The lights moved slow. Not the pace of a ranch hand heading home after drinks, but the kind of slow you get when someone’s counting fence posts, checking sightlines. They came up the main drive, then hung a left at the bend, idling just past the tree line. I heard the engine, a soft purr, not even trying to muffle itself.
I stood, careful not to let the chair scrape, and moved to the window. I didn’t bother with the lights. I watched.
The car was a sedan, dark color, big enough to carry four or five people, but only one silhouette in the driver’s seat. It idled for a full minute, headlights trained on the house, not wavering.
Then, with a practiced deliberation, the driver cut the engine. The lights stayed on, burning the snow in perfect cones, and then, after a pause, they blinked out, plunging the yard back into the gray-on-gray.
I waited for movement—door opening, figure getting out, maybe a phone raised to take a photo—but nothing happened.The car just sat there, gathering condensation, ghosting a cloud of breath into the cold.
My own breath fogged the window, a soft bloom in the dark. I rubbed it away with the side of my hand and leaned in, getting a better angle.
Still nothing.
Behind me, Emilio stirred, made a soft cry, then went quiet again. The monitor blinked green, unconcerned.
I thought about calling Rawley, but I didn’t. If it was trouble, it was mine before it was his.
I watched the car for another two minutes. Time stretched, bent, threatened to snap. The cold pressed harder against the glass, the kind of pressure that promised a storm by morning.
I stood there, statue-still, one hand on the frame and the other loose at my side. I let myself remember every time I’d waited for a bomb to go off, for a perimeter to be breached, for the future to arrive with its boots on.
This was the same kind of waiting, the kind that demanded you hold your ground and let the world make the next move.
The car didn’t move. The window glass went slick under my palm. The world outside was a study in white and black, the snow reflecting the last of the moonlight, the trees at the edge of the property lined up like soldiers waiting for orders.
In the crib, Emilio settled again, his hand curling around the edge of the blanket. I let myself breathe.
I stood at the window until the cold reached up my arms and into my chest, until my breath came out in a thin, steady line, until the car became just another shadow on the landscape.
I didn’t look away, and I didn’t stand down. Not until the world told me it was safe.
It never did.
Chapter Six
~ Liam ~
I killed the engine halfway down the drive and let the heat drain out of the air vents, watched the windshield fog from the inside, watched my own breath ghost up the glass.
The car—a cash-only Subaru that already looked suspicious in a world of battered farm trucks—ticked and settled into silence with each pulse of the cooling engine block.
The world outside was black and flat and frozen. At the far end of the gravel, the porch of the Steele house stood like a movie set, lit only by the vapor-thin spill from a kitchen window. The kind of yellow that existed nowhere in nature, but here it felt as permanent as the sunrise. The house sat on its own little planet, suspended above the slick nothingness of the yard. No other light for miles.
I kept my hands on the steering wheel long after the keys were out. My fingers had gone white at the knuckles and would take their time coming back to flesh color. The only feeling left was the burn of the nerves. That, and the prickle at the back of my neck, an old friend that had come with me all the way from Montana.
I’d run every security step I could think of. Two gas stations, far apart and both at shift change. Spent fifteen minutes outside a truck stop pretending to fuss with the wipers while I cataloged every vehicle, every potential tail.
I took an alternate route I’d mapped out weeks ago, even though it added forty minutes to the drive and at least ten of them were in total darkness. I’d left the phone powered down and battery out, still ziplocked in the glove box, just in case someone could triangulate a dead thing.
And still, I was certain I’d been seen. Not by the attorney’s people, not by the woman in the Escalade, not even by a beatcop. Seen by the house. By the porch. By the man who could find humor in any disaster, even this one.
I was less worried about being found than I was about what would happen if he opened the door.
That wasn’t true, and I knew it.
I was less worried about being found than I was about what happened if he didn’t open the door. If he looked through the glass and saw only a problem, another stray to be handled, another ghost at the edge of the yard.
I tried to picture Hooper in the kitchen. I imagined the sleeves rolled back, a mug in hand, the left bicep flexed tight around a two-month-old baby who had no reason to recognize me.
