Chapter
One
BEN
The bellover the door jingled as I stepped inside Stonewood Hardware, dragging a gust of Gulf Coast winter wind in with me. That wet cold clung to everything — my clothes, my skin, the scar tissue puckered along my ribs — and made even the inside of the hardware store feel colder than outside. It was the kind of cold that didn’t just touch you; it sank in, humid and heavy, crawling under your skin like it had a personal vendetta against your bones.
The side of my face — the one that had caught the worst of the windshield glass and that damned fourteen-point buck’s antlers — ached the second the winter air hit it. It wasn’t a surface sting, but a deep, bone-level throb that felt like every nerve was remembering the night my accident happened. The skin there never sweat right anymore, never adjusted well to temperature changes. It just went straight from numb to burning. The wind still carried the faint tang of brackish water from where the river met the bay, and somehow that made it worse, like the air itself wanted to pick at my old wounds.
Under the hoodie, the scars across my chest pulled tight as I moved, the damaged nerves flickering with cold-bitten static. My left knee ached like it always did when the pressure dropped, the steel pins inside it humming dull and mean. My hands hurt worse. I should’ve worn gloves. Henry had reminded me, but I’d waved him off.
Idiot.
The floorboards creaked under my boots as I kept my head low, hood up, hands shoved deep in my hoodie pocket. The list in my pocket crumpled against my fingers as I pulled it out and studied it, Henry’s tight handwriting spelling out wood glue, epoxy, screws, hinges, sandpaper, and a damn space heater. We had central heat at my family’s old hunting lodge, sure, but the east wing was drafty, and Henry had a thing about redundancies. It was an old habit from his special-forces days. The man had backup plans for his backup plans.
I moved through the aisles, methodically running through the items on the list, ignoring the sideways glances from the two girls behind the counter. The older one — barely out of junior college, maybe — kept sneaking peeks in my direction. The other one had her phone out, scrolling through social media, gum popping between her teeth.
They didn’t bother to whisper as they gossiped with each other.
The older girl leaned toward the younger one.
“…he’d be, like, twenty-five now, right? But I haven’t seen the guy since I was a kid.”
The younger one blew a big bubble with her gum and snapped it with an obnoxious pop.
Please tell me they’re not talking about me, for fuck’s sake.
The younger one actually paused her scrolling and looked up from her phone.
“My cousin swears she saw him through the gate of the hunting lodge last year, but it was probably just Henry. Or maybe a ghost. You know what they say about that hunting lodge.”
Pop.
The older one crossed her arms and shook her head.
“It’s not the hunting lodge that’s haunted, stupid. It’s Ashgrove House, the old Stonewood family mansion, where Jacob Stonewood died. Ben Stonewood’s stepmom totally killed his dad. Everybody knows it. But nobody could prove it, and then she skipped the country while Ben was in a coma? Like, hello?”
Pop.
If the younger girl kept popping her gum like that, I was going to have a really hard time not slapping it out of her mouth for the sake of my sanity. The younger girl glanced around, but didn’t lower her voice before speaking again.
“I heard he’s deformed. Like… Phantom of the Opera kind of deformed. That’s why he never leaves the hunting lodge since his accident.”
I wished like hell that I hadn’t listened to Henry. I’d love to be back at the lodge right now, rather than hearing those two airheads gossip about me and my family.
I reached for a box of epoxy and missed as the younger girl popped her gum again, pulling my attention away from what I was doing as I glared at her over my shoulder. My hand slidsideways and white-hot pain lanced through my palm, dragging my attention back to what I was doing.
There was a sharp edge on the bracket underneath the shelf, and I’d just cut my hand on the jagged metal someone hadn’t bothered to file down. It had sliced clean across my palm before I could pull back.
I gritted my teeth as my hand pulsed with throbbing pain and warm blood dripped from my palm onto the metal shelf and the concrete floor.
I sucked in a breath through clenched teeth, but I didn’t curse. I didn’t flinch, either.
Of course this would happen. Of course, this was the day Henry finally convinced me to leave the damn hunting lodge. I spent three goddamn years in a coma, then four years awake and hiding away at the hunting lodge, and this was how my reintroduction to the world started? Bleeding on the concrete floor in Stonewood’s one hardware store while girls who didn’t even know me on sight gossiped about my life like it was a Netflix docuseries.
I stepped up to the counter, blood trailing down my fingers. My hood still shaded most of my face, but my voice came out gravel-rough. Years of disuse did that.
“Can I get a first aid kit, please?”
