“Send me what you found.”
I keep going, circling toward the north side, where the pasture curls down to the creek. The moon throws enough light that I leave the flashlight at my side, letting my eyes do the work.
“Do you think he could still be out there?” Sin’s voice echoes my own questions I’ve had for years.
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. I stop in my tracks. “I gotta go. Talk soon.” I hang up before he’s even had a chance to say goodbye.
I spot headlights.
Low, dirty, bouncing.
On Coleman land.
A pickup, no running lights, no hesitation.
My pulse spikes.
The truck is near the back corner, where the property line meets the old service road. Too far to catch detail, close enough to know it doesn’t belong.
“Hey!” I bark, already breaking into a run.
The engine revs.
Taillights flare—red ghosts in the dark—and the truck swerves toward the fence line.
I sprint, boots pounding, breath steadying into that tight, efficient rhythm I trained into my body years ago.
“Stop!” I shout, useless but automatic. “Coleman property!”
The truck doesn’t stop. It guns it. For a second, it looks like the fool driving is going to plow straight through the fence we rebuilt twice. At the last second, they jerk the wheel and slip through a narrow gap between posts where the ground dips—just shallow enough to make it, just hidden enough you’d have to know it was there. They peel out onto the service road, gravel spraying, taillights shrinking.
I push harder.
Adrenaline burns through me, hot and clean. My world narrows to those two red points and the knowledge that someone was just on this land, doing God knows what, and I was ten seconds too late.
I crest the small rise as the truck fishtails onto the main road and disappears behind a stand of pecans.
Gone.
I stop. My heartbeat is a drum in the quiet. My lungs drag in air that tastes like dust and exhaust and fury. “Coward,” I mutter to the empty night. I turn back, scanning the ground with the flashlight now.
Tracks.
Fresh.
Deep.
They drove in slow, left in a hurry.
I follow the impressions along the fence, looking for anything broken, anything planted. I find a churned patch of dirt near a gate post, like they stopped there for a second.
Crouching, I run my fingers over the ground. Nothing obvious. No new cut wire, no packages, no obvious marks. Maybe they were scouting. Maybe they were measuring response time. Maybe they were just testing how close they could get to my nerve without getting caught. Either way, they’re getting bold.
Bold gets people hurt.
I straighten, muscles singing from the sprint, and look back toward the house. A light burns in an upstairs window—Delaney’s room. The sight hits me square in the chest.
She’s up.
