Warren nodded once. “Fair enough.”
“Good.”
Freddie slung the towel over his shoulder and walked off, leaving Warren with a truth he couldn’t shake. That hadn’t sounded like a threat. It sounded like a line in the sand.
And Warren had to decide what side of that line he was on.
So he ran some more. Let the pounding feet and sweat drag his thoughts into order. Then he hit the showers, left the gym, and climbed into his car. He drove along the length of the seafront. Past empty benches, shuttered cafés, and the lingering scent of wet salt and chip oil. Rain had thinned out the tourists. Just a few die-hard joggers braved the pavement in damp neon, heads down, earbuds in, running as if the weather couldn’t touch them.
Under the skate park canopy, a group of teenagers loitered. Five of them. Four lads and one girl. Hoods up. Weed smoke curling even through the drizzle. Warren slowed, watched. Movement. Eye contact. Hierarchy. One kid flicked a cigarette into a puddle. Another leaned in, rolling something tighter. Butthey weren’t working. They were local. Bored. Stoned. Killing time before curfew.
Warren rolled on.
Two pubs were lit along the high street. Both had police posted outside. Uniformed, visible, already dealing with Saturday night fallout. Warren let them handle it. Swung through the drive-thru Costa instead. Grabbed a toasted sandwich and a coffee, half out of habit, half for something to do with his hands. Then without fully meaning to, he ended up back on Jude’s street.
Parked three cars down.
And he sat watching the soft glow of house lights through half-drawn curtains. He ate the sandwich one-handed, logged the time Jude’s living room light switched on, what window glowed next, how still the place seemed.
Because for a man who’d been a walking question mark since Warren first opened his file… Jude Ellison didn’t seem to do much of anything on a Saturday night.
Just silence.
Stillness.
And shadows behind glass.
Chapter Eight
Pass the Baton
Jude didn’t sleep.
Didn’t dare.
How could he, with Callum sprawled across his sofa as if he owned the place? The man had barely moved. He woke to piss, eat whatever was in the fridge, then crashed again as if it werehishome. Jude flinched at every footstep, every creak of floorboards. Every shift in the air telling him Callum was awake. That he wasthere.
And while the man slept, Jude sat rigid at the kitchen table, laptop open, fingers numb against the keys. He scrolled through every record he could find about his release. Court listings, release registers, local news.
What he found, what little there was, made his stomach drop.
Callum was a free man. Sentence served. No parole. No licence. No conditions. No one was watching him. There was no probation officer to call, no system to flag his name. Because on paper, there was nothing to monitor. And even if there had been, Jude wouldn’t have factored in. He’d never existed in the contextof Callum Reid’s world. Not officially. Not in any report. Just a ghost that never made it into the paperwork.
Which meant Callum wasn’t a risk. Not to anyone but him.
Not on anyone’s radar.
Not anyone’s problem.
Except Jude’s.
He could apply for a restraining order now, of course. Tell the truth. Dig up that past, drag it through the courts. But that would mean explaining everything. How he’d fled the scene of a crime, left a man bleeding, kept quiet when he should have screamed. How he’d survived by disappearing.
And as a teacher? That confession would destroy him. One police report, one whisper of a “history,” and it would all be gone. The life he’d built. The job. The safety.
He spent the entire weekend holding his breath. Swallowing his heartbeat. Pretending not to exist too loudly while the devil from his past lounged beneath his throw blanket, on his cushions, as if the years between them had been nothing but a pause.
Callum hadn’t left.
