No.
No.
Izzy promised she’d stay there.
Fear slammed into him so hard it felt like rage.
Sam Talley’s parting words echoed through the roar of the engine, a bitter ghost mocking him from the dark.Give your heart to a bird, eventually it flies.He realized with a sickening stab of clarity that he’d spent weeks pushing Izzy away, so terrified of turning into Sam that he’d convinced himself she was destined to abandon him. But he’d been a blind fool. The real tragedy of Clara Vale wasn’t that she had flown away from the man who loved her. The tragedy was that she had wanted to stay, and the monsters on this mountain had stolen her choice. He wasn’t running to stop Izzy from leaving anymore; he was fighting to give her the chance to choose.
Burke hit the gas harder.
The truck fishtailed through the curve.
By the time Bridlepath came into view ahead, both men already knew.
Something terrible had happened.
48
Highway 107
The cruiser’s tires screamed as Burke threw the truck into a blind curve, the speedometer needle shaking past eighty-five. Dust and dead hemlock needles exploded behind them in a blinding wall, but inside the cab, the silence was suffocating.
Grant sat rigid in the passenger seat, one hand braced against the dashboard, his knuckles white. He wasn’t watching the road anymore.
He was watching his brother.
Burke’s hands were locked at ten and two on the wheel, the muscles in his forearms trembling beneath his uniform sleeves.
“Burke,” Grant growled, his voice rough. “Slow down before you put us in the damn creek.”
Burke didn’t answer.
Didn’t blink.
Didn’t ease off the gas.
Then suddenly?—
A sharp metallic crack split through the cab.
Burke’s fist slammed into the center console hard enough to shatter the plastic radio bracket clean in two.
“Dammit!”
He hit it again.
The sound that tore out of him barely sounded human.
“Dammit, Grant!”
The truck swerved hard across the center line before Burke jerked it back, breathing ragged and uneven.
For four terrifying seconds, the Sheriff mask vanished completely.
“I reopened the file,” Burke rasped. “I did this.”
Grant said nothing.
