Outside, another shout.
“Sam, stop walking!”
I edged closer to the doorway, ignoring Maude’s hand reaching for my sleeve. The old wood floor felt like it was vibrating under my bare feet, humming with a frequency that belonged to fear and engines and the click of safeties being switched off.
The porch boards were cool beneath my toes when I stepped out, the night swallowing me in damp air and harsh light. The brothers were spread out at the bottom of the steps, fanning out, guns drawn, bodies angled into that shape I’d seen before only in movies—protective, braced, ready.
Gideon stood in the middle, just ahead of Lucas and Ethan, his stance wide, arms steady, the gun in his hands as much a part of his silhouette as his shoulders. He was barefoot, still in his T-shirt and jeans, hair mussed like he’d been asleep seconds ago and snapped awake by danger.
The road that led up to the inn was washed in a mix of light—the inn’s front porch light, the wash of the distant security flood the brothers had rigged before sunset. The marsh on either side of the drive was a black wall, the grass whispering under a breeze I couldn’t feel.
And my father stood in the middle of it.
Sam Jarrow looked smaller than he had in the dining room. Smaller than he’d looked when I was twelve and watching themdrag him away in shackles. The prison hand-me-downs were gone. He wore a dark jacket zipped to his throat, jeans that didn’t fit right, shoes that looked like they’d come from a charity bin. His hair was thinner, his face more lined, his eyes wet and wild under the harsh light.
He was walking. Slow, unsteady steps, like each footfall had to be negotiated with his legs before they’d cooperate. His hands hung uselessly at his sides.
“Stop!” Gideon’s voice cracked across the night. “Don’t come any closer!”
Sam flinched, shoulders hunching like the words themselves hurt. But he kept moving.
“They said,” he called, voice wobbling, “they said I could fix it.”
My skin went cold.
Ethan took a half-step forward, gun aimed center mass, his expression carved from stone. “Stop walking, Sam. Right now.”
“I’m trying,” my father sobbed. “You think I want to be here? You think I—” His voice broke on a laugh that sounded like it had barbed wire tangled up in it. “You think I got a choice?”
Lucas’s gun tracked every inch of his movement, his jaw tight, eyes hard. Elias stood slightly off to the side, pistol raised, gaze moving between Sam and the shadows beyond the road as if he expected something worse to step out at any second.
“Hazel, get back inside.” Gideon didn’t turn his head, but his voice found me easily. I saw the muscles in his neck stand out, the tendons in his arms tight as cables.
I couldn’t move.
My father’s gaze snagged on me. Not on the guns. Not on the brothers. On me.
“Haze,” he called, voice cracking. “Baby girl. I knew you’d be here.”
The nickname hit my chest like a thrown stone. All the years I’d spent sanding that name out of my memory, replacing it with Hazel, with Bradford, with a new life built on new syllables—and he still found the old ones like a bloodhound.
“Don’t talk to her,” Gideon snapped. Rage threaded through his voice, dark and lethal. “You look at me, Sam. You keep your eyes on me.”
Sam blinked, tears spilling over. Under the lights, they looked like something else—sweat, or the shine off a fish belly, something slick and wrong. He scrubbed at his face with the back of one hand and only smeared whatever was already there.
“They said I could make it right,” he babbled. “They came to see me. Nice suits. Smiles like knives. Said, ‘Sam, old buddy, you want to make things square with your little girl? You want her taken care of?’”
His gaze flicked to the truck, then snapped back like he’d been yanked by an invisible string.
“They told me there was money,” he went on. “A chance. A way out. They said I could help you, Haze. Fix what I broke. I just had to?—”
His voice dropped to a whisper I couldn’t catch.
“Sam!” Ethan barked. “Stop where you are.”
My father’s feet kept moving. Gravel shifted under his shoes with a crunch that sounded too loud in the thick night. He was maybe fifty yards from the porch now. Forty five.
My heart hammered so hard I could feel it in my gums. I wanted to scream at him. Run to him. Run away. All of it piled up with nowhere to go.
