Or maybe that’s just fear.
The point stretches ahead, all scrub brush and pale sand and drifting shadows. Every instinct I have is screaming at me now. I could vanish out here. That thought arrives whole and undeniable. I could disappear into this dark and no one would find me until morning, if at all.
Still, I keep walking.
The old fishing hut comes into view at the far edge of the point, weathered and leaning slightly, its door hanging partly open as though whoever sent the message wanted to make things just eerie enough to feel theatrical. I stop a few feet away, my heart pounding hard enough to hurt. The darkness inside is thick, almost solid.
“Hello?” I call, and my voice sounds too small in the open air.
Silence answers me at first.
Then movement.
A figure shifts in the dark interior, stepping slowly into the faint spill of twilight. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Familiar in the way only danger can be.
Fear hits first, fast and electric.
“Who are you?” I ask, though even as I say it I can feel recognition beginning to take shape beneath the panic.
The figure takes another step.
And another.
Until the light catches his face.
“Maverick?”
My brother stops just inside the doorway, his expression unreadable, his leather vest dark against the fading light, his silence heavier than any answer could be.
Something in me goes still.
Because whatever he called me here to say, whatever truth he’s carrying, I know it before he ever opens his mouth.
After this, nothing stays the same.
Chapter Forty-Five
“What are you doing here?”
My voice comes out thinner than I intend, too sharp in the close, damp air of the fishing hut. Maverick stands a few feet in front of me, half-shadowed by the weak light slipping through the open door, his expression so carefully blank that it frightens me more than anger would have.
“I needed to meet you somewhere no one would think to look,” he says. His tone is calm, but there is strain beneath it, something tightly leashed. “Somewhere far enough from home that nobody would get curious.”
I stare at him, my pulse already beginning to pound harder. “Curious about what? Mav, what are you talking about?”
He doesn’t answer right away. He just looks at me in that steady, unreadable way of his, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I have the awful feeling that I don’t know what he’s going to say before he says it. That unsettles me more than the dark, more than the isolation of this place, more than the long drive that brought me here with a thousand bad possibilities already blooming in my mind.
“I’ve been keeping things from you,” he says at last. “Fromeveryone, actually. I got involved in something I probably should’ve left alone, but once I knew enough, there wasn’t really any turning back. I made a move, and now…” He trails off, jaw tightening. “Now it is what it is.”
A chill slips under my skin. “A move for what?”
He drags a hand over the back of his neck, then drops it to his side again. Even that small gesture looks tense on him. “I don’t regret what I did, McCullough. I need you to understand that part first. I don’t regret it. But I didn’t do it the way I was supposed to. I stepped outside protocol, and because of that…” He pauses, his eyes holding mine. “I might go down for this. I might even go to jail.”
The words hit me so hard I actually sway.
“For what?” My voice breaks around the question. “Maverick, what did you do?”
The walls of the shack seem to press inward, the stale air suddenly too close, too thick. My brother has always been the steady one in my life, the one person connected to where I came from who somehow never made me feel trapped by it. He has been reckless, yes. Stubborn, absolutely. But never secretive like this. Never evasive in a way that made me feel like I was looking at a stranger wearing his face.
