He kept watch.
He didn’t abandon her.
She stepped away from the window and forced her hands back into motion. Pages. Spines. Covers. She needed evidence, not fear.
But the shop’s sounds had changed. Every creak had edges. Every passing shadow carried weight. Suspicion sank into her muscles and stayed there like a bruise.
This was why she’d walked away four years ago. Not because she couldn’t do the work. Because the work never stopped doing her.
The constant vigilance. The way danger made her mistrust every smile. The way trauma rewrote ordinary moments into threats.
She thought about Jack—the way their minds used to click into place together, like gears aligning. She remembered the precision, the breakthroughs, the quiet satisfaction of giving the forgotten dead a voice again.
She also remembered the other part. How safe she’d felt beside him. How unsafe that feeling made her. How his presencehad tempted her to let her guard down. She’d survived losing him once. She didn’t know if she could survive letting him close again.
Her phone sat on the counter near her ledger. She reached for it without deciding to. Her thumb hovered over Jack’s contact.
One call. One sentence. I changed my mind. Take the case. I’ll stay out of it.
She could hand this back to him and retreat into her old life of antique auctions, display arrangements, customers who wanted stories that didn’t bleed.
Then she saw Eric again in her mind—his eyes fluttering, his hand clutching hers, his whisper scraping out like a warning from a dying man.
“They know.”
“They know what? Who?”
And why did it matter enough to hurt him?
Annie lowered the phone and slid it away. She couldn’t outrun this. She couldn’t shop her way out of danger. Whoever had targeted her already knew her name, her shop, her apartment, her uncle.
Distance wouldn’t protect Uncle Eric. Truth might.
She pulled another book from the box—a slim volume of poems with a faded cloth cover. Her fingers ran along the spine.
Then she heard it.
A soft scratching sound. Not the building settling. Not the normal creak of old wood. Not the faint tap of a loose windowpane. Something deliberate.
Something that didn’t belong.
The scratching came again—longer. Slower. Like someone dragged a tool along wood. Like fingernails carved lines with intent.
Annie’s blood turned to ice.
She angled her head toward the sound. The shop held its breath around her.
The back door.
Her mind flashed to the gouged warning upstairs. Letters cut deep enough to feel like wounds.
YOU’RE NEXT.
The scratching stopped.
Silence filled the space it left, heavier than the sound itself.
Annie snatched up her phone. Her hands shook, but she moved fast. She didn’t waste time debating. She didn’t second-guess. She ran for the front door.
