Lucky. Vivian. Maddox.
Hewouldrisk anything to bring Laurel Tide down.
Because how could he not? How could he look at the faces of the people they’d hurt—the ones who vanished, the ones they’d found too late—and not do everything in his power to end it? There were children still missing. Families still praying. Innocent people facing unspeakable atrocities while he sat in a hospital room nursing guilt like a wound.
He had to stop them. He had to.
But as he looked at Vivian’s still form, the faint flicker of her pulse in her neck, he wondered what the cost would be when the mission finally ended. How many more people he’d destroy trying to protect the rest of the world. How much of himself would be left to save when it was over.
The thought gutted him. Because he already knew the answer.
He’d trade everything to stop Laurel Tide’s reign.
And tonight, thateverythinghad almost been Viv.
He rubbed the heel of his palm over his brow, like he could press the memory out. The image kept cutting through anyway—Vivian sideways on cold iron, eyes unfocused, blood smearing a line near her temple, his name coming out of her like paper tearing. He’d put his jacket under her head, and her fingers had found his wrist and held on. He hadn’t realized until then how long he’d been starving for someone to hold on to him.
Not someone… Vivian.
“Stupid,” he muttered at himself, barely a breath. “Sloppy.”
A nurse pushed the door open with her hip and slid a tray onto the rolling table, eyes flicking from the machines to the bed to him. “Vitals are stable,” she said, voice gentle to match the hour. “If she wakes, one sip of water at a time. We’ll re-check in ninety minutes or so.”
“Thanks,” he said.
She looked at him another second, like she was taking inventory of more than his answer. “Family?”
The word hit someplace he didn’t have a name for. “Wife,” he said, too easy, like it was real instead of cover.
She nodded like the distinction mattered less at this hour and eased the door closed again.
Blake stood because sitting let the thoughts breed. The room was dim past the lamp by the bed. The window held a square of moon-silvered night; condensation had ghosted along the corners. He walked to the glass and looked down. The small-town hospital’s lot was half empty. A few late-shift sedans, a county cruiser idling without a soul in it, tailpipe spilling a thin ribbon of white. Streetlamps pooled light that didn’t quite make it to the far fence. Beyond that, piles of old snow ate the world.
His phone buzzed once in his pocket. Not a call. The specific vibration he’d set for one thing. He pulled it out, thumb already moving.
DOCK CAM: MOTION 02:14:07
A grainy still loaded a second later—just static-salted darkness, a slice of rope, the smear of a shape moving past the edge of frame. The motion detector at the marina he’d wired from habit years ago. Far from the hospital. Unhelpful, except for the itch it gave him.
He checked the hallway. Clear. Checked the bathroom. Clear. Checked again, because that was the rhythm that kept you alive:check, breathe, check, breathe. He came back to the bed and rested two fingers over the blanket on Vivian’s forearm. Warm. She slept through his touch, brows pulling, like her dreams were narrow hallways with too many doors.
He shouldn’t be here. He should be at the docks or Maddox’s office or the lighthouse again with a forensic kit and a flashlight. He should be anywhere that wasn’t a chair he couldn’t fix things from.
She mumbled something—a name maybe, or a curse. He leaned closer but didn’t catch it. Her lips pressed together and then eased. The monitor ticked off another few seconds. He could stay until the nurse came back. He could stay forever. Neither would change the fact that someone had stood in that lighthouse and watched Vivian fall and then had the audacity to scoop up the casing like a signature.
He turned back to the window.
A smudge of black moved beyond his reflection.
He stilled. Didn’t breathe. The shape disappeared. He focused, but all he found was the reflection of the room—bed, IV pole, his own shape, and beyond that, only darkness. He shifted an inch right. Something shifted in the outside world in sync, at the far edge of the lit lot. Not a shadow thrown by wind, not a nurse on smoke break. A person at the corner where light gave up. Standing too still.
He put two fingers on the blanket again—habit, anchor—and then slid them away. “Be right back,” he said to no one, barely more than a thought said out loud.
The hallway was a different kind of quiet, lights dimmed to save eyes on nights like this. His boots softened, noiseless on the floor. He let the door whisper back into place without clicking. The nurse from before was at the far station, head tilted toward a monitor, pen tapping a pad in her other hand. He kept moving.The automatic doors at the lobby sighed open as he approached, letting in a sheet of cold air and fog.
The night wrapped him in a damp chill, bracing and familiar. He took two steps to the right, letting the first camera over the entrance consider him a normal man stepping into normal air, then cut left into shadow along the building’s brick. He scanned the angles without fully turning his head, using the reflection off a minivan’s chrome bumper instead of his eyes.
There. The shape he’d seen from above was at the perimeter fence now, half turned in, half turned out, as if listening for something. A beanie shadowed the skull; hands were bare in the cold—stupid or deliberate. The stance said deliberate. The person stepped forward one pace into light, and the hospital’s glow snagged a gleam off a metal—ring, watch, something small.
