I move around the table and stop in front of her. When she doesn’t back away, I pull her against me with a hand on her back. “I know,” I tell her, my voice rough.
Then she does pull away. “No, you don’t,” she whispers. “You don’t know what it would do to me to lose him, too.”
“No, I don’t, but I know what it’s like to live with fear. I know how it is to plan for the worst because the worst already happened once.”
Her eyes fill with tears, and though I know she hates to cry, she doesn’t try to hide it. “I can’t keep running from him,” she whispers.
Behind her, Calder’s got his chin up, standing firm.
Elena blinks, and the tears slide down her cheeks.
“Then we make our stand here,” I say, straightening. “No more pretending cameras and lights are enough,” I say. “We treat thislike what it is.”
“A hunt.” Calder’s tone is flat.
“We tighten everything. School, house, travel, routines. No solo movement. No assumptions.”
Elena stands taller. “T.J. stays with me.”
“He does.”
“And nobody makes decisions for me.”
I give her a grim smile. “You were never going to allow that.”
“No.” For the first time since she walked in, some of the panic leaves her face, and resolve takes its place.
I slide my hand up to her shoulder and squeeze once. “Then we do this together.”
She closes her eyes briefly. “Together,” she says when she looks at us again.
“Together,” Calder echoes.
I think about T.J.’s desk and the ruined science projects. About the glove hidden behind the shelf and the grainy footage of Anton Kozlov coming into the school like he had a right to be there.
Protective fury is too small a phrase for what lives in me now.
We’re done reacting. He wanted us scared and off balance. Instead, he gave me certainty.
This is war, and he’s not going to get another free shot.
CHAPTER 33
WESTON
By all appearances, I’m volunteering at the school to get the sports fields in shape for spring.
In reality, I’m working a perimeter.
I keep moving, never in a straight line for too long, never settling into a pattern. Trips to the main building for supplies give me a chance to patrol the entrance and the staff lot before I head back past the gym and out to the edges of the property.
All the while, I catalog doors, windows, sightlines, blind corners, fresh tire tracks, and anything out of place.
I circle toward the back of the field and walk along the fenceline, bucket in one hand, rake in the other. Beyond the fence, where scrub and pine clusters provide too many concealment points, I feel something before I see it.
When I get a prickle at the base of my skull, I transfer the rake to my other hand and scratch my neck to make it look like an itch is the reason I’m slowing down. Meanwhile, I’mscanning the terrain without locking in on anything in particular too quickly.
Deep in the brush, where the tree limbs hang low, there’s a shadowy shape that doesn’t fit. It’s too straight in one place and too matte in another. There’s a line that reflects a shard of afternoon sun.
