Page 50 of Sinner’s Torment

And I thought about my father—the man who’d raised me with patience and love, who’d taught me to ride a bike and helped me with my homework and never once raised his voice at me even when I deserved it. Who’d bandaged my scraped knees and scared away the monsters under my bed. Who’d told me I could be anything I wanted to be, do anything I wanted to do.

The man who’d just walked out of my room with murder in his eyes.

I pulled my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around them, and tried to breathe through the panic rising in my throat. Tried to slow my racing heart. Tried to think clearly through the fog of fear and confusion and bone-deep exhaustion.

Something had shifted.

Something fundamental and irreversible. Like tectonic plates moving beneath the surface of the earth, reshaping the landscape of my life.

My father knew about the club now. About the tattoo. About what I’d been doing for the past five years. About the choices I’d made and the person I’d become.

And whatever he was planning to do about it, whatever action he was about to take, I had a feeling it was going to change everything. Was going to turn my world upside down all over again. Was going to drag me into something I didn’t understand, something bigger and more dangerous than anything I’d faced before.

Again.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Hex

I walked out of my daughter’s bedroom and closed the door behind me with a control that cost me everything I had left.

My hands didn’t shake. My breathing stayed even. My footsteps down the hallway were measured and deliberate, the same way they’d been for the past thirty-four years—the footsteps of a man who’d left violence behind, who’d built something good and clean and honest with his bare hands.

But inside?

Inside, I was burning.

I passed the living room where Hannah sat reading, her glasses perched on her nose, a cup of tea cooling on the side table. She looked up as I walked by, her expression questioning, but I shook my head once. Not now. She’d know soon enough. She always did.

I kept walking through the kitchen, past the mudroom, out the back door, and into the Connecticut night.

The air was cold and sharp, carrying the scent of pine and earth and the distant promise of rain. The kind of night that made you feel small beneath the vast darkness of the sky, beneath the weight of stars you couldn’t see through the cloud cover.

I stood there for a moment on the back porch, letting the cold bite into my skin, letting it ground me. Letting it remind me that I was still here, still alive, still capable of feeling something other than the white-hot rage that threatened to consume me from the inside out.

Then I started walking toward the barn.

The property stretched out before me in the darkness—twenty acres of rolling Connecticut hills that Hannah and I had bought with the money I’d saved from years of legitimate work. Construction. Carpentry. Honest labor that left my hands calloused and my back aching but my conscience clear.

We’d built a good life here. A real life.

The nice farmhouse sat solid and warm behind me, lights glowing in the windows. The garden Hannah tended every summer. The chicken coop that my boys had helped me build. The fire pit where we gathered on cool evenings, roasting marshmallows and telling stories and pretending the past didn’t exist.

It was everything I’d wanted when I walked away from the Silver Shadows. Everything I’d fought for. Everything I’d sacrificed five years of my life to protect.

And now it felt like a lie.

The barn loomed ahead, a dark silhouette against the darker sky. I’d built it myself the first year we moved here, working weekends and evenings until my hands bled and my shoulders screamed. Hannah had brought me lemonade and sandwiches, then sat on the tailgate of my truck and watched me work with that quiet smile she wore when she was proud of me.

I pushed open the heavy door, the hinges creaking in protest. The smell hit me immediately—hay and dust and motor oil and something else. Something older. Something that belonged to a different life entirely.

I didn’t turn on the lights.

I didn’t need them.

I knew exactly where I was going.

The barn was organized the way I organized everything now—tools hung on pegboards, lumber stacked neatly against the walls, the riding mower parked in its designated spot. Everything in its place. Everything controlled and contained, and safe.