I’m checking for weapons. Burner phones. Notes. Names. Anything that tells me what she plans to do with this little bite of freedom she stole for herself. Any information that we didn’t already find of hers.
That’s still what I’m doing when I unzip her bag and start to sort through everything she packed in a rush last night.
Folded clothes. Toiletries. A small makeup pouch.Ibuprofen. A flashlight. A pen. An envelope thick with papers.
I sit on the edge of the chair and go through it.
Some of it I’ve seen pieces of before. Names. Dates. Scrawled notes. Fragments of a life cut clean in half and then obsessively stitched back together in ink. But there’s more here than I realized. Newspaper clippings softened at the folds. Copies of reports. Handwritten timelines. The same names circling back again and again like teeth marks.
Deacon.
The rosary tattoo.
Pieces of her family.
I find a small notebook beneath a sweater. Not quite a diary—she’d hate that word—but close enough. The cover is bent, pages swollen a little from use. I open it because I’m fully accepting my stalker era at this point and the more information I have, the safer I can keep her.
The handwriting changes from page to page. Sometimes precise. Sometimes slanted hard enough to cut through paper. Sometimes so angry the words look carved there.
I read anyway.
I learn more than I wanted about my precious little firefly.
Or maybe more than I was always goingto take.
I knew the broad strokes. Girl survives massacre that kills her family. Girl grows up sharpened by grief. Girl comes looking for one monster and walks right into three others who will destroy her if they’re not careful.
But broad strokes aren’t the same as truth. Truth is in the details. Truth is the way she writes about the blood drying under her father’s fingernails.
The way she remembers the smell, before they ushered her out of the house.
The way she circles the word hidden in one margin so many times the paper is almost worn through.
Truth is the years after, too. The ones she doesn’t linger on but doesn’t have to. A reference here. A sentence there. Foster care—the Jacobs. A locked bathroom door. A hand she didn’t want on her. Cal arriving before something worse could happen, or maybe after it already had. The notebook doesn’t spell it out plainly. It doesn’t need to.
My jaw locks so hard it aches. I flip another page.
Revenge breathes through all of it.
It’s not a dramatic kind of thirst for vengeance. Not wild. Not hot with the kind of heat that burns bright and dies off. This is older than that. Colder. The kind that roots itself down in the marrow and waits with claws in her soul. The kind that makes a girl keep breathing because dying would let everyone else off too easy.
I understand that sort of thing. Maybe more than I should.
Homer jumps down from the bed and winds around my ankle, then sinks his claws into my jeans and begins to climb. I absently scratch behind his ear while I keep reading.
There are entries about Noir. About us.
Nash is exactly what she thinks he is and somehow worse all at once.
Shiloh she doesn’t trust at all, which is the smartest thing I’ve seen in here so far. She sees his smirks and laughter as something to hide his truth.
Me—
I stop. Read the lines again. There isn’t much. Just a few observations.
Quiet. Watches too close and sees too much. Freaking stalker vibes. Dangerous in a different way. More patient. Does he even like me? Jury is OUT. I think he’s hurting where no one else can see it. I want it. His hurt.
My mouth tilts despite myself. She sees me better than I realized.
