"What does it say?" I asked.
She flipped it around so I could see.
The words were typed in a clean, professional font:
Ask him about his father. Ask them all.
My hand gripped the edge of the table so hard I felt the wood creak under my fingers.
Fuck.
My father.
Byron Dane. The man who'd been gone more than he'd been present. The man who'd disappeared when I was a kid. The man I'd spent years trying not to think about because thinking about him hurt too much. The man I always wanted to be …
What the hell did he have to do with Dominion Hall? What the hell did he have to do with any of this?
Amelia was watching me, eyes sharp, cataloging every micro-expression I couldn't quite hide.
"Levi," she said quietly. "What does this mean?"
I couldn't answer.
Because I didn't know.
But the sinking feeling in my gut told me I was about to find out.
13
AMELIA
The words on the card refused to stay still.
Ask him about his father. Ask them all.
The restaurant around us kept moving—glasses clinking, cutlery chiming, the murmur of conversation rising and falling like waves—but the little rectangle of cream cardstock had turned our table into the eye of a storm.
“Levi,” I said again, even softer this time. “What does this mean?”
Across from me, he looked like someone had dropped a live grenade in his lap.
Color had drained from his face, leaving his tan skin a shade too pale. His jaw worked, muscles ticking, eyes locked on the sentence like he could force it to rearrange itself if he stared hard enough. For a man who could stay calm under incoming fire, this was the closest I’d ever seen him to rattled.
“My father’s dead,” he said finally. The words came out flat and wrong, like he didn’t quite believe them himself. “Has been for years.”
“Then why would someone …” I swallowed, glancing toward the hostess stand where the blonde girl had already gone back to stacking menus. “Why tonight? Why here?”
He didn’t answer.
He was somewhere else—back in Montana, I suspected—standing in a kitchen he’d once described to me. Wood stove. Peeling linoleum. A coffee cup with a chipped rim his dad never let anyone throw away.
“It could be a coincidence,” he muttered, more to himself than to me.
My reporter brain rejected the thought on instinct. “Nothing about today has been a coincidence.”
His eyes met mine, dark and raw. “You think this is about Dominion Hall.”
“I think everything is about Dominion Hall right now,” I said. “The note says ‘ask them all.’ That’s plural. As in: the men in that house. The Danes.”
