The plural snagged in Annie’s chest.
This didn’t feel like a desperate thief acting alone. Someone had forced her off the road. Someone had broken into the shop. Someone had ransacked her apartment while she sat at the station and wrote her statement. Someone had carved a warning into her wall.
Someone coordinated this.
Someone watched.
“I’ll start with the books,” she said, moving toward the stacked boxes she’d brought home from the Blackwood estate sale. “If someone hid something in a hollowed-out spine or between pages—”
“Good.” Jack pulled out his phone. “I’m ordering lunch. We’ll be here a while.”
The bell above the door chimed as he stepped outside.
The moment he left the threshold, the shop’s silence changed. It didn’t simply quiet—it exposed her. The front windows suddenly felt too wide, too clear, too inviting to anyone who wanted to look in and calculate.
He’s just outside, she reminded herself. He’ll come right back.
She forced her shoulders down and turned to the boxes.
Work gave her something to hold onto. Not control, exactly—but rhythm. Purpose. The familiar comfort of details.
She opened the first box and lifted a stack of books out carefully, like she handled fragile relics in a museum. Her fingers traced the cracked leather. She breathed in the faint scent of old paper and dust and time.
She flipped through each volume, her thumb skimming page edges, her gaze searching the seams where someone mighttuck a note. She checked the inside covers for loose liners, ran a fingernail along the inner spine, pressed gently at the back boards in case she found an unnatural give.
She kept her breathing steady.
She kept her mind from straying back to blood.
A leather-bound copy of Pride and Prejudice from the 1920s. Beautiful. She verified the publisher page, checked for a signature or bookplate, and found none. She set it aside on a shelf she’d already cleared for high-value stock.
A signed copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. She held it up to the light, checking for altered pages or glued inserts, then smiled despite herself at the neat inscription inside.
Normal. Let it be normal.
After ten minutes, she paused and scanned the small pile she’d organized. These books would sell for good money—real money. Enough to pay a month’s rent, maybe two. Enough to help keep her shop afloat.
Not enough to justify an attack.
Not enough to explain why a masked man had slammed her against a wall and demanded a locket like his life depended on it.
The locket had done something to this town. To its buried history. To whoever guarded the Blackwoods’ secrets.
She slid a copy of Wuthering Heights onto the shelf and shifted her stance as her bruises tugged at her wrists. Pain reminded her she lived in a body, not just in her head. The ache grounded her, and she hated that she needed it.
The bell chimed.
“Took you long enough,” Annie called without looking up, relief already loosening her chest. “I thought your sergeant called you back.”
“Oh—I’m sorry to bother you.” A woman’s voice. Not Jack’s.
Annie’s stomach tightened. She lifted her head.
A well-dressed woman in her forties stood just inside the door with a little girl who couldn’t be more than six. The child shifted from foot to foot, knees pressed together, face pinched in urgent misery. The woman held a handbag that looked too expensive for the town—structured leather, polished hardware, the kind you bought in a department store in Nashville, not a small mountain shop.
“My daughter needs to use the restroom,” the woman said, tone pleasant, practiced. “I saw your lights on. Is there any way…?”
Annie hesitated only long enough to assess the child. The girl’s distress looked real.
