Cotton reaches for my hand, sticky fingers and all.
“Hey,” she says. “We got you, okay? Me and Brodie and Shy and Gunner and Jack and this very large loaf of man-bread you’ve been assigned. You’re not alone in this.”
Emotion scrapes at my ribs. I swallow hard.
“I know,” I say, because they need to hear it. “I just—if I can do something, I have to.”
She nods. “Doing something doesn’t mean doing it alone.”
Her words land in the same place Bran’s did earlier, like little weights on opposite sides of a scale I’ve been tilting on all my life.
Useful or loved.
Asset or burden.
I don’t know how to be both.
But as Cotton squeezes my hand and Bran checks the window for the third time in an hour, a tiny, treacherous thought slips in anyway.
Maybe I don’t have to pick.
Maybe I get to be the sharpest weapon in the roomandthe girl somebody refuses to lose.
ELEVEN
TWIGGY
Bran’sbootsaretoobig for my apartment.
Not literally. Well—maybe literally. They’re planted in the middle of my tiny living room like he’s bracing for an earthquake, and the man himself looks like he barely fits inside the walls. Broad shoulders, thick arms, that whole looming-Jack Reacher vibe. Every time he shifts his weight, my floorboards give a tiny, protesting creak.
Cotton perches on my lone armchair, one hand on the swell of her belly, the other wrapped around a travel mug she brought from home. She didn’t want to leave after we finished the casserole, citing boredom.
I think she just wants to keep an eye on me, though.
I pretend not to notice the creaks. Or the way my pulse keeps stuttering any time I look directly at him. Cotton notices every-damn-thing, and I’ll never hear the end of it.
Focus, Tallulah.
I turn back to my laptop, to the chaos I understand—open case files on women who have gone missing in nearby states, scanned reports, half a dozen browser tabs, the digital version of my brain spread across two monitors and an ancient corkboard on the wall.
“This is everything we have that’s solid,” I say, mostly for my own benefit. My voice sounds steady, which is a minor miracle. “Jason Adams’ confession. The search reports from Claytor Mountain. Employment records from Kendrick’s. Adoption paperwork from the Thurston estate, what we could pry loose. Newspaper clippings. Witness statements, including Shiloh’s. Gossip that turned out to be…not gossip.”
Bran grunts behind me, arms folded. “And none of it includes him talking.”
I click open the scanned transcript of Jason’s confession, the one that makes my stomach knot every single time. “No. Jason wouldn’t shut up once he started. Henry, of course, never got the chance. By the time the cabin raid was over, Jason was in handcuffs and Henry was long gone. Ghosted.”
There’s a long silence behind me. I can feel Bran’s attention on the back of my neck, hot and heavy. Like standing too close to a bonfire.
“And you built a profile off of all that,” he says at last. “Secondhand scraps.”
“Secondhand scraps are still data,” I reply. “Especially when the source is a narcissistic psychopath who can’t resist bragging about how clever he and his brother were.”
A low, disapproving rumble. “You give that word out too easy.”
“Psychopath?”
“Clever.”
