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Oscar is still sleeping. Breathing slow and deep, one arm stretched across the space I’ve left in his bed.

I check his watch again. Replace the spent juice carton with a fresh one. Then I’m in motion again, downstairs before I know it, tugging on my boots and heading for the door.

Outside, I hit the ground running and dart up the hill and out of town, reaching the gate fast enough to sear my lungs.

I can’t hear my own breath.

Someone else might.

I slow as I vault the gate without risking the squeaking bolt Folk told me to fix when he was here. That I didn’t fix because he told me to.

In my head, my sister’s opinion on that generates like a text message.

Finch: stubborn little shit

Maybe. But I’m not that little anymore, and I don’t think twice about palming a crowbar from the tool stash and slinking to the top field as darkness presses close and clawing, vines of apprehension coiling my muscles and nerves tight enough to snap.

And yet, I’m not scared.

I know what being deaf takes from me. But it gives me something too. Sharper awareness of other things. Instincts more honed than a hearing person. Unease needles me, but I use it to my advantage and track the silver wash of moonlight over the grass and the wheat.

This is my land.

I know every rut and divot. Every spot the soil holds water after rain and every rabbit bolt route through the hedge. Unless it’s old farmer Letherby’s ghost, whoever’s out there doesn’t know this land; a thought that steadies me as I sink lower, keeping the hedgerow at my back.

Until I finally see him.

Dav.

He kneels in the disturbed earth I questioned him about yesterday, an old military torch laid on the ground beside him while he hauls a filthy canvas bundle from the hole he’s dug while I’ve been gone.

I have no idea what I’m looking at.

Then the canvas slips, metal catches the moonlight, and my stomach drops to the earth’s core in the same instant something hot and primitive tears through me.

Guns.

Jesus Christ.

I need them off my land before I take my next breath. I need Dav gone too before he has a chance to bury more secrets in my fields, and violence surges in me, bright and sharp—jagged edges of a temper I rarely let fly.

My fingers tighten around the crowbar and I step out of the shadows so suddenly Dav almost topples into the hole.

The only reason he doesn’t is my hand at the scruff of his neck, hauling him to his feet before I toss him to the ground again.

He lands messy, skidding through loose soil. In the dark, his eyes are wide and shocked, pained as his aging body hits the ground.

Then he sees me and something like relief bleeds into his gaze, and it enrages me enough to blow forward again.

I grab his collar and drag him upright. I shake him with enough force to rattle his teeth. “What the fuck are you doing?”

He doesn’t answer.

Just stares.

At me. The crowbar. At the guns.

My pulse pounds so hard I feel it in my feet. “Tell me what the hell you’re doing, before I bury you in that pit with those weapons.”