CHAPTER 6 #2
He already had a theory. She could see it in the set of his mouth, in how his reflection held perfectly still in the dark glass while everything else in the room seemed to breathe around him.
He was waiting to see if she’d arrive at the same place on her own.
Testing, like a teacher testing a student, or a predator testing prey.
Not with malice, with the patience of something that had lived long enough to stop hurrying.
Marcus set the pipe coupling down on the table.
The metal made a soft sound against the wood.
He didn’t look at it. His hazel eyes held on the middle distance, somewhere between June and the doorframe, and his big hands rested on the tabletop, loose, the rag crumpled beside the coupling.
He hadn’t spoken. He didn’t need to. His presence in the room was its own statement.
The steady, practical presence of a man who fixed what was broken and didn’t see a reason to complicate things that weren’t.
“Who else in Ashton Grove would have the knowledge to stage a vampire kill that convincingly?” June asked.
The question sat in the room and didn’t move.
Nobody answered.
The silence that followed settled, thick, physical.
Not the empty kind. The kind that was full of things nobody was saying.
Sebastian’s gaze didn’t waver. His reflection in the window glass showed nothing.
Just the silver at his temples, the line of his jaw, the absolute stillness of a man who had learned that some questions were better left in the air than answered aloud.
Luca looked at the floor. Something passed across his face that June couldn’t name, not guilt, not fear, something older.
The expression of a man who had just remembered something he’d been trying to forget.
Marcus picked the rag up. Folded it. Set it beside the coupling. His movements were methodical, unhurried, the economy of a man who had spent thirty years as a country doctor and another eighty-five as something that wasn’t a doctor anymore but hadn’t forgotten how to work with his hands.
The answer was in the room. June could feel it, same as a storm before it breaks.
A pressure in the air, a quality of stillness that preceded something breaking.
Nobody was going to say it. Not tonight.
Not to her. Not with the pack divided and two bodies in the ground and a vote that had failed twice by margins that were getting narrower each time.
She nodded. Once. She let it go.
“Thank you,” she said. It came out almost sincere. Rough at the edges, unpracticed, gratitude from someone who didn’t hand it out often and wasn’t sure she was doing it right.
She turned. Crossed the front room. The dust motes swirled in her wake, catching what little light came through the windows, and the settee with its faded upholstery sat where it had sat for decades, patient, unmoved by whatever passed through the room on a Tuesday night.
Luca didn’t offer to walk her out. He stayed by the door, and his dark eyes followed her to the threshold, the same attention that had followed her in. Steady, considering, watching her, some part of him filing it away for later.
The door opened. The night air came in cold, carrying pine, loam and the faint mineral smell of the hills.
June stepped onto the porch. The warped boards complained under her weight, same as they had coming in, and the sound echoed in the empty dark between the Victorian and the trees.
She felt his eyes on her back the whole way to the door and didn’t turn around to check if she was right.
The door closed behind her. Not with a latch. Not with a click. With the quiet of something that had been designed to seal tightly and had been doing its job for longer than most houses in this town had been standing.
She stood on the porch for a moment. Her breath fogged in the cold. The gravel path stretched ahead to where her truck sat, nose pointed back toward town, the ridge a black hump against a blacker sky beyond it.
She started walking. Her boots crunched on gravel. Once. Twice. Then the sound was swallowed by the distance, and the night took her back as it had brought her. In silence, in dark, with nothing but the wrongness she’d been carrying for four days and a question nobody had answered.
The first stop sign past the ridge road turnoff was where the gravel gave way to patchwork asphalt and the trees opened up enough that you could see the sky. June sat there with the truck idling, both hands on the wheel, and ran the conversation back from the beginning.
She had believed Luca before he finished the sentence.
That was the part that worried her. Not the content, the content made sense.
Clean cuts, missing blood, bodies arranged rather than dropped.
Someone staging kills to look like nest work.
Someone who knew enough about vampires to fake a feeding convincingly and had a reason to want the pack’s anger directed at the Hollis place instead of wherever it belonged.
She believed it because it fit. The way a diagnosis fit when the symptoms lined up and the treatment responded. The rightness of an explanation that accounted for the discrepancies instead of smoothing over them.
She’d been a medic long enough to know that the thing you believed before the evidence was complete was the thing you tested hardest. Belief was cheap.
Certainty cost. The difference between them was the difference between a hunch and a fact, and hunches got people killed when they were wrong and got you killed when they were right and you acted on them too soon.
She wasn’t ready to call it certainty. Not yet.
Not with two bodies in the ground and a pack that had voted twice and a third name on an intake form that nobody in town seemed to recognize.
Callum Reese. Spring wellness. Five weeks ago.
The same handwriting that had put Deacon Pruitt and Terrell Oakes on the same page had put Callum Reese there too, and now two of them were dead with identical wounds and the third one was missing.
The question of who benefits was starting to shape itself into something she could almost see.
The pack’s anger, directed at the nest. Gabriel holding the line.
Ramsey Tucker waiting rather than arguing.
Ramsey Tucker’s patience: a man who had lost his friend and was measuring exactly how much this would cost before he moved.
If the nest was the target, then the person staging the kills wanted the pack to move on the Hollis place.
Wanted whatever was in that Victorian gone, or contained, or distracted enough that something else could happen without interference.
Or they wanted the nest to react. To break Sebastian’s rules.
To feed in town, to fight, to give the pack the confirmation it was looking for.
To become exactly what they were being accused of being, because sometimes the fastest way to make someone guilty was to treat them as guilty until they stopped pretending they weren’t.
A set of headlights passed through the intersection without slowing.
High beams, throwing the ditch grass into sharp relief for a second before the darkness swallowed them again.
Somebody headed out toward the county line, or somebody headed home from a late shift, or somebody headed somewhere they didn’t want to be followed.
The light swept across her windshield and was gone, and the night settled back into its particular quality of silence.
The kind that happened when the ridge was holding its breath and waiting for whatever came next.
June put the truck in gear. The transmission engaged with a soft clunk. The tires found purchase on the asphalt, and she pulled away from the stop sign with both hands on the wheel and the wrongness she’d been carrying for four days rearranging itself into something that had edges she could grip.