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“I don’t like this,” Owen said. “You take the east side while I go west. Clear the place.”
Ty unholstered his Glock and inched through the dark house. A cold chill bubbled along his skin as he moved to Josiah’s room. The door was open. He entered and cleared it, then moved to the bathroom, clearing it as well, then her office.
Ty’s phone dinged with a text, but he ignored it.
“Ty,” Owen called, and the tone in his voice sent Ty’s world to a screeching halt.
A note card had been stuck to Bex’s bedroom door with a knife.
I’ve killed. I’ve stolen almost everyone you care about. I’m not done. You can’t stop me.
Ty read it once, then twice. Ahnah. Cami. Now he had Bexley and Josiah. This freak of nature hadn’t left the island and was using the hurricane to his advantage. They never expected anyone but their own desperate selves to be out in this nightmare weather. It had been an oversight. A potentially deadly one. “I can’t leave now.” How was he going to fight a hurricane and this killer at the same time? He slumped on Bexley’s bed and cradled his head in his hands, a temptation to pray entering his thoughts. Because nothing he’d attempted so far had proven successful. He’d believed in no one but himself, and he was spent, stretched as far as one man could be stretched, feeling it in every beat of his heart and in every breath. A deep aching pressure that wouldn’t release. Like being enclosed in a tomb alive with little air.
He had no peace.
No hope.
No help.
Panic set in, shivering through his veins until he trembled. A dam of tears burst and he was powerless to stop them. “He has them. He’s going to kill them and I’m going to be too late. Josiah will never know I was his father. Never know...never know that I loved him more than myself. How am I supposed to do this? He’s won. He’s ended my life without killing me.”
“No. You’re struck down, friend. But not destroyed. You’re hard-pressed but not crushed.” Owen sat beside him on the edge of Bexley’s perfectly made bed. “We’re not going to leave. We’re going to clear our heads and find them.” He tapped his fist to his heart as he said, “Together.”
“I can’t let you stay. If the hurricane doesn’t kill us, he might. You go—”
“Tiberius, stop. If the tables were turned, would you leave me?”
“No,” he whispered. “You know I wouldn’t.”
“Then why are you pushing me to do what your own stubborn self wouldn’t do?” He leaned over and gripped the back of Ty’s neck, bringing his brow to Owen’s. “We are in this together.” His grip tightened to deliver his resolute message. Ty might not have a single brother he could trust, but he had Owen. Like some divine blessing—if he believed in those things.
Ty nodded against his brow and then pulled back, wiping his face and standing. “I’m going to check Josiah’s room. Maybe the killer left a note there too.”
“I’ll call Asa, take the heat for us both.”
“Thank you,” Ty murmured, and tapped his chest as he left the room, knees like twigs about to snap in half.
His phone dinged a second time as a reminder he’d received an earlier text.
He gripped the wall. Ty wasn’t ready to see photos, or a video, of his dead son and the woman he’d never gotten over. This would break him. He decided to take a chance. “God, if You’re listening...” That was it, the only words he could muster. Right now, he had come to the end of himself. Bexley had been right. He’d been disappointed in his own ineptness. He’d fooled himself, and the reality terrified him.
He hesitated opening the text, his finger hovering over the unknown number, but he bit the bullet and tapped the text.
A sudden wave of relief enveloped him. The text was from the portrait guy from the Inky Octopus in Wilmington. He’d drawn the sketch of Smoothy, who had tattooed the Family’s logo secretly on three of the victims.
His relief was short-lived. The hits kept coming regardless of his internal pleas for a reprieve.
He’d known the truth, but had been in denial, hoping shared blood would have meant at the very least civility.
But there was no question. No doubt of who this face belonged to.
Garrick Granger.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Blue Harbor
Bexley Hemmingway’s home
