Behind her, the phone buzzed again.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she muttered, even as guilt lodged itself under her sternum like a pebble.She shouldn’t ignore Marcus.Or Winters.Or her mother.Especially not her mother.
But she couldn’t be reasonable right now.Reasonable people didn’t race toward a crime scene that had no official designation as such.They didn’t blow off Bureau protocol to visit a house connected to their childhood.They didn’t ignore the cautionary advice of colleagues who had saved their life—more than once.
Reasonable people didn’t chase the echo of a warning whispered by a man locked in a concrete cage two thousand miles away.
But Kate Valentine had long ago accepted that reasonable wasn’t always a luxury she was allowed.
A car roared past her in the opposite lane—chrome grill, tinted windows, the whole machine shimmering like a fish scale under the full afternoon sun.She watched it vanish in her rearview mirror, the image collapsing into the dusty shimmer of the road.
She exhaled.Tried to steady her breathing.Tried to order the snarl of thoughts into some sequence that would reassure her she’d been right in coming back here.
The right decision?
No.
Theinevitableone.
Ever since the moment she’d typed her childhood address into Google earlier that day, something had clenched tight inside her chest.Mulberries.1508 Clancy’s Drive.The house she had both loved and fled.The house whose name—itsdumb, silly,whimsicalname—had always felt like a dare.Like something that didn’t belong to them, or maybe didn’t belong toher.Like something a toothy British girl would say in an old novel.Summer at Mulberries?How lovely!
When the search results had appeared—bland realtor photos from the last time the house had been listed, grainy images of the front porch, the yard, the bedroom window she used to crack open at night to listen to the crickets—her pulse had stuttered.Something in the air had shifted.
She’d felt watched.
Not by the house itself.Not by memory.
But by something… expectant.
Something that had already chosen her.
Again.
She swallowed.
The fields gave way to denser pockets of trees—maples and elms clustered in cathedral-like formations, the branches forming ribbed arches overhead.The sun slipped in and out between them, strobing her windshield with light.
Up ahead, a green sign announced the turn:
FOREST LAKE – 2 MILES
She rolled her shoulders, but the tension stuck like tar.Her body buzzed with nerves, fatigue, uncertainty—everything layered on top of the heaviness that had been with her ever since she’d talked to Cox through the bulletproof glass.
“Close to your heart”
She hated the accuracy of it.Hated that he was right, even vaguely.Hated that the mere act of reaching for the past felt like playing on his chessboard.
The road bent.She followed it toward the small lake town that had once shaped her in ways she still didn’t fully understand.
She slowed only a little as the speed limit dropped.A sign announced:
WELCOME TO FOREST LAKE
EST.1881
Someone had added a decal of a trout leaping out of stylized blue waves.The town might as well have been welcoming her back with open arms.Or baring its teeth.
There were legends.A crock of gold stolen from the local Native American tribe.Emphasis oncrock, she thought.A curse placed on the land.A fable more influenced by Scooby Doo, she thought, than the truth.
