Tears leaked from their eyes. Was it real, or another performance?
“You’ll sit here looking at each other, realizing this didn’t have to happen,” she continued. “A life for a life. That’s the cost.”
She took a step back.
“By the time anyone finds you, your bodies will be bloated and eaten by bugs and rodents. That’s the legacy you leave. No more jokes. No more tapes. Just rot.”
She let it hang in the air.
Then she turned and walked out.
At the gate, she paused and looked back through the window. Their figures were silhouettes now, distorted through the glass. She couldn’t see their faces clearly.
She didn’t need to.
They weren’t going anywhere.
The road below was empty, but she knew patrols would pass eventually. Let them. Some truths deserved to be found late, not buried forever.
Mary didn’t celebrate.
She walked home slowly along the road, the night cool on her skin, the sea breathing in the distance. She’d waited a long time for this night. She’d imagined feeling triumphant. She didn’t.
There were no fireworks. No relief big enough to erase what they’d done.
But there were no regrets.
She’d taken them from this world. It was a better place now. Justice, warped and late, had finally caught up to them—with her hands.
Her daughter was still gone. That would always be the cruelty she couldn’t forgive. The weight of that loss still rested heavily on her chest.
The echo of her daughter would always surround her. But now, at least, she’d never again have to hear the voices of the men who’d turned her baby into a ghost.
Mary reached her door, hand on the knob. For the first time in years, she was smiling.
A real smile.
She felt . . . lighter. Not healed. Just a fraction less haunted.
She prayed it would last.
If it didn’t, if the echoes grew louder again, if the dead kept calling . . .
Now she knew something she hadn’t fully believed before. Justice really could be served. And she still had work she could do. She just prayed she wasn’t teaching anyone else how to listen. Because somewhere on Catalina, someone was already keeping time.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The Shape of the Storm
The pressure had been building all afternoon, thickening the air until every window in Avalon felt ready to shatter beneath it. By nightfall, the island smelled of electricity and salt—like something waiting to ignite.
Mary stood on the bluff above the harbor, her coat whipping around her legs. Below, the town glimmered in fractured light. Everything was shifting now—truths, alliances, even loyalties that had once seemed immovable. Mary had known it would come to this. All of them together again, the web tightening.
What surprised her was the calm.
Not relief. Not peace.
Just the quiet that comes after a decision has already been carried out.
