what they wouldn't do | DAREDEVIL

thirty five

Sarah's return to work after her rescue mission with Matt was, to put it briefly...torturous.

Not in the literal sense, luckily. She had been partly expecting the literal kind of torture when she stepped into Orion, so she was both relieved and unsettled to find that Jason was nowhere to be seen—and that no one seemed to know where he was.

By just past eleven that day, Sarah already wanted to go home. Not only because her muscles were aching, and her head was pounding, and her eyelids kept wanting to close from a lack of sleep—but also because she'd had to answer the same handful of questions over and over again since she got there.

"Jason isn't in his office?" He sure isn't.

"Have you heard from him?" Nope.

"Wasn't he supposed to be back today?" Yes, but he's not.

"Do you know when he'll be back?" No, I don't.

"I have a meeting scheduled with him." Not anymore.

Different variations on the same conversation had happened at least fifty-three times, and she was ready to scream. She wished her desk was anywhere other than outside Jason's office, where she had to continuously tell people that he wasn't here, he wasn't answering emails or phone calls, and she had no way to get in touch with him. Several people seemed suspicious of her answer, as though maybe she had a magic mirror to contact him and was simply refusing to use it.

To be fair, it was odd that Jason hadn't returned from his trip to Chicago—if that was even where he'd really gone. If anything, Sarah had thought he'd come back earlier after McDermott's body was found, or at least once he found out his hired goons had lost their hostage. But there had been no word from him, to her or anyone else at the company. The silence was ominous.

His absence did have one upside: it gave Sarah the chance to do something she'd been meaning to do for a while. She gathered some innocuous files up on her desk—just invoices for office supplies that needed to be approved, things she would often take home to work on—and opened the bottom drawer of her desk, surreptitiously collecting the folder with the surveillance photos of Mrs. McDermott's and placing it under the other files. Then she slipped them both in her purse to take home. There was too great a chance of the photos being discovered at Orion, but at home she could burn them or shred them.

A woman who worked somewhere on the second floor approached her desk, and Sarah sighed, setting her bag aside as she prepared to answer the same question for the fifty-fourth time.

—

A few nights later, a massive thunderstorm rolled into Hell's Kitchen just as Matt and Sarah started their training session at the boxing gym. The rain had just started coming down as they arrived, and by the time they got warmed up and began it was fully pouring outside, and the sound of thunder grew closer and louder.

Inside, the two of them had other things to focus on besides the storm. The strange quiet at Sarah's work didn't sit any better with Matt than it had with her. The idea of not knowing Jason's whereabouts was concerning to him, to say the least. Matt had checked out the area around 59th where Sarah had mentioned dropping him off once, but there was no sign of Jason currently living there.

"So, no one knows where he is?" Matt asked, using his forearm to block Sarah's foot from making contact with his hip.

He heard Sarah's ponytail swish as she shook her head. "He's MIA for now, which is really creeping me out. But it does seem like you were right."

Matt cocked his head. Lightning whizzed through the sky above them; even from inside, Matt could feel it light up the outside air with electricity.