She held out her hand. He took it. Warm. Familiar. Steadying in a way that unsettled him.
Memory pressed close—late nights, quiet prayers, lines he’d tried too hard not to cross.
He released her hand gently. Those days were behind them. This wasn’t about what they had been.
This was about protecting her now. And uncovering whatever someone believed the Blackwoods had hidden well enough to nearly kill for.
Chapter 3
The afternoon sunlight poured through the front windows of Annie’s Antiques, turning dust motes into drifting gold and throwing long shadows across the chaos that had once been her carefully staged displays. Annie paused just inside the doorway and forced herself to take it in with fresh eyes.
Overturned chairs. A toppled side table. A display case shifted inches off center, like the shop itself had flinched.
After seeing Uncle Eric’s blood on her kitchen floor, this damage should have felt small. It did—and it didn’t. The mess looked like a stranger’s hands had been everywhere, touching what wasn’t theirs, rearranging her life with careless force.
Jack stepped in behind her, the door closing with a muted thud that seemed too final in the hollowed space. He’d insisted on coming with her after the hospital—said he wasn’tcomfortable letting her walk back into this alone, not when someone had already proven they would hurt people to get what they wanted. He didn’t speak at first. He didn’t have to. His gaze moved the way it always had when he worked a scene—slow, methodical, cataloging what had been disturbed and what had been left behind. He was wearing the ‘Detective face’ she used to tease him about.
She let her gaze move where his had, noting the small, telling details—the drawer that had been pulled out and shoved back crooked, the papers that had been rifled through but not scattered, the faint drag marks where boxes had been shifted and then abandoned.
“What are you looking for?” She ask Jack after following his pointed looks for several seconds.
“Nothing. Just making sure there isn’t anything the team may have missed.”
He turned his attention back to her.
“So, where do we start?” Jack asked.
Annie didn’t hesitate. She turned and led him toward the back of the shop, past the damaged display and the overturned chair, to the crates she hadn’t yet fully unpacked from the Blackwood estate sale. Several lids were loose now. Packing paper spilled where someone had forced it aside. Items sat out of place, returned without care.
“Here,” she said. “Everything I got from the Blackwood estate is in these boxes.”
They began pulling items free with care. Jack lifted out photo albums while Annie gathered the bundles of old newspapers and correspondence she had stacked aside for later review. The shop grew quiet except for the soft sounds of paper and leather and the faint tick of the wall clock. Faces from another century stared up at them—formal portraits, familygatherings, society photographs, Eleanor’s image recurring again and again, young, composed, and unsettlingly watchful.
Annie laid the newspapers across the counter, skimming headlines until familiar names surfaced. Blackwood. Fairview. Business expansions. Charity events. And then, months later, the careful phrasing surrounding Eleanor’s disappearance.
From a smaller crate, she lifted out several clothbound journals and set them beside the papers. Jack brought the albums over and exhaled slowly.
“This is what they didn’t want you reading,” he said.
Annie opened the nearest diary, the brittle pages whispering beneath her fingers. “Then this is where we find out why.”
And together, they started where Eleanor had left her voice behind.
Jack stood close behind her, solid enough that she could feel his presence without looking back. “Crime scene finished up about an hour ago,” he said. “They lifted some prints, but most of them will match yours or Eric’s.”
She nodded, because if she tried to speak, grief might pour out of her instead.
The hospital had promised Eric was stable. No skull fracture. A serious concussion. They would keep him overnight and call if anything changed.
They always said that.
Her mind kept replaying the moment she’d found him—face-down on her kitchen floor, blood matted in his hair, his breath thin and wrong. Every time she blinked, she saw the gouged letters on the wall again.
YOU’RE NEXT.
Jack shifted, gentle but purposeful. “We need to look for anything tied to Eleanor Blackwood,” he said. “If they came back twice, they might want more than the locket. Or they missedsomething the first time. Either way, we need to find it before they do.”
They.
