My stomach drops.
“Where?”
He gestures toward the porch. “Close enough to touch the house.”
Hadley shifts behind me, her fingers tightening in my shirt, and I pull her closer without thinking, my own pulse loud enough now that it’s hard to hear anything else.
“Did you see them?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “But they weren’t trying to hide the noise.”
The thought hits hard and immediate, a warning that isn’t subtle or careful but completely intentional.
I glance toward the open door, toward the darkness just beyond the porch light, and for the first time since we walked into this house…
it doesn’t feel like shelter anymore, it feels exposed.
Like we just stepped into something that was already waiting.
And somewhere out there, just beyond the reach of the light—
Someone knows exactly where we are.
Chapter seventeen
No More Running
Jace
Iget them inside and lock the door and then I stand there with my hand still on the deadbolt, listening to the house settle around us, doing the thing I've been doing all night.
Holding it together.
Because that's the job right now, that's what this moment needs, someone steady at the center of it who isn't going to let the fear show.
The second it shows it becomes real for everyone else in the room. Riley is already holding herself by a thread she's too proud to let anyone see fraying.
So I hold it together.
I check the windows and the back door. I walk the perimeter of the house the way I've done it these past weeks. I find nothing. No one, just the dark and the wind and the marks in the soft ground near the porch that confirm what I already knew.
Someone was here, close enough to touch this house, close enough to know we were inside it.
I come back into the living room and Riley has Hadley settled on the couch with a blanket and a quiet voice. Talking her down from the edge of something the kid barely understands but feels anyway. Hadley has always felt everything first and understood it second.
I watch them for a moment from the doorway, and that's when it hits me.
Not the anger or the frustration of being two steps behind on something I should have seen coming faster. Not the tactical calculation of what happens next and how I handle it. Something underneath all of that, something that has been building since the rodeo, the note in the trailer and the sprint across dark ground toward my daughter. Even since Riley said we, and meant it. Since I stood in this house I built and started understanding why I built it the size I did.
I am not going to lose them.
The thought arrives without permission and lands without apology. Certain in a way that bypasses every wall I have ever built against exactly this kind of certainty. I feel it settle somewhere deep and permanent, the kind of knowing that doesn't ask for confirmation.
I'm not built for halfway. I never was, and I spent a long time pretending otherwise.
Riley gets Hadley down around nine, sitting with her until her breathing evens out and the tension of the night releases the way it only can in sleep. When she comes back down the hall and finds me in the kitchen with two glasses of sweet tea she doesn't want but is going to drink anyway. She stops at the counter
Watching.
