“Please,” Sam said, voice shattering. “They said they’d?—”
He reached for the zipper of his jacket.
Everything slowed.
Gideon’s shoulders tightened. His trigger finger flexed, then froze. Lucas swore under his breath. Ethan said something I didn’t catch.
My father’s hands fumbled with the metal teeth of the zipper. For a second it caught and I had a flash of relief, of irrational gratitude for cheap hardware. Then it slid down with an ugly rasp.
He opened his jacket.
Underneath, instead of a T-shirt or a button-down or the worn plaid he’d favored when I was a kid, there was canvas and metal and wire.
It took my brain a full, agonizing heartbeat to understand what I was seeing. Pouches. Cylinders. Straps crossing over his chest and around his shoulders. A small black box nestled against his sternum, a tangle of colored wires snaking out of it like veins.
Someone screamed. Later, I would realize it was me.
For a moment, Sam didn’t look like my father at all. He looked like an anatomy chart drawn by a madman, all his vital organs replaced with uglier ones.
“They said,” he sobbed, hands hovering helplessly over the vest but not touching, like he was afraid to disturb it, “they said if I walked up here and talked to you, if I made you listen?—”
His gaze darted toward the porch, toward where I stood at the top of the stairs, fingers digging into the doorframe hard enough to hurt.
“Don’t move!” Gideon roared, voice breaking in a way I’d never heard before. “Sam, do not touch anything. Hazel, get back in the house.”
My father’s eyes found mine again. For one insane, suspended moment, the world shrank back down to just us. Him in the road, me on the porch, years of wreckage strung between like a too-tight wire.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. His face crumpled. “I didn’t know. I didn’t?—”
His hands twitched toward the little black box on his chest.
Every gun at the bottom of the steps lifted that fraction of an inch that meant everything.
25
GIDEON
I'd been trying to rest.
Not sleep—I'd given up on that hours ago when my brain refused to stop cataloging threats and running through contingencies. But rest. The kind where you let your body go still and your breathing slow while your mind stays sharp enough to catch the sound of trouble before it arrives.
The front porch was as good a place as any. The new boards Ethan and Lucas had installed earlier were solid under my back, the railing steady against my shoulder. The night air pressed close, thick with salt and the green smell of the marsh. Somewhere out in the darkness, a night heron called, lonely and insistent.
Lucas was inside, supposedly sleeping on the sofa. Ethan had taken the back door, positioned where he could see both the kitchen entrance and the rear approach to the property. Elias had left an hour ago to check in at Dominion Hall, promising to return by dawn with better equipment and maybe some answers about who'd authorized Sam Jarrow's release.
The security sensors they'd installed were top-grade—motion-activated, networked, the kind of tech that cost more than most people's cars. If anything bigger than a raccoon crossed the perimeter, we'd know about it.
I'd just started to let my eyes drift closed when the alert came.
Not a blare or a siren. Just a soft chime from the tablet propped against the railing—the kind of sound that wouldn't wake a sleeping civilian but cut through an operator's rest like a knife.
My eyes snapped open. My hand found my sidearm before my brain caught up.
The tablet screen showed a heat signature moving up the main drive. Slow. Unsteady. Human-sized and alone.
I was on my feet and moving before the second chime sounded.
Lucas appeared in the doorway, weapon already drawn, eyes sharp and alert despite the late hour. Ethan materialized from around the corner of the house, moving with that silent, mountain-lion grace that made you forget how big he was until he was right on top of you.
