“I remember every one,” I said, the words trembling but clear. “You strangled her. In our kitchen. You told the police it was an accident.”
Gideon’s whole body went still.
Sam shrugged. “Accident, heat of the moment—what difference does it make now? She’s gone, I’ve paid my time, and I’m still your blood.”
“No,” I whispered. “You stopped being my blood the night you killed her.”
Gideon moved before I could blink—one deliberate step forward that made the room shrink around him. “You’re going to walk out that door,” he said evenly. “I don’t care where you go, but you’re not coming back.”
Sam tried a smirk. “What are you, her bodyguard?”
“Something like that,” Gideon said, voice steady but deadly quiet. “And if I find out you so much as drove past this place again, you’ll answer to me.”
Sam looked at him, weighing it, then laughed softly—the sound of a man who’d underestimated the wrong opponent. “You military?”
Gideon didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The way he stood said it all—coiled control, trained restraint, a promise of violence held in check by choice, not fear.
Sam’s eyes flicked back to me. “You always did like your heroes, Haze.”
“Get out,” I said, sharper this time, the kind of voice that leaves no room for argument. “I’m serious.”
He hesitated, then looked to Maude. “You always ran a kind house,” he said, oily again. “Shame to see it poisoned by?—”
“By what?” she snapped.
He stared at her for a long moment, jaw ticking, then slung his backpack over one shoulder. “You all act like you’ve seena ghost,” he said. “Maybe you should remember—sometimes ghosts come back for a reason.”
Gideon took one more step forward. “Keep walking,” he said.
And Sam did. Slowly, deliberately, the sound of his shoes fading across the old wood floors. The door opened, then closed, and the porch light caught him once before the darkness swallowed him whole.
For a moment, the only sound in the room was my breathing—fast, uneven, trying to keep up.
Maude pressed a hand to her chest. “Lord have mercy,” she whispered. “That man’s soul was rotten long before they locked him up.”
Gideon turned to me, eyes softening, hands still steady. “Hazel,” he said quietly, “he’s not coming back here. I won’t let him.”
The certainty in his tone undid me. I nodded, my throat tight, tears burning behind my eyes.
17
GIDEON
Ifollowed him out the door.
Every muscle in my body screamed to close the distance, to wrap my hands around his throat and finish what the justice system had started. If Hazel and Maude weren't inside—if I didn't have witnesses who'd already seen too much violence in one lifetime—I would have torn Sam Jarrow's head from his body and thrown the pieces in the marsh for the crabs to pick clean.
The urge was so strong, it made my hands shake.
I'd killed before. Clean kills, sanctioned kills, the kind that came with orders and extraction plans and the cold comfort of righteousness. But this—this was different. This was personal in a way that made my vision narrow and my breath come too fast. This was the father of the woman I loved, and he'd murdered her mother with his bare hands in a kitchen that probably smelled like coffee and safety until it didn't.
Somehow, impossibly, I held back.
I stood on the porch and watched him walk down the drive, backpack slung over one shoulder, moving with the casual easeof a man who thought he'd won something. He didn't look back. Didn't hurry. Just walked like he had all the time in the world and nowhere urgent to be.
The darkness swallowed him whole at the bend in the road, and still I stood there, fists clenched, jaw aching from how hard I was grinding my teeth.
The night air pressed close, humid and thick with salt. The marsh whispered its secrets. The ocean kept its steady rhythm. Everything was the same as it had been an hour ago, and nothing would ever be the same again.
