Byron Dane.
The man who'd disappeared fifteen years ago without a trace. The man we'd mourned, searched for, given up on. The man whose absence had carved holes in all of us that never quite healed.
He stood there in the wash of the porch lights, rifle still raised overhead, and looked at us with eyes that were the same storm-gray as mine.
His mouth curved into something that might have been a smile in better circumstances.
"Hello, boys," he said, voice carrying across the space between us like he'd never left, like fifteen years was nothing, like he hadn't just shot a man's arm off and blown his head apart in front of his own children. "I've missed you."
The words hung in the air.
Lucas made a sound—low, choked, like he'd been punched in the gut.
I hadn’t seen Ethan come up behind us. He didn't move. Didn't breathe. Just stared with the kind of stillness that meant his world had just tilted off its axis and he was waiting for it to right itself.
My finger was still on the trigger. My weapon was still raised. My hands were still steady.
But inside, everything was screaming.
Because Byron Dane—my father, my hero, the man whose footsteps I'd followed into the military and then into the shadows—was standing twenty feet away from me.
Alive.
Armed.
And apparently, very much back in our lives.
26
HAZEL
Ididn’t move.
I didn’t even breathe—not really. Air sat high and sharp in my chest, refusing to go any deeper, like my lungs had forgotten the sequence. Everything in me locked at once, my body latching onto stillness as if movement would make the world tilt harder, spill open wider.
My father lay in the road.
Or what was left of him did.
Except my mind refused to attach his name to the shape in the gravel. It was like trying to force two magnets together the wrong way—they pushed apart, repelled each other. Sam Jarrow. My father. The body on the ground.
No.
No.
No.
The night around me was too bright, somehow—the porch lights blasting harsh gold across everything, magnifying every detail I didn’t want to see. The red spatter on the rocks. The wayone of his shoes had landed crooked, toe pointed sideways. A piece of fabric fluttering in the marsh grass.
I kept waiting for sound to come back, but everything was muffled, like someone had stuffed cotton in my ears. The men were shouting—Ethan, Lucas, Gideon—but it reached me faint and distant, underwater and warped.
My fingers dug into the doorframe so hard they went numb.
I couldn’t blink. Couldn’t shut my eyes. I tried, but my eyelids refused, sticking wide and dry, forcing me to take it all in. Every impossible piece of it.
A warm hand wrapped around my upper arm.
I startled so hard my whole body jerked.
