bergamot at the top of it and the salt of skin underneath, and the sheets are still damp in the place where I’ve been. His chest is warm against my back and his breath comes slow at the nape of my neck, the even rhythm of a man who has already decided he’s keeping me. His fingers found my freckles. Shoulders, collarbone, the bridge of my nose, each one pressed once, like he’s signing something.

Claiming.

“Morning, angel.”

His voice is still rough with sleep, gravel in it, and my stomach does that thing where it thinks it’s on a rollercoaster. He turns me onto my back, and the light transforms his hair to gold and his eyes to deep blue, just as it always does with him. The smudged cherry lipstick remained in the center of his lower lip as he didn’t care to remove it. He doesn’t smile. He looks at me the way you look at a page you have to get down before somebody takes the book away.

“You’re real.”

He lets out a laugh, low, and the sound goes through his chest into mine. “So are you.”

His thumb brushes the mole under my left eye, then the one below my lip. “Punctuation marks. On a love letter no one else will ever read.”

I should find that ridiculous. It is ridiculous. My throat goes dry anyway.

Read more

I wake up clean.

That’s the wrong first thing to notice.

Three men fucked a drugged woman for hours in a stranger’s apartment; she should notice pain. Or fear. Or the sick lurch of waking up in a place she doesn’t recognize, reaching for a phone that should have been ringing all night.

I noticed the soap.

Lavender. Salt. The scent clinging to my skin like a second layer. Someone washed me. As the water clouded with everything done to me, someone held a cloth to my face. I remember half of it. The grey eyes. The washcloth on my jaw. The owner of the low “I’ve got you,” while I sank into water exactly the right temperature.

My body reports in next.

The pain arrives late, the way a bill comes after the service. My jaw hinges wrong—pried open, left that way. My neck wears a collar of bruises, each one the shape of a different man’s teeth. Metal clamps and the rush of blood returning after their removal left my nipples raw under cotton. Between my legs, the map of last night: the delta where Ethan bottomed out, the trench Colt carved with his fingers, the shallow bay where Alex came.

I shift and a sound escapes; small, involuntary, the kind you swallow before it becomes a scream. My inner thighs burn like the inside of a matchbox after the match has gone out.

I lie still, letting the body finish its inventory.

I’ve always been good at cataloguing; annotating margins, filing observations into categories that let me survive without feeling.

My skin is a page written in someone else’s handwriting; I’m covered in bruises and bite marks. Muscles I have never worked before ache as if I had put them through a brutal obstacle course.

I should flinch when I remember the wand. The strangers. The way my body accepted its role like it had been waiting for an assignment. Like it finally found its purpose amidst the void’s denial.

I don’t.

Read more

The bathroom tile was cold under his bare feet because he had left his shoes in the bedroom.

He ran the water and tested it with his wrist, not his elbow. His mother had always used her wrist. Warm but not hot, because a drugged body regulates temperature poorly and crashing blood pressure would be dangerous. Gap year as a nursing assistant. His brain was producing every piece of caretaking data he’d ever accumulated in a precise cascade, and the data was not an alibi.

Alibis were for men who didn’t know what they were doing. The data was how you did it right.

Competence was the product. Competence was what she would remember. Not the sex. Not the sound of the headboard. The bath. The temperature. The salt. The cloth on her face. The steady, unhurried, impossibly attentive hands of a man who knew how to take care of a body, and who would always know.

Epsom salt. Lavender oil. Ethan kept a bottle on the counter. Of course he did.

He adjusted, tested, then turned the tap off. He looked in the mirror above the sink.

A man in an unbuttoned dress shirt with his sleeves rolled. A red mark on his collarbone where she had gripped him. Hair slightly disheveled. A face that looked—

Fine.

His face looked like a man who had gone grocery shopping, dealt with a household issue, and was running a bath for a houseguest. There was nothing on his face to suggest what had happened in the next room.

Alex stared at his reflection for four seconds and felt the load settle. A wall accepting the weight it carried.

I look normal.

I look like the responsible one.

Because I am.

Read more

Ethan was right.

That was the worst part.

The room was thick with it — the smell of sex and sweat and something sweeter underneath, like the cheap body spray Rachel must have worn to the rave the night before. It clung to the sheets, to her skin, to the air itself. Beneath was the sharper edge of Colt’s leather and the faint, expensive trace of Ethan’s cologne, undercut by the wine he’d been drinking since morning. Alex could taste all of it on the back of his tongue.

He had been part of this the second he said I want to see her eyes.

He knew that. He’d known it while he was still standing in the doorway, trying to be the responsible one. The responsible one didn’t ask to see the drugged girl’s face. The responsible one didn’t feel his cock twitch when she looked at him like he was the first warm thing in the room.

But here he was. Kneeling between her cuffed thighs like he belonged there.

Read more

Alex swiped his keycard twice before the light turned green. The reader had been glitching for a week. Someone needed to call the building manager, and by someone he meant him, because someone in this apartment always meant him.

He held the door with his foot while he hauled the grocery bags through.

Five in one hand with his laptop bag over his shoulder.

A cardboard tray with two coffees balanced in the crook of his forearm.

The coffees were both his; he was not sharing.

If he drank the first at nine, he’d crash by noon. Crashing at noon meant losing prep time for the presentation set at 2:30 tomorrow. The presentation attached to a three-million-dollar proposal. The one with his name on slide seven. He was not spending the afternoon unconscious from a caffeine crash when four hours and twelve minutes of sleep was all the night had given him. He had the presentation on all five of his calendars, and it synced to the alarm clock. The second coffee was for one o’clock, and it was sacred.

He kicked the door shut behind him.

The loft was quiet.

No indecipherable thrash metal assault that shook the cave walls while the Neanderthal smoked in his room, having disabled the smoke detector.

As if to test Alex’s limits personally.

No scent of overpriced coffee being poured over at the island by Ethan, who would read some pretentious novel from the 1700s by an oversexed nobleman with syphilis, or educate Alex on the virtues of coarse-ground beans sourced from some unpronounceable island his parents visited on sabbatical.

The loft was quiet at 9 a.m. on Sunday, and while Alex should feel comfort, his sleep-deprived lizard brain perked up.

Alert.

Alert.

There was an unknown variable that would inevitably put the three-million-dollar presentation with his name on slide seven in jeopardy.

Read more

I don’t know how many men fucked me.

Read more

This is stupid. You know this is stupid. What exactly are you expecting?

I’m looking at myself in the mirror, my right arm rubbing my left arm over my still-empty stomach.

Liz said to dress cute, so I had put on as close an approximation of cute as I could manage. A cheap grey slip with silver sequins and a neon yellow sports bra underneath. The contrast looks rave-attire enough and, looking at the mirror, objectively, I don’t look like I’m trying too hard.

I have no fucking idea. What does trying too hard even mean?

Which has to be better than not trying hard enough.

I spent three hours lying in bed, staring at the ceiling as my phone vibrated next to me.

This was the most attention it had gotten since the first day Camila transferred ownership to me and her contacts didn’t yet realize she had a new number. Where everyone else sees a cellphone shifting to one side, it looked to me like my phone was bouncing out of control with a flurry of activity it couldn’t comprehend.

I checked it once at hour one. Then three more times at hour two. Then, once every ten minutes at hour three. Could I relate to the next cluster of messages in the chat?

I couldn’t. I couldn’t even relate to anyone specific from class, because these girls and their extended friend group didn’t chat about class. They chatted about TV shows I only have peripheral knowledge of, who won what game of which sport, guess who cheated on Becca with Nicky, but Nicky is actually Nicolas, not Nicole, and Becca was a bitch anyway-

I can’t keep up.

Read more

The door opens with a low whine, and I walk in, fingers searching for the switch, my flats abandoned in the tiny vinyl entranceway before the carpet. The backpack slips off my shoulder without ceremony. The kitchen light turns on.

Well, the kitchen light. The key light in my 200-square-foot studio stays off. I should get it changed.

I think I say that every time I notice it.

I don’t really need the light, to be honest. There is nothing here. Seven steps ahead: the tiny kitchenette, fridge, stove, sink, dishwasher. Eight steps to the right there’s the desk disguised as a dining table, the single chair, the stack of books I’ve actually read annotated to the margins in pencil, the notebook with a half-finished paper on Morrison’s “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” that I will show no one. Two steps from the desk is the box spring mattress I call a bed. Two steps from the bed is the tiny hallway that fits me and a pedestal sink across from a shower and toilet.

The sink had a toothbrush; I didn’t use this morning. I hadn’t used it yesterday, either. Nobody was going to get close enough to know.

My life in one, empty, room.

I shuffle to the kitchen, not sure why I bother when I already know what’s waiting for me. My body goes through the motions of opening the fridge, a scoff from my nose validating what I already knew.

I have an empty fridge in an empty room. At least I cleaned out last week’s cafeteria leftovers and the month-old milk. That was rank.

Productivity.

I close the fridge, taking one second to debate getting away before making the slow trek to the bed. I have time until the study group Stacy invited me to last minute because my eyes met hers while she was talking to her friends.

“Yeah, let’s meet at the library!” Her eyes met mine, and her open-mouth smile flickered. A pause.

I watched the calculation move across her face in two discrete steps. Does Stacy even know this girl? Will the group be weird about a stranger? I saw her decide to be generous about it a beat before she said so.

“Rachel, right?” She glanced back at her friends, their polite nods, their nonchalant shrugs, and turned back to me. “You can join us too!”

I didn’t expect to.

“Okay.”

I was a pity invite to a study group for a class I was barely functioning in.

...I was barely functioning anyway.

Before I could collapse onto the mattress, still in my shoes, my phone vibrated in my jacket pocket. I don’t want to answer it.

I already know who it is.

She is the only one who calls, and when she does, it’s because no one else has bothered to yet.

My eyes close. There is a shuddering breath stuck in my throat. If I don’t pick up now, she’ll try again tomorrow because Mom would poke and prod her. If I don’t pick up then, she’ll call later that same day because now it’s a mission.

If I answer, how long would it take before I get another call?

From anyone.

God, that’s depressing. If I don’t answer, at least the phone will stay useful. If I do answer, the phone becomes inert.

I take a slow breath and pull out the phone, letting it vibrate twice more before I click the green accept button and bring it to my ear. “Hey, Mila.”

“There you are.” I can hear the slight tinge of annoyance. “Mom told me to check up on you.”

Of course she did. Mom outsourced her job to you, and since you are the responsible one, you took time out of your busy day with your residency to check on me. No one else does, so you do, because Mom told you to, because she is busy with Valentina and I am inconvenient.

I don’t say that. I can never say that.

I have to keep the peace, even now, in an empty studio apartment, in a world that keeps moving without me.

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I’ve been busy with classes, so I haven’t called her.”

I haven’t called her because the last time I did, two weeks ago, she didn’t pick up. I left a voicemail talking about passing my midterms, and she never called me back. I haven’t called her because the last time I heard from her was a chain message. From her church. My name wasn’t on it.

“Well, let her know how you’re doing. She’s been busy with Tina’s Quinceañera. A call might give her a distraction, you know.”

Because a call from Rachel is one she’ll definitely pay attention to between dress fittings and cake tastings.

I remember standing with thirteen other girls, holding small bouquets as Camila stood on the podium, Dad holding her manicured hands while Mom sniffled through her speech on how she was so proud of the woman her daughter was becoming.

Camila’s hilariously puffy pastel pink and champagne gown, glittering tiara on her updo, and fading embarrassment overlooking like a Barbie-doll cake gown took center stage, until the pride and joy on my parents’ faces was all that remained in an overblown ceremony.

I stood watching her being fawned over by our abuelitos and abuelitas, clapping and crying, and for a moment, I looked forward to turning fifteen.

Money got tight. I understood. I always understood.

Mom is busy with Tina’s Quinceañera.

I let out a shuddering sigh a little too close to the phone.

Camila pauses. Her voice lowers. “You doing okay? Classes going well?”

My bottom lip trembles before my mouth parts. “I’m —” I close my mouth, choking on the words, my throat closing in before I try again. “Sure, I’m —”

“Good, glad to hear it. Glad to hear you finally honed in on a major. Rach, I’m jealous. I wish I were back in college. I don’t know what I’d choose, but this residency has been hell. I couldn’t even read one patient’s chart; the handwriting was illegible. Thank God for the nurses, because that would’ve been a malpractice suit waiting to happen—”

“Uh huh.”

I sink onto the edge of the bed, slouching until I’m curling into myself, holding the phone to my ear as a tear falls, the back of my head tingling uncomfortably. My mind goes foggy as I am held hostage by my sister, letting her vent, making the right sounds, and swallowing the three words I can’t get out.

I’m not okay. Mila... I’m not okay.

For forty-five minutes, I am suffocating on my words, listening to my sister talk at me, thinking about Mom working on a celebration I never had but my baby sister will get, while the world moves on without me in a grey, empty studio.

The void will eat me alive.

No one will notice.

***

I hate it when I’m right.

No one has noticed that the page in my notebook is blank.

Here I am in the library, sitting next to a classmate I barely recognize — Grace, or Hope, a name that means a word I definitely have nothing of — staring down at my textbook on Quantitative Research Methods in Communication. I’ve been on the same page since I got here at five. Forty-five minutes in, and the page has not turned.

Technically, a problem. Because I read this chapter two weeks ago. The margin notes in my handwriting, small, precise, one in the corner about the difference between content analysis and discourse analysis that would earn me an ‘A’ on Professor Martin’s quiz tomorrow.

If I bothered to open the notebook in which I wrote them, they, together with every other page in this textbook, showed the only evidence in the world that I was paying attention to anything at all.

I would not open the notebook.

I would not share the notes.

The group had not asked. The group had not asked because the group did not know to ask, and the group did not know to ask because I had, six weeks into the semester, stopped raising my hand.

To be fair to myself, as undeserving as I am, the surrounding group made little headway either. All of us gave up on even passing the quiz Prof. Martin would surely give us tomorrow.

I’ll skate by with a C.

Average, neutral.

Invisible.

The conference rooms were full, so our group joined many others huddled around the round tables in the library center. Towering bookshelves, containing every book but the one you need, surrounded us. That you’ll find in the College Co-Op, for the lovely price of this semester’s dining budget.

My stomach growled, but the noise from filled tables, students crowding the edges, and teacher aides lining up to check out syllabus materials for their assigned courses meant no one noticed.

Honestly, I’m about to tap out. I close my textbook, a mumble under my breath like “Thanks for holding the group,” before the person on the opposite side of Grace-Hope touches my elbow.

I shouldn’t acknowledge it.

I shouldn’t.

I glance over.

“Are you doing anything tonight?” Before I can even think of an excuse, she continues. It’s as if everyone here knows the answer is no. “So, like, we got VIP tickets to enter The Underground for their rave tonight and —” The stranger glances over to another stranger across from me. “Kimber pussed out.”

“I didn’t puss out, I’m spending the night at Cam’s, fuck off.” Kimber didn’t even look up from her phone, her acrylic nails tapping rapid-fire against the screen.

The stranger — wait, I think I have her name, Elizabeth, Liz — looked back at me, her glare softening to a polite veneer of hospitality. “So, we got a spot open. Wanna join?”

Stacy perks up, leaning forward, perfectly timed to cut off the Uh — about to leave my lips. “You should join us, Rachel. If we have a full group, we don’t need to wait in line!”

Kimber grabs my phone before I can even react. “Look, these bitches ain’t gonna shut up till you say yes, so I’mma drop Stacy’s number. She seems to know you, right? Hey, can you unlock it?”

“Umm, wait, hold on.” I pried my phone out of her pink nails, my heart beating out of my chest, my ears hot with shame.

I don’t want them to see how empty my phone is. The contact list with no scroll bar, the chain prayer message from my mom, the text left on read by my dad, the security code from whichever food app I used last.

Kimber raises an eyebrow, but Liz cuts her off. “Chill, Kim. I’ll add her to the group chat. Stace, did you get her number?”

Stacy pulls out her phone, her thumb scrolling once, then twice, then a third time before pausing. “Yeah, I got it. This your number, right?”

She holds up the screen, and I nod numbly.

That was my number, right next to the name Hoodie Girl.

With my nod, my phone buzzes and suddenly I’m in a digital room filled with over ten numbers I don’t recognize, filling the space with emojis about something that has nothing to do with me, until now.

“Right, you’re in!” Stacy’s grin blinds me as she puts her phone away. “We’re taking the 10 p.m. DT Bus right outside JSH. You know the stop, right?”

I nod. “I take the 7 p.m. to get to my apartment —”

“Great! We’ll see you on the way, then!”

I was the first one ready to go, and yet been the last one out of the table, my classmates had already abandoned the study session.

Grace, or Hope, I still don’t know, calls out to me over the crowd. “Make sure to wear something cute! Gotta get our free drinks somehow!”

In five minutes, I got roped into going to the worst imaginable situation for me.

A rave.

I glance down at my phone, chewing my bottom lip. The chat, a never-ending flurry of activity, was already spamming with glee and eggplant emojis that had absolutely nothing to do with produce.

I guess I should get ready.

She disappeared from a rave. One text. Six hours late.

‘hey did u leave early? lol’

She never went home.

Rachel Santos has been invisible her entire life—the middle daughter, the forgotten friend, the girl the world skips over. When two strangers pull her from a crowd and a third feeds her breakfast like she matters, she doesn't fight it. She sinks.

Into their loft. Into their beds. Into a world where she's photographed like a masterpiece, marked like territory, and fed like something precious. Three men, three kinds of hunger, and Rachel—starving, invisible Rachel—finally full.

By the time the worship becomes a cage and her body becomes a spectacle, there's no outside left. Just a girl who was so hungry to be seen that she let them devour her, and a lock she turns herself.

Nobody Came Looking: A Love Story is a darkly seductive, psychologically devastating debut about what happens when being wanted is the most dangerous thing that's ever happened to you.

For readers of: dark romance with actual teeth, literary horror that crawls under your skin, and love stories you'll need to shower after.

Content warning: This novel contains graphic sexual content, sexual assault, drugging, psychological manipulation, coercive control, and themes of self-erasure. It is not a redemption story.

Welcome to Nobody Came Looking, a darkly sedu

ctive descent into the kind of love story that locks the door behind you.

Not a rescue.

Not a redemption.

A girl so invisible she vanished from a rave and got one text about it — six hours late, ending in lol — and the three men who carried her home and made her the center of everything she’d been starving for.

Due to the explicit and psychologically devastating nature of Nobody Came Looking, this will not be a free serialized novel. It will be available to premium subscribers. However, for those premium subscribers, I plan on putting future serializations on Substack first before Kindle or KU — meaning ALL future publications, from Nobody Came Looking to Letters Between Sex and Violence vol. 4, will be accessible to premium subscribers.

Not only that, but check out the following perks!

Coda Dream Team Perks

1. Character References and Behind-the-Scenes Insights: Get an in-depth look at the characters that inhabit my worlds — Rachel, Colt, Alex, Ethan, and the rest of the Santos universe — as well as behind-the-scenes notes and inspirations.

2. Safe for Work & Not-so-Safe (NSFW) Artwork Galore: Treat yourself to a variety of artwork for my stories. Enjoy Safe for Work illustrations that bring the loft to life, or indulge in more mature NSFW pieces to tantalize.

3. Exclusive Access to Novels-in-Progress before Kindle Unlimited: I got my start by serializing my novels and I hope to continue that trend with my new stories. Nobody Came Looking chapters will be released as soon as they are completely written.

Please consider getting a premium subscription. Your support is already greatly appreciated.

Schedule

Episodes of Nobody Came Looking will, tentatively, be released weekly on Wednesday — perfect for #WreckedWednesday. When an episode is released or scheduled, I will announce it on my newsletter. Comments and a chat dedicated to each episode will open for critique on Wednesday as well.

Without further ado…

Three men. One loft. A girl who’d rather drown in warm water than die of thirst in the cold.

Enter the world of Nobody Came Looking.