The window is crackedopen just enough to let the night air in. The study is dim, lit only by a single lamp on a heavy wooden desk and the faint glow from Sebastian’s tablet. The walls are lined with bookshelves that are half filled with actual books and half with files we don’t want sitting in plain sight anywhere else. There’s a rug underfoot that’s seen better decades, worn thin in the center, and a pair of mismatched chairs that look like they were stolen from entirely different rooms.
It’s normal and quiet, the kind of room that pretends none of this exists.
I stand at the window, watching. Cason is already halfway across the property grounds by the time I let myself breathe again. He stumbles once, catches himself, then keeps going. He doesn’t look back.
Something in my chest cracks and falters.
But it’s a good thing he’s not looking back. He shouldn’t. If he looks back, he might hesitate. And if he hesitates, I might—
Behind me, the quiet tap of fingers against glass helps to cut off that thought. Sebastian is sprawled in one of the chairs, tablet balanced on his knee, watching the live feed from the perimeter cameras like this is just another operation.
Maybe for him, it is.
“Your timing’s off,” he says casually. “He should’ve veered left by now.”
A soft voice speaks from the corner of the room. “He will.”
Right on cue, Cason slows. Even from this distance, I can see the shift in his posture, the slight turn of his head, the way his steps lose their rhythm. He pauses, scanning the tree line like something isn’t adding up. Then he starts moving again. Left. Right. Then left again, sharper this time, like he’s trying to correct for something he can’t quite track.
I can feel Mia’s ability working the same way I feel my own shadows—subtle, invasive, threading through the edges of perception.
Cason slows again in the distance, his path turning uneven, erratic. He glances over his shoulder once, then pivots like he’s second guessing his own direction. By the time he makes it to the road, he won’t remember how he got there. He won’t remember the turns, the landmarks, the exact stretch of woods that leads back here. He’ll only know that he escaped.
“It’s done,” Mia says after a moment. “He won’t remember the route. Not clearly enough to retrace it. It’ll be nothing but a blur.”
I nod once. “Thank you.”
When I glance back at her, she’s standing near the wall, arms loosely crossed, watching me with a look that’s a little too perceptive for my current tolerance.
Do I have a giant neon sign above my head that readsProperty of Cason Bellrose?
I hold her gaze long enough to make the dismissal clear.“You can go.”
She inclines her head, then turns and leaves without another word. The door clicks shut behind her, and silence mercifully settles over the room.
I turn back to the window. Cason is smaller now, further away, still moving. Still not looking back. I told Sebastian and Mia that this was strategy, that letting him go would give us an angle on Malcolm. That Cason might lead us somewhere useful, flush something out, make a mistake we could exploit.
It wasn’t a lie.
It just wasn’t the truth.
The truth is…I didn’t want to hurt him anymore. It wasn’t making me feel any better like it was supposed to. As a matter of fact, when he said he hated me, it made me feel a lot fucking worse.
It turns out it was never the shadows that made me a monster. They only gave me a place to belong.
Behind me, Sebastian shifts in his chair, and I can feel his eyes boring into the back of my head.
“Just fucking say what you’re going to say, Baz,” I tell him, no real heat in my words, as I watch Cason completely disappear into the dark of the trees.
“You had to know I’d notice your shadows covering the camera down there.”
Yes, I knew. I didn’t care at the moment, but now I’m regretting it.
I’m regretting a lot of things.
“Are you ready to tell me yet?”
I don’t answer. I don’t turn around. The question hangs there anyway, Sebastian as patient as always. He’s not asking about the plan, or rather my lack of one. He’s asking about Cason, about why I let him go when every logical part of this operation says I shouldn’t have.
